Texas in My Soul (1967)--take 2

Still not much to say about this one even on my second time through, but two things did strike me:

1. The use of the word “soul.” So much of Willie’s music is about his mind. Everything and everyone is “always on [his] mind,” but only Texas is in his “soul.” Though Willie does a few gospel albums, he really is a more cerebral singer and writer.

2. This album is important because it reminds me of how important Texas is to Willie’s identity as a singer, writer, and guitar player. And though he usually spends his songs remembering lost loves, here he remembers The Alamo and everything Texas has meant to him.

Naked Willie (2009)--Take 2

This time through I notice how the “Do Right Man” meets “Johnny One Time.” Paradoxically, Willie is “both sides now.” He’s Johnny “always” and Johnny “one time.” As W. H. Auden wrote in 1959:

“I will love you forever,” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear. “I will love you at 4:15pm next Tuesday”: Is that still as easy?

My 10-yeard old daughter, Stella, made fun of my 7-year-old daughter, Vivian, today by saying: “Vivian likes Willie Nelson.” Vivian denied it, but I had heard her earlier telling Stella that she liked the music (not the vocals) of these naked recordings. So six months of Willie Nelson has worn them down into submission. They are girding their ears for 48 hours of Willie in the car ride to Maine and back. We may need to drive down and back twice, though, since I have amassed almost 4 days’ worth of Willie’s music.

Memory and mind are the key themes to the songs on this album. Tears and time. These patterns are emerging and coming into clearer focus as I listen more deeply to each album.

Always on My Mind (1982)--Take 2

It’s funny that the three songs that struck me this time around are the three songs I did not mention in my blog from January, which suggests that I do need to continue this second-time through process. First, M. Curtis’s “Let it Be Me.” A tender ballad that fits into Willie’s genre of “always” and “never” songs:

Don't take this heaven from one

If you must cling to someone

Now and forever, let it be me…

So never leave me lonely

Tell me that you love me only

And say you'll always let it be me.

Willie wants someone who will love him “forever” and “always,” someone who will “never leave me lonely.” And yet he wants this while he is perpetually on the road.

Chips Moman’s “Staring Each Other Down” may be my favorite song on the album; I’m not sure how I missed it the first time through. Not sure what to make of these lyrics:

You're hangin' on his arm

She's holdin' mine

A fool must have said love was blind

We're shouting I love you's

With people all around

And they don't hear one sound

Let her eyes do the talkin'

And her eyes do the walkin'

And her eyes do the slippin'

Around staring each other down

And we're both on to

How long a slow song

Would be for us now

This timebomb we're holding

Is so near exploding right down

So let her eyes do the talkin'

And eyes do the walkin'

Her eyes do the slippin'

Around staring each other down

Staring each other down

In terms of Willie’s theory about love, the notion that “a fool must have said love was blind” implies that love is not blind, which contradicts many of Willie’s lyrics about the foolishness of love. The length of a slow song and the “timebomb” make obvious connections to Willie’s obsession with time as it pertains to (and perhaps is) love. And then another Chips Moman song, “Old Fords and a Natural Stone”:

Papa's words ringin' in my ears son you got to get tighter with your tears

Just because she's leaving don't start believing

That your rock'n roll days are gone

Cause nothing lasts forever but old Fords and a natural stone

And when those sad songs and slow hurtin' songs

Get you down while you're alone it won't hurt long

Cause nothing lasts forever like old Fords and a natural stone

Diamonds are forever and these old cars they still keep rolling on

And all those I love you forever's they're just words that can't be depended on

Cause when they're wrong they're wrong and when they're gone they're gone

Cause nothin' lasts forever but old Fords and a natural stone

Papa's words ringin' in my ears son you got to get tighter with your tears

This song has it all. It has tears: “Son, you got to get tighter with your tears.” Does this mean you have to cry less over lost time? No use crying over lost time? But if that isn’t worth crying over, what is? Most of Willie’s career has been spent either crying over lost time or trying not to cry over lost time. Here he boldly states that we can’t trust “those I love you forever’s; they’re just words that can’t be depended on.” Diamonds and old cars last forever, but not love.

Also striking this time through are the lyrics for “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” It seems a bit ironic that Willie of all people would be singing about the need to be a “do right man.” Clearly he wants to be this, he desires to be this, and he believes these lyrics, and yet, so many of his songs are about doing wrong, about how hard it is to do right, about how he can never do right. And the very next song, “Always on My Mind,” is basically an apology for not doing right. It asserts that I know I’m not a “do right man,” but I meant well, I had good intentions, good thoughts. So maybe Willie’s a “think right man.”

American Classic (2009)--Take 2

I listened to this album all day yesterday and even the day before, but never got around to blogging about it. This time around I’ll focus on the lyrics. Even though Willie didn’t write most of these lyrics, his song selection reflects his philosophy. In “The Nearness of You” Willie sings, “All my wildest dreams come true.” It’s not completely clear whether what is near to him is a person or merely the memory of the person in the night. This raises the question of what it means to be close, figuratively and literally. Close physically and close mentally. Which is more real, more true, more perfect? “Fly Me to the Moon” strikes a similarly idealistic tone. Here love transports Willie to the moon. “You are all I long for, all I worship and adore. In other words, please be true.” Again we have the desire for truth, for honesty, for loyalty. This in the face of “Funny how time slips away.” “Come Rain or Come Shine” suggests a love that transcends circumstances and the vagaries of life. “I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you…I’m gonna be true if you let me.” Another promise song. “I’m with you always; I’m with you rain or shine.” Until, of course, I’m “on the road again,” and then I’m only with you always in my mind. If music is sound organized in time, than love is life organized in time. Love organizes life according to almost musical principles. “If I Had You” makes a similar promise. “I could change the gray skies to blue if I had you.” Love could change everything. Here Willie confirms his faith in love to overcome all of life’s hurdles. Previously I wouldn’t have associated “Ain’t Misbehavin’” with this genre of optimistic love songs, but it fits as well. I see now that this song is asserting that time won’t slip away this time. I’m not joking this time. I mean it this time. I’ll be true. But why should we believe you this time? “I know for certain the one I love. I’m through with flirtin’, it’s just you I’m thinkin’ of…I’m savin’ my love for you.” Note the certainty, the sureness, the blind faith. And note that these are pop standards. Musically, but also lyrically. They assert the base line of true love from which all other songs vary. In “I Miss You So” Willie recalls a perfect love from the past. Here he is truly in search of lost love, lost time. What I am finding here is that love and time are one, and thus if music is sound organized by time, then it might also be said that music is sound organized by love. “Because of You” suggests that love is the ultimate cause and source of all good things. In short, love makes the world, literally, go round. “I only live for your love and your kiss.” Is this not the ultimate line? The ultimate promise? The ultimate lie? “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is a seduction song, another song about the little lies we tell in love to win, to woo. It isn’t really cold outside. That isn’t the issue. The issue is never the issue. It is always about something else, especially in love. In “Angel Eyes,” Willie laments that “My angel eyes ain’t here.” “My love is misspent on my angel eyes tonight.” This is the first dark, haunting song on the album. Here, “The last jokes are on me” and “the facts are uncommonly clear.” Someone else is now “number one.” Time and love have officially slipped away. Then Willie switches gears abruptly with the bouncy, up-tempo “On the Street Where You Live.” “Enchantment” seems to be a theme of these songs. As is nearness. The word “near” shows up in at least three of these songs. “Let the time go by, and I won’t care if I can be here on the street where you live.” So love transcends even the passage of time. “Since I Fell for You” shows the deceptive side of love. “You made me leave my happy home. You took my love and now you’ve gone…Love brings such misery and pain. And it’s too bad, and it’s too sad that I’m still in love with you. You loved me, and then you snubbed me. What can I do, I’m still in love with you. I guess I’ll never see the light. I get the blues most every night since I fell for you…” Willie wobbles over and around every word in these lines. He seems to get a phrase’s worth of emotion out of each word. Each word becomes a sentence. The word “I” seems to have a verb and a direct object the way he sings it. Here Willie is on the receiving end of cheating. His foolishly optimistic view of love, as depicted in most of these songs, finally runs into the reality of the fickleness of human nature, the inability of humans to be true, to live up to these ideals of love. Willie admits that he will never learn; he’ll keep “falling,” that is being fooled, for love. If only he didn’t fall so easily and so hard. If only he could wise up and learn. This album makes the short list of Willie albums that don’t contain a single Willie-penned song. “Always on My Mind” closes out the set. The only place love can be perfect—in Willie’s mind.

Spirit (1996)--take 2

This morning while listening to a RadioLab podcast titled “Beyond Time,” they of course played a clip of Elvis singing Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” In the midst of interviews with physicists discussing the many universes theory, they turn to Willie, who was there first, before the super colliders, to point out that time is slippery, elusive, and anything but linear. As Freud said (and I must paraphrase here from memory), “Wherever I go, the poets have been there first.” So not only is Willie a neuroscientist, he is a quantum-physicist.

Today I return to possibly my all-time favorite Willie album. If I have to pick one, this is probably it. I won’t re-cap my comments from my January blog on this album, but this time around I will focus more on the way Willie wrestles with time.

The opening track, “Matador,” wordlessly gets at the seductive nature of time. How we lunge for it, try to pin it down, try to put our fingers on it, but it always eludes us, slips away. This is Willie’s version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle that we can never measure both time and place with accuracy. We can only be certain of one or the other.

It strikes me now that “She’s Gone” may not be about a woman. In this case (and perhaps in every case), the woman is Time. Time is a woman, fickle, elusive, seductive, like the Fates in Greek Mythology. Maybe all of Willie’s lamenting for lost women is really symbolic, allegorical. What he is really lamenting is the passage of time, the way it slips away, Proust’s lament and search for “lost time.”

She is gone, but she was here,

And her presence is still heavy in the air.

Oh, what a taste of human love.

Now she’s gone, and it don’t matter anymore.

Again, the presence, the taste of love lingers in memory, ripens, becomes more intense in the mind than it was in the flesh. So is she really gone? Or is her presence even fuller, richer now than ever? And if this is so, does it matter whether she’s here or there?

Passing dreams in the night,

It was more than just a woman and a man.

It was love without disguise.

And now my life will never be the same again.

Love that is more than a woman and a man? Love that transcends the body? Love without the disguise and artifice of the body? A pure, platonic, timeless love. Again and again Willie seems to long for this perfect, guileless love. And yet again and again he acknowledges that so much of what we think of as love is guile, deception, illusion, in short, a lie, a fiction, a romance, in the medieval sense of the word, in the courtly love tradition of the Troubadours and Petrarch. And then comes “Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave.”

Been feelin’ kinda free,

But I sure do feel lonesome.

Baby’s takin’ a trip,

But she ain’t takin’ me.

I been feelin’ kinda free,

But I’d rather feel your arms around me

‘Cause your takin’ away everything that I wanted.

There’s an old hollow tree

Where we carved our initials,

And I said I love you, and you said you love me.

It’s a memory today, it’ll be a memory tomorrow.

I hope you’ll be happy someday.

Your memory won’t die in my grave.

This is straight out of Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer. The desire for love to outlive time. And yet it is a conflicted, paradoxical desire, because he enjoys being free, feeling free, and yet he desires to feel her physical arms around him. He wants to be both free of those arms and embraced by them at the same time. It’s another “She’s gone” song, but it’s another song more about time than a woman. The only lasting love is carved in trees, written in songs and poems and novels, but never in reality. “I’m Not Trying to Forget You Anymore” continues the theme of memory. Here Willie just basks and luxuriates in his fond memory of a lost love. I picture him sitting in a warm bubble bath of memory. And even though it’s gone forever, he doesn’t bemoan the loss:

It did not last forever

Oh, but that’s alright…

And if I had the chance, I’d do it all again.

Here he seems almost indifferent (but tenderly so, if that’s possible) to the inevitable loss, the inevitable slippage of time. He has given up trying to hide from memories, and he has embraced the notion of enjoying them, coming to terms with them. “Too Sick to Pray” I treat pretty thoroughly in my January blog. It may be the most honest song in Willie’s entire catalog. Here he acknowledges a presence outside of time. From there he goes to another instrumental, “Mariachi,” where Johnny Gimble’s fiddle evokes whatever Willie’s voice cannot. Then he returns to the theme of always and forever in “I’m Waiting Forever”:

I’m waiting forever for you,

For this is my destiny, this is what I am to do.

But forever ain’t no time at all,

It’s only the time between telephone calls.

And the love that I hear in your voice is so clear comin’ through,

Keeps me waiting forever, waiting forever for you.

I’m waiting forever for you,

For this is my destiny, this is what I am to do.

But waiting is no waste of time,

I just play out the scenes on a stage in my mind

And I love makin’ love to your memory

It’s all that I do

While I’m waiting forever, waiting forever for you.

The paradoxes are everywhere. “Forever ain’t no time at all” reminds me of his line “How long is forever this time.” And, of course, “funny how time slips away.” Funny how forever slips away. But for Willie, “waiting is no waste of time.” He can keep love alive “on a stage in [his] mind.” Just as Proust and Gatsby and Petrarch and Shakespeare do. “Makin’ love to your memory” could be a defining line for Willie’s music. It’s all he does in every song. And it’s all always in his mind, the sound in his mind. The song. Because music is simply ordered sound, sound ordered in time. I’m not sure what to make of “We Don’t Run.” It seems to contradict so many of Willie’s songs. He’s always running, hitting the road. What can he mean when he says “We don’t run, we never do”? He lives on the road. I’ll need to puzzle over this song some more. In “I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes,” the “place called paradise” seems to be his woman’s image of him. Willie sings, “I hope I’m here forever, but I think it’s time we both realize, that I guess I’ve come to live here in your eyes.” He seems to be saying that he wishes it could last forever, but realistically speaking, the best they can hope for is perfect memories, perfect images, perfect ideals of love in their minds. They shouldn’t hope for more. And that’s okay. Sounds like a compromise, which he insisted in the song before he never made: “We don’t compromise.” “Tears and doubts consume [him],” and he fears “someone will take it all away.” But no one can take away memories, the images we hold in our eyes, in our minds, and in our mind’s eye. “It’s a Dream Come True

VH1 Storytellers (1998)—take 2

They say time changes everything, but six months has not changed my view of this album. It is still in my top ten, and as I wrote in January, I don’t see it going anywhere. This is Willie at his best in his best setting: solo acoustic. At times I wanted a little Johnny Gimble fiddle, but that’s it. Maybe a little Mickey Raphael harmonica. Funny how the first three albums I reviewed have stood the test of time and are still in my top ten. I listened to this album two or three times while cooking dinner, and it just keeps getting better.

Teatro (1998)--take 2

For my recent trip to The High Hampton Inn, I made a new playlist of the 200 Willie Nelson songs (out of a possible 1600) that I marked as 5-stars in my ITUNES. I put it on shuffle and listened to my 5-star Willie Nelson mix. 200 songs distilled from 111 albums and selected from over 1600 songs. I also made a 4-star mix made up of all the songs I marked with 4 stars.

Today I begin working my way back through the 100 or so albums I have already reviewed. As I get my hands on the remaining albums I’m missing, I’ll review those, but till then, I’ll just re-listen to the ones I have already reviewed (in the same order). So I will start again in 1998 with Willie’s flamenco-inflected “Teatro.”

Willie opens with the instrumental “Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour” (Where Are You, My Love?). He begins, like the play “Hamlet,” with a question. A wordless, instrumental question. A state of questioning, longing. Then he moves to the gnomic, paradoxical “I Never Cared For You.”

I know you won’t believe the things I tell you…

Your heart has been forewarned

All men will lie to you

Your mind cannot conceive

Now all depends on what I say to you

And on your doubting me

So I’ve prepared these statements far from true

Pay heed and disbelieve

I’m not even sure how to paraphrase these zen-like koans. I think he is saying, “I know you won’t believe me. You think all men will lie to you. But everything depends on what I have to say to you and on the fact that you will not believe me. So I have prepared false statements for you. Pay attention, but don’t believe them.” What can that possibly mean? Reminds me of the “All Cretans are liars” paradox. If a Cretan tells you this, what are you to make of it? Either way it’s true, either way it’s false. Willie’s songs are based on the desire for truth, but the recognition of lies, deception, and cheating when it comes to matters of the heart. Nothing is what it seems. Trust no one and nothing, even the advice to trust no one and nothing. Even that advice “ain’t necessarily so.” Willie here seems to be paraphrasing Hamlet’s famous “Get Thee to a Nunnery” scene in Act III, scene 1 of “Hamlet.” The question is, can we take Willie or Hamlet seriously? Are they crazy, foolish, mad (as they so often claim to be)? I reprint the entire scene at the end of this blog, but the key idea is that Hamlet says he loved Ophelia once, but then he says he never loved her. Just as Willie says, “I never cared for you.” Is he being ironic or serious? How can we tell? Should we (or Ophelia) believe either of them? And then the larger question raised by all of Willie’s music, is true love even possible in this fallen world, or should we follow Hamlet’s advice to “Get thee to a nunnery”?

This time around I have a sense of every song Willie ever sang as I re-review these albums, so I have a better sense of the whole in the part. In “Everywhere I Go” Willie seems to be referring to taking a memory of his love around with him in his pocket, in his mind. It’s another version of “You Were Always on My Mind.” Even on the road, at every show, the memory of your love will be with him. Is this true love? It is permanent, but it is purely mental, platonic, ideal. Does it really exist? Is it “just a memory.” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” is another “she left me” song, but an upbeat, two-step sad song. In “My Own Peculiar Way” Willie describes an unusual kind of love indeed. He insists, “Don’t doubt my love,” and yet he and Hamlet asserted earlier that she should trust none of us, we are arrant knaves all of us. Though Willie’s mind wanders to yesterdays, to past loves, she should remain certain of her love living on in his mind? What kind of assurance is this? Should she take comfort that she will live always in his mind, but if his mind wanders, then what? Is there even stability in the mind and memory? “These Lonely Nights” is another teardrop song, another promise song: “I would love you till no end.” In other words, “I’ll always love you,” except of course if I never love you, and in either case, don’t believe me. “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” may be the scariest song in Willie’s repertoire. He kills his love so she can’t hurt him anymore by leaving him and saying goodbye. It is the scariest solution to the “she left me” predicament. It is the closest Willie comes to Keats “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Here love is truly frozen in death, made eternal, perfect. And yet we see here perfectly, literally, that to freeze love, to make it last, is to kill it. This version of “Home Motel” may be the best, and the only song I know of where Willie sings solo vocals with just a piano and nothing else. I can’t make sense of Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker,” but it seems to be about man’s longing for yet separation from God. “I’ve just destroyed the world” could be the soundtrack for Hamlet’s nunnery scene with Ophelia. “Fools in love…never learn till it’s too late.” Hamlet has destroyed his own world and any hope of finding love. “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” may be one of my top ten favorite Willie songs. As haunting and heartbreaking as he gets. This is the funkiest version of “Three Days” I’ve encountered. “I’ve loved you all over the world” offers the paradox that Willie will follow his heart wherever it takes him (which implies unfettered freedom), and yet he vows to love his woman “until death do us part” and “all over the world.” His love is boundless in every sense of the word. It can’t stay put; it is always flowing willy-nilly over all banks and borders, across geography and time. It can’t be tied down in both the good and bad sense of the phrase. He ends with another instrumental song, a technique he’s used before. Open and close in wordlessness.

Hamlet, Act III, Scene i

And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

OPHELIA

Good my lord,

How does your honour for this many a day?

HAMLET

I humbly thank you; well, well, well.

OPHELIA

My lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have longed long to re-deliver;

I pray you, now receive them.

HAMLET

No, not I;

I never gave you aught.

OPHELIA

My honour'd lord, you know right well you did;

And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed

As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,

Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

There, my lord.

HAMLET

Ha, ha! are you honest?

OPHELIA

My lord?

HAMLET

Are you fair?

OPHELIA

What means your lordship?

HAMLET

That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should

admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA

Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than

with honesty?

HAMLET

Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner

transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the

force of honesty can translate beauty into his

likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the

time gives it proof. I did love you once.

OPHELIA

Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET

You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot

so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of

it: I loved you not.

OPHELIA

I was the more deceived.

HAMLET

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a

breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;

but yet I could accuse me of such things that it

were better my mother had not borne me: I am very

proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at

my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,

imagination to give them shape, or time to act them

in. What should such fellows as I do crawling

between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,

all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.

Where's your father?

OPHELIA

At home, my lord.

HAMLET

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the

fool no where but in's own house. Farewell.

OPHELIA

O, help him, you sweet heavens!

HAMLET

If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for

thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as

snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a

nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs

marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough

what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go,

and quickly too. Farewell.

OPHELIA

O heavenly powers, restore him!

HAMLET

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God

has given you one face, and you make yourselves

another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and

nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness

your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath

made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages:

those that are married already, all but one, shall

live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a

nunnery, go.

Exit

OPHELIA

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck'd the honey of his music vows,

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;

That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth

Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

Re-enter KING CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS

KING CLAUDIUS

Love! his affections do not that way tend;

Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,

Was not like madness. There's something in his soul,

O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger: which for to prevent,

I have in quick determination

Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England,

For the demand of our neglected tribute

Haply the seas and countries different

With variable objects shall expel

This something-settled matter in his heart,

Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus

From fashion of himself. What think you on't?

LORD POLONIUS

It shall do well: but yet do I believe

The origin and commencement of his grief

Sprung from neglected love. How now, Ophelia!

You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said;

We heard it all. My lord, do as you please;

But, if you hold it fit, after the play

Let his queen mother all alone entreat him

To show his grief: let her be round with him;

And I'll be placed, so please you, in the ear

Of all their conference. If she find him not,

To England send him, or confine him where

Your wisdom best shall think.

KING CLAUDIUS

It shall be so:

Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.

Touch at a Distance

On a RadioLab podcast on music, a psychology professor defines sound as “touch at a distance.” It strikes me that this could be a good way to define Willie Nelson’s music. Willie has an album titled “The Sound in Your Mind,” and it turns out that all sound is created by electric signals transmitted from your ear to your brain, so sound literally exists only in your mind. Sounds also literally touch bones in your ear that vibrate, and thus you can touch people through music in a physical, biochemical, electrical way. Jonah Lehrer discusses much of this in his book “Proust was a Neuroscientist.” He is also interviewed extensively on the RadioLab podcast. Willie’s music is dovetailing nicely with many of my other interests, such as William James (quoted in the epigraph of Lehrer’s book and the subject of an entire book by Jacques Barzun, which I just purchased). Willie sings about the intersection of time, mind, and sound. This trinity seems to be the source of all our woes when it comes to love. I also plan to consult Robert Sternberg’s “The Psychology of Love” as I delve deeper into Willie’s own psychology of love as expressed in his 50-year career and 100+ albums.

A Sad Day

Well, it’s a sad day. I now own 93 Willie Nelson albums of original material, and if you add the compilations, I own 111. But today I seem to have hit the wall. I can’t get my hands on anything new. There are a few albums still out there that I know of, but I just can’t get my hands on them:

“Walking the Line” (1977)—album with George Jones and Merle Haggard

“The Electric Horesman” (1979) (movie soundtrack)--$99 used on Amazon (a bit pricey)

“Music From ‘Songwriter’” (1984)—movie soundtrack—I can find the movie but not the soundtrack

“Pancho, Lefty, and Rudolph” (1995)—Christmas album with Merle Haggard; not sure if this is just a compilation or original versions

“Willie Nelson and Eddie Rabbit” (2000)—I think this is a compilation

“Georgia on My mind” (2001)— I think this is a compilation

“Good Hearted Woman” (2001)— I think this is a compilation

“Gravedigger” (2007)—not sure what this is

I would also like to get the Bear Family compilations:

“Nashville was the Roughest” (1998)

“It’s Been Rough and Rocky Travelin’” (2003)

But they may just compile stuff I already have, and they are pricey ($100+ used on Amazon).

And there are about a dozen live shows available on USB keys in wristbands available on-line, but they are $30 a pop, so I’m not ready to buy all of those just yet.

I have not reviewed and do not own the individual albums for “And Then I Wrote” and “Here’s Willie Nelson,” but I think all of this material appears on “The Complete Liberty Recordings,” which I own and have reviewed.

Tomorrow I may need to start re-listening to the cds I have already reviewed and/or start reviewing the best versions of certain songs (ie., ranking the best versions of “Whiskey River”). I may also start revising, cleaning up, and polishing my previous blogs in light of further listening (and with the almost-entire oeuvre under my belt). I thought I’d make it longer, but it is still pretty impressive to go six months with listening to a new album (or disc of a multi-disc album) almost every day. That’s a lot of Willie Nelson. According to my ITUNES (and I think I’ve loaded all of my albums onto my computer), I have 1,664 Willie Nelson songs, which makes for 3.7 days of music and takes up 9.7 gigs of memory, so it won’t quite fit on my 8 gig nano IPOD. That said, several of these songs are duplicates because they appear on original albums and on compilations.

Laying My Burdens Down (1970)

I own this 1970 Felton Jarvis produced RCA album on LP, but since I don’t have a record player, I’ll be reviewing the songs via the ITUNES album I downloaded for $9.99. I’ve reviewed the title track on my blog for the compilation “One Hell of a Ride,” but it bears repeating that this gospel tune has a funky bass that makes me wish Willie did this song live in concert these days as an encore. Dee Moeller’s “How Long Have You Been There” fits into Willie’s host of haunted memory songs. He burns bridges, but memories of lost loves pursue him, haunt him, and won’t let him go. Willie makes a wise choice with Glenn Campbell’s “Senses.” “I feel lonely every day…now I can taste the tears that I cried…it’s over but I don’t have the sense to let you go…It doesn’t make much sense for me to cry for you, and if I had any sense at all I’d realize we’re through. But my senses are reacting much too slow.” This song and Willie’s career might do well to steal a title from Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility. Here Willie is crying as usual. He’s the crying cowboy, a sensitive soul. And yet, he has no sense. Too sensitive for his own good, and not enough sense. It’s another “she’s gone” song. The battle between heart and mind, between feeling and thought, is one that Willie depicts in song after song. He’s the Jane Austen of Country Music, the Lizzy Bennett (with a little Wickham sprinkled in for good measure, or bad measure, as the case may be). Felton Jarvis let me down by letting the strings and back-up singer invade this song, but the lyrics and the vocals make up for the grating background. Willie’s own “I Don’t Feel Anything” returns to the funky bass beat of “Laying My Burdens Down.” It’s an interesting choice to follow “Senses.” In that song he felt too much, here he feels nothing. Willie’s always feeling too much or not enough, and always at the wrong times. A not uncommon human predicament. “I don’t feel love or hate or anything that I felt before. Why was I so afraid of seeing you again? How I must have loved you once upon a time…You look the same as always, time’s been good to you, but I must confess that time has done a few things for me, too.” Here again time is on Willie’s side. He uses time to his advantage. “Love’s not time’s fool,” and neither is Willie. I actually kind of like the canned horns in the background. I wish Willie did more with horns. Harlan Howard’s “I’ve Seen That Look On Me (A Thousand Times)” is another example of Willie’s double-vision, his ability to see “both sides now.” Like Proust’s binoculars. The gist of the song is that Willie’s been cheating on his woman for a long time, and now she’s finally started cheating on him. It takes one to know one, and Willie knows that knowing look. He can sympathize. He can see himself in someone else. “What makes us do the things we do? Heaven only knows. We think we have a secret, but it always shows. And I taught you how to cheat, and you’re doing fine….But I still love you, and so I pretend, and hope I never see that look again. But if I do, I know the fault is mine.” She lies to him, and he lies back by acting like he doesn’t notice. Fight lies with lies. I think what attracts so many people to Willie’s music is his willingness to admit “the fault is mine.” He knows people lie and cheat and hide, but he doesn’t get bent out of shape because he knows he does it, too. I’m not sure what Willie’s “Where Do You Stand?” is about. This sounds like the same version that’s on the 2009 compilation “Naked Willie,” but I’m not positive. “Hey what’s your plan?” The strings and horns and back-up vocals are almost too much to bear. “It’s time for commitments, it’s time for a showing of hands.” Willie is one to talk about commitments. “Surely there’s someone with courage to say where he stands.” How can you stand firmly when you’re always on the road? Eddie Rager’s “Minstrel Man” is very much in the JT, Carole King, 1970s vein of songwriting. “Happiness Lives Next Door” seems to be the same version as the one on “Naked Willie” but different from the one on “The Ghost” and “Face of a Fighter.” “When We Live Again” is the third song that shows up again on “Naked Willie.” Clearly Mickey Raphael thought this was an album in dire need of denuding. This song features one of Willie’s more telling lines: “Let’s re-live again the time that we know now.” Even in the present moment he is looking ahead to how this moment will look as a memory. He can’t wait to re-live a moment. In fact, he seems to hurry through life on the road so he can get to re-living his life. “Let’s not lose the days, the progress love has made.” “Following Me Around” harkens back to “How Long Have You Been There?” A memory is following Willie around. This song fittingly appears on “The Ghost” (and I have reviewed the lyrics on my blog for that compilation) and this same version appears on “Naked Willie,” sans strings and back-up vocals. So almost half of this album is rescued and restored by Mickey Raphael. He needs to go through and do the same with a great deal more of Willie’s over-produced early work. In short, the over-production of these songs knocks this album out of the untenable top ten, but you can hear many of them in a more palatable setting on “Naked Willie.”

The Party’s Over (1967)

Today I’m going back to before I was born. I have already commented on the lyrics for “Suffer in Silence” in the blog entry for “The Ghost” (Part 1). On some albums it is listed as “Suffering in Silence.” I find this with several of Willie’s songs. The titles vary slightly over time or from album to album or compilation to compilation. This version is drenched in strings. “Hold Me Tighter” takes a new approach to an old Willie theme. “I thought if you’d just hold me tight maybe I’d forget her. But I don’t suppose, as yet, you’ve held me tight enough. Please hold me tighter. I still remember. Put your arms around me. Hold me close and hold me tight and long… and I can’t love again until her memory’s gone.” What other country singer can get away with using phrases like “as yet”? I would not be shocked to hear Willie use “moreover” or “heretofore.” Here he wants his new love to squeeze the memory of his old love out of him. In his other songs Willie has tried to out run memories, drink them away, sleep them away, hide from them, but here he tries to squeeze them out. Proust would have a field day with this. Or a madeleine. I’ve reviewed “Go Away” on previous blogs. The strings drown out the otherwise solid vocals. The version of “The Ghost” on the compilation of the same name is so much better than this one. It is a textbook example of how the same song is so much better as a demo recording than as a fully-produced Nashville Sound recording. “To Make a Long Story Short” is pregnant with meaning. Isn’t that what songwriters do? Make long stories short? Condense entire love affairs into 2 ½ minutes? “To make a long story short, she’s gone.” All of Willie’s music, and all of country music in general, and the blues, could be summed up in these two words: she’s gone. The irony here is that Willie has spent 80 years singing and writing about why she left. He hasn’t made the story short at all. He’s made the story into a career, into hundreds of songs. He’s made the story last, literally, forever. So, as an artist, he both condenses and contracts and thereby heightens stories, but he also lengthens and preserves and extends them. And, inexplicably, does both at the same time. In the same way Proust makes a long story short in “In Search of Lost Time,” or is it a short story writ long? Maybe writers make long stories short and short stories long. “I won’t try to give the reasons why I miss her so.” Yeah, right. I’ve heard that one before. And then, of course, “A Moment isn’t Very Long.” It’s forever. It goes by so fast, but then it lasts so long. It almost seems as if the faster it goes by the longer it lasts? Like the skid marks of time, the residue. I have reviewed most of these songs previously, but it is interesting to see how they fit together on one album. “The Party’s Over” gets at the notion that “all good things must end.” And yet all of Willie’s songs deal with how we face this fact. Time and life is fleeting, it passes quickly, it ends, and yet tomorrow comes. How do we find closure within eternity? How do we deal with unique experiences in the midst of the “same old thing again.” “The Party’s Over” is also another “she’s gone” song. It’s interesting to compare the 1962 Liberty version of “There Goes a Man” with this 1967 version. Both have strings, but this more recent version does without the canned back-up vocals. I have commented on the lyrics in an earlier blog, but this time around I note Willie’s statement about fate: “Fate has frowned on him, then turned around and smiled on me.” Willie does believe in some sort of fate or destiny. This is confirmed again in the next song: “Once Alone.” “Life’s too short to spend it feelin’ blue. And it’s not too late. Our dreams could still come true. But before our chance for happiness is gone. Don’t you think we should try it once alone?” When the going gets tough in marriage, the Willie way is to hit the road and look for sunnier pastures. Why feel blue if you don’t have to? Then Willie builds on his no-fault approach to relationships: “It’s not your fault, and neither is it mine. It seems that we’re just victims of the times.” Star-crossed lovers, victims of fate and time. “It’s not that I don’t love you, ‘cause I do. But love alone can’t make a dream come true.” Not sure what to make of his. If love alone can’t make a dream come true, what can? He seems to be saying that love alone is not enough to sustain love. Which implies that he actually wants something more than love (adventure maybe?). Or maybe it’s the Gatsby/Daisy paradox that real love cannot support the weight of ideal, imagined, platonic love. “I suppose that we’ll survive the parting tears. We’ve survived so many others through the years.” And back to tears again. Tears and time. That might be the title of my book. Time and Tears. This version of “No Tomorrow in Sight” sounds very similar to the one on “The Ghost,” but it’s hard to tell. I have commented elsewhere about the lyrics, but what strikes me this time around is that this is another “Leave-me-quietly-in-the-night” song. This seems to be a theme. No fault, no blame, just leave and move on. “Our love was too weak to pull our dreams through, but too strong to let us forget.” Ah, the twin tides of love. As with the previous song, love is not enough to pull us through, but strong enough to haunt our memory. It can’t last forever in reality, but it can last forever in our minds. It can’t conquer time, and yet it can. “I’ll Stay Around” also appears on “The Ghost,” which seems to be the case with many of these songs. “I’ll hang around till it’s over and hope that it never ends and maybe in time you’ll change your mind and decide to love me again. I’ll just simply refuse to leave you. Call me stubborn, but I’ll never give in.” Ah, Willie playing the faithful housewife again. Sitting at home waiting longingly for her spouse to return. He’ll just wait patiently forever. This from the man who wrote “On the Road Again.” It’s one of the most delightful paradoxes in all of music. Willie, like Walt Whitman, is both of these people. The wife waiting at home and the husband who never comes home. And he plays both parts convincingly. It’s another “always” song, another “forever” song. It flies in the face of his many “Funny how time slips away” songs. Willie is both the person who sincerely pledges his love will last forever, and the person who knowingly smiles when it doesn’t. He’s just casually “hanging around till it’s over” and hoping it will never end. Even though “the party’s over,” the lights are out, Willie is hanging around in the dark ever hopeful, ever optimistic. A modern day Pangloss preaching that all is for the best. This is one of Willie’s most tender vocal performances. If only we could edit out the strings. “The End of Understanding” is another song that also appears on “The Ghost” and “The Road Goes on Forever.” I review the lyrics on the blogs for those albums, but suffice it to say that Willie will never reach the “end of understanding.” He stays on the intellectual and emotional road to nowhere. Understanding is as elusive as the light at the end of Daisy’s dock. And “understanding” here means both forgiveness and knowledge. Willie is always reaching the end of his own rope, and he is always forcing others to reach the end of theirs. Living at the end of all ropes seems to be his motto, and maybe even living at both ends of both ropes, if that’s possible. In any case, a perfect song to end an album with. I need to look more closely at how he sequences songs on albums. Always very thoughtful.

The Words Don’t Fit the Picture (1972)

When “the words don’t fit the picture” there’s “no need to force the love scenes anymore.” So many of Willie’s songs are about empty words, empty promises. “A game we play.” A role. And we say words that aren’t our own. Just lines that people say in movies; lines that we don’t mean, though we wish we did. “And if we’ve been acting all along, and we both act right and we both act wrong, where does it say that we should cry?” No-fault romance. No need to cry. We’re both right. We’re both wrong. Everybody wins. Everybody loses. No use crying. A fairly spare recording with a prominent harmonica. Willie still sounds like he’s trying to be someone else, but he does seem to be singing all over the beat. This version of “Good Hearted Woman” does not compare well to the more famous (and rightly so) live versions. This is the first time I’ve heard “Stay Away from Lonely Places…till you learn to live alone.” It has a mournful harmonica and steel guitar. I was pleasantly surprised by the spare setting. A little Trigger work in the middle. “Stay Away From Lonely places for a while.” That “for a while” is key. The diction reminds me of “funny” in “Funny how time slips away.” I’ll be sad, but only for a while. No BFD. Everything in Willie’s universe is just for a while. Time itself is just for a while. Ain’t no thang. Fleeting and evanescent like Japanese poetry. Cry for a while, but smile for eternity. This version of “Country Willie” is actually slowed down, and the vocals feature prominently. It may have the worst back-up singing yet. Even my four-year-old said he didn’t like this song when the background singers kicked in. “London” surprised me. What is the crying cowboy doing singing (or, rather, talking) about London? This one is a real curiosity. Unlike anything else he has done. More of a Johnny Cash talking song. Willie hums along: “London, you’ve screamed the largest portion of the day…Rest your lungs, tomorrow’s on it’s way.” This version of “One Step Beyond” is funkier and bouncier than the others I’ve heard. It may be one of my favorites. Nice guitar work on several of these songs. The doo-wop singers are back with a vengeance on “My Kind of Girl.” This is the first time I’ve heard this song. “Will You Remember?” may be the best song on the album. I’ve reviewed this version previously in my blog about the compilation “Sweet Memories,” where it also appears. I have numerous versions of “Rainy Day Blues,” but I like the way the vocals stand out in this one. This album started out rough with all the strings, but it’s growing on me towards the end. Some definite keepers here. And the harmonica shines on this track and others. Is it Mickey? “If You Really Loved Me” “you wouldn’t treat me this way. And you’d be kind enough to leave some night while I’m away. And I might cry when you go, but I won’t die when you go.” Cryin’ but not dyin’. Willie bends, but he doesn’t break. Emotional ju-jitsu. Or is it judo? The one where you give ground and use the opponent’s momentum against them. Willie seems to miss a few notes on this one, but I like the way he’s stretching. Willie seems to be saying that true love is leaving someone in the middle of the night without saying goodbye. Is that like a mercy killing? True love isn’t loving someone forever, it’s knowing when to go, and going quietly in the night, no questions asked. No-fault love. Not exactly unconditional love, as it is traditionally conceived, but I guess this is Willie’s version of agape. I wanted to end on a positive notes, but he (or Chet, more likely) trots out the doo-wop singers for the last 10 seconds. Why?

Willie Nelson and Family (1971)

Listening to Willie and family on my 17th anniversary. This album opens with versions of “What Can You Do to Me Now?” and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Willie’s vocals are strong, but the string arrangements cloy. There are so many better versions of these songs on other albums. I wasn’t expecting to find a Hank Williams tune on this album. This version of Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” sounds like the domesticated Disney version. I’m actually shocked that Willie would do this with syrupy strings and triangles tinkling. I’m afraid this version might make Hank cry, but I suspect Chet Atkins is to blame, not Willie, for adding the strings. The strings probably made Willie cry, too. Just as I’ve said that Willie should stay away from Paul Simon songs, I think he should avoid JT as well. I don’t think anyone can improve on JT’s own versions of “Fire and Rain,” and this one just didn’t need to be re-done. And for some reason, Willie is trying to sound like JT. That’s so un-like Willie, who always seems to sound just like himself. Track 5 is where Willie starts sounding like himself. Willie and family get funky on the swingin’ gospel “Kneel at the Feet of Jesus.” Willie has several gospel albums, but they are more sober gospel tunes. I’d love to hear a whole album of rowdy gospel tunes like this. This version of “I’m a Memory” is solid despite the strings. I confess I kind of like the cheesy horns. Track 7, a version of Harlan Howard’s “Yours Love,” may be the most interesting song on the album. The only other place I have seen it so far is on the 2006 album “Songbird.” It is a hopeful, optimistic sort of prayer. Instead of a foolish promise, it’s a prayer for faithfulness. A prayer for lasting love. It is one of the few places where Willie seems to be praying, asking for his love to last. And he seems to mean it as the song rises pleasantly in intensity. He chants the verses like a prayer, and the incantatory effect builds momentum. “I Can Cry Again” is new to me; this is the first time I have seen it in close to 100 albums. It’s always good to see another song about crying from the crying cowboy. This song needs the naked treatment; the strings and back-up vocals need to be stripped. The vocals remind me of “Red Headed Stranger,” but the arrangement drowns them out. Only Willie would think it was “good to see” he could cry again. Only Willie would be “glad to say” that he can cry again. “Now I’ll return to life and live again.” For Willie, crying is living. Living is crying. If you ain’t cryin’, you ain’t livin’. Sort of like the skier motto: if you’re not falling down, you’re not really skiing. If you’re not getting hurt enough to cry, you’re not really living. It’s good to cry. Willie is glad to cry. Previously, his “pride would not permit [his] tears to fall”; he “walked through burning hell and never cried at all.” But now he’s happy once again because he can cry. He’s not happy unless he’s crying. Not sure how this fits with his stoic, Buddhist philosophy of accepting with a smile whatever comes his way. Here he suggests that might not work. That crying is important. I haven’t seen “That’s Why I Love Her So” on any previous albums. Again, Willie’s voice is “Yesterday’s Wine”-esque, but the strings taint the track. Merle Haggard’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” is another new song to my ears. I’m not sure why he hasn’t re-visited this song on more albums. He has so many hidden gems like this that beg to be re-done without strings. It reminds me of George Jones’s “He Stopped Loving her Today,” but in reverse. He thought he was over her. But today he sings, “What a fool I was to think I could get by with only these few teardrops that I’ve cried. I should have known the worst was yet to come and that cryin’ time for me had just begun.” So the day he starts crying in earnest for her is the day he starts loving her again. So here, again, he associates crying with loving. He cries because he loves. The absence of crying indicates the absence of loving. It is only in crying that we truly live and love. Again, the strings kill another great vocal performance. Some hidden gems here, but overall, not an untenable top ten album. Worth buying on ITUNES for $9.99, which is the only place I could find it, used or otherwise. Even on LP, it’s hard to find. EBAY has some, but they can be pricey. For now, ITUNES is the way to go, and I suppose Willie actually gets some money for it that way, whereas if I buy it used he gets nada.

The Willie Way (1972)

I think Willie is trying to sound a bit like Johnny Cash on the opening track, “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago.” “Today might be the day that you walk away, but you left me a long, long time ago.” Real leaving happens in the mind. Willie insists that she go without saying why, without saying sorry. No questions. This is another theme in his music: accepting fate and not questioning or dwelling over the reasons. And yet this contradicts the career he has made out of dwelling and questioning. He lives on “the usual memories that always linger on.” They provide the content for so many of his songs. The lingering memories, the remembrance of things past. He is either trying to outrun or hide from the past, or he is chasing it down, in search of lost time. He’s either trying to lose it or find it. And he does both with equal vigor, often at the same time. The arrangement is pleasantly lacking in strings or back-up vocals, so it seems to be a vast improvement from 1969’s “My Own Peculiar Way.” “Wonderful Future” captures this paradox perfectly because Willie also has a song called “A Wonderful Yesterday.” Tomorrow and Yesterday are always better than Today, and yet this flies in the face of Willie’s live-in-the-present, hakuna matata mentality. He loves and hates three days: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. “Today as I walk through my garden of dreams, I’m alone with the sweet used-to-be.” Sweet memories, sweet used-to-be. That’s where Willie likes to live, in his garden of dreams, in his mind, in the sound in his mind. The heavenly choir of his own mind. “My past and my present are one and the same, and the future holds nothing for me.” Willie is outside time; he has transcended its bounds. Past and present are one. “Yesterday’s kisses still burning and yesterday’s memories still find me. Scenes from the past keep returning. I’ve got a wonderful future behind me.” Memories linger and haunt. They pursue and hound. It’s almost a Greek way of looking at things. Willie sees his future in his past. The Greek goal was to build a lasting legacy, to be remembered, so you always had an eye to your own past. Your future was merely a means of creating a memorable past. Willie has beaten them to the punch because his future is already past. He has outrun time. But now he is in this weird limbo. “You say there is happiness waiting for me, but I know this is just fantasy. Let me trade one tomorrow for one yesterday. Let me live in my garden of dreams.” Willie wants to trade one tomorrow for one yesterday. He wants to live in the past. This recording of Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make it Through the Night” starts out as one of my favorites, but the strings and back-up vocals kick in and ruin it midway through. This version of “Wake Me when It’s Over” is the funkiest one I have come across. It has a gospel, bluesy feel, with a little Hammond organ and an almost R and B drum backing. The harmonica slips in midway through and Willie has fun with the phrasing. May be my favorite version of this song. I can’t say the same about this version of “Undo the Right.” Very straightforward and perfunctory. There are many superior versions out there. This is the first time I’ve heard Willie sing Scott Wiseman’s country/bluegrass standard “Mountain Dew.” I love the spare acoustic setting, but it needs a fiddle and a banjo. “Home is Where You’re Happy” seems to have a harpsichord, and it is a rare Willie tune that only appears here and on “The Ghost.” “Home is where you’re happy, just any house will do.” This fits Willie’s house/home song genre. Home is where the heart is. A house is not a home without you there. This version of “A Moment isn’t Very Long” ranks up there with the best. With the exception of the cheesy strings and back-up vocals on “Help Me Make it Through the Night,” this has been a spare acoustic album. Definitely an important early album with mostly Willie-penned songs in spare settings. I’m surprised this slipped through the Nashville Sound production system. This is the first time I’ve heard Willie’s “What Do You Want Me to Do?” It sounds like a tape recording of some conversation he had with one of his many wives. You can see why these songs were too real for Nashville. They can be painful to listen to because they are all conversations or thoughts we have had but were to embarrassed to admit, even to ourselves. You feel uncomfortable like you are overhearing another couple argue right next to you. “Well I can’t read your mind when you change it all the time, and I don’t know what’s the matter with you. I think I do my share to show that I care, so just tell me what do you want me to do? I’ve tried to be kind. But it don’t work sometimes, and you’re not the same person that I knew. And tell me where should I start to return to your heart, and tell me what do you want me to do? What do you want me to do with the dreams that I own. Should I change them to memories and leave you alone? Maybe I’m not too smart. I guess you know me by heart, and if my chances of winning are few, let my heart step aside with what’s left of my pride, and tell me what do you want me to do?” Willie asks if he should turn his dreams into memories. They are safer and more stable there. More lasting. Even sweeter. Ugh. The cheesy back-up vocals return on the last track, “I’d Rather You Didn’t Love Me.” Why? This could be a top ten album without those few bits of strings and back-up vocals. Nevertheless, I will return to it often for the funky version of “Wake Me When It’s Over.”

My Own Peculiar Way (1969)

What are the chances I pull out my 1946 edition of G.K. Chesterton’s 1913 book The Victorian Age in Literature and find something related to Willie Nelson on the first page? About 100%:

“real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road, but drawing life from them, as from a root. Even when we improve we never progress. For progress, the metaphor from the road, implies a man leaving his home behind him: but improvement means a man exalting the towers or extending the gardens of his home.”

So which is Willie doing? “Leaving things behind” or “drawing life from them”? Or, paradoxically, both? Is he “leaving his home behind him” or “exalting the towers and extending the gardens of his home”? Is he severing roots or watering them? Or has he somehow found the magic formula to allow roots to grow deeper on the road? Rootless roots, road roots? Roots rooted in the road? Maybe in America the road is our roots. The ride over was a kind of root for the pilgrims. The sea is home for Ishmael and the White Whale. Homer’s whale-road, or was it Beowulf’s? Or both.

I turn next to Jacques Barzun’s little book of lectures titled “The Use and Abuse of Art.” He quotes E.M. Forster: “[Every artist professes to] create a world more real and solid than daily existence…, [a world] eternal and indestructible.” This is what Willie does in his mind, in his songs. The sound in his mind becomes more real and solid, more eternal and indestructible, than life itself.

Willie recorded “My Own Peculiar Way” in 1969, the year I was born. This may be the worst setting for Willie’s songs I have heard yet. Willie’s vocals sound fine on the title track, but the back-up vocals and the syrupy strings taint the music like oil from the BP spill. This is the first time I have heard Willie sing “I Walk Alone.” “I walk alone where once we wandered…Till you return I’ll stay the same, dear. I’ll still be true and walk alone…By stars above I swear to love you.” Another promise song. Willie promises to be true forever in the face of fickleness. The strings and back-up singers didn’t seem quite as offensive on this track. Ditto for this version of “Any Old Arms Won’t Do.” I only have three versions of “I Just Don’t Understand,” but it has one of my favorite wry Willie lines: “Do you mind too much if I don’t understand?” That kind of questioning line captures the essence of Willie’s tone and style. Quizzical, sardonic, ironic, but somehow not cynical. “I Just Dropped By” appears only on this album and on “Naked Willie,” which I is the same version denuded:

“I just dropped by to see the house I used to live in. I hope that you don’t mind. I won’t stay very long. So long ago someone and I lived here together. And then so suddenly I found myself alone. I couldn’t stand the thought of living here without her. And so I moved away to let my memories die. But my memories outlived my better judgment. This may sound strange to you, but I just thought I’d drop by. The very door your standing in, she used to stand there and wait for me to come home every night. And when I’d see her standing there, I’d run to meet her. These things were on my mind, so I just thought I’d drop by. I guess that I should leave. Someone might just not understand. And I’m aware of how the neighbors like to pry. But you can tell them all today a most unhappy man was in the neighborhood, and he just thought he’d drop by.”

It’s another house song. Another ghost song. Another local memory song. Willie tries to let his memories die, but they have a life of their own. They override his judgment. They are on his mind, they haunt his mind, they run his mind. Not one of my favorite versions of “Local Memory.” The only other version of Merle Travis’s “That’s All” I can find is on Willie’s duet album with Wynton Marsalis, “Two Men with the Blues.” The version with Wynton is six minutes long, though, and this one is only 2:26. “If you can’t preach without going to school, brother, you ain’t no preacher, you’re an educated fool.” Doing without knowing, doing unselfconsciously, naturally, is superior to doing by rule. And if you can’t, “You better change your way of living cause the good lord say, that’s all.” Willie’s vocals on this version of “I Let My Mind Wander” are actually better than many of his other versions of this song. If only we could remove the background fluff. John Hartford’s “Natural to Be Gone” is new to me. It raises the question, what is natural? What does it mean to be and act natural. “What’s the difference being different when it’s difference that now looks alike? You say I’m changing, I’m not sure that’s wrong.” It’s natural for love to come and go. “There’s no season in my mind that I can count on for an answer.” Seasons of the mind. Seasons are like meter, which Willie is always breaking. Breaking seasons, predictable patterns. Seasons never surprise, and Willie thrives on surprise. Seasons are the most unoriginal thing you could find, and original artists resist seasons, and yet the ultimate artist, the ultimate creator, who created artists themselves, was not above creating seasons, patterns, clichés. Changing and moving on is normal, and yet Willie still cries and wants it to last forever. He wants it both ways. He wants it to be both wrong and right. Willie continues his theme of mind with Dallas Frazier’s “Love Has a Mind of It’s Own”:

“I’d love to forget every time that you kissed me. I’d love to forget that you’re gone. And I’d gladly hold back every tear that I’m cryin’…Love is the ruler, the greatest of kings. Love sits up high on a throne. Forgetting you, darling, is not my decision. For love has a mind of it’s own…I don’t want to cry all night long. I wish I could run from the day that I met you…”

Willie can’t control his own mind. He can’t ditch these memories. He tries to outrun time and memory, but he can’t. Willie’s “The Message” may be too clever for its own good, but it also feature’s Willie’s obsession with mind. “There are so many things that I want to say tonight, that my mind keeps moving faster than my pen can write.” Don Baird’s “It Will Come to Pass” has that Taoist resignation to fate and the passage of time and seasons. What will be will be. “Love will grow; it will come to pass.” Even in 1969 we see Willie’s obsessions with time, mind, and memory.

Rainbow Connection (2001)

This is the kind of quirky, eclectic, organic, evolving kind of album only Willie could come up with. According to Willie’s own account written in the liner notes, it started out as a children’s cd, but it evolved into a cd that starts with children’s songs and then evolves into mature adult songs. This is another one of those favor albums Willie does as favors to his friends and family. He did this one for and with his daughters and friends. It’s great to hear Willie singing solo acoustic on the title track, but it isn’t one of his stonger vocal performances. He can’t seem to hit some of the notes. “I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover” is an old tune from Willie’s childhood, and the “Luck Choir” actually makes it sound like a family sing-a-long at Christmas, which it literally was, recorded in Luck, Texas over Christmas. “O’l Blue” becomes even more special when you learn that Willie made his grandmother, who taught him music, play it for him every day, and it made him cry every time. That’s where the cryin’ cowboy learned to cry. A hard-livin’ man with a soft heart. This song is worth the price of the cd, and it is as good as anything Willie has ever done. His daughter sings a lovely, understated harmony. Amy Nelson wrote and sings “Wise Old Me,” but Willie doesn’t sing or play on the track. “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon” is a fun little tune. Just Willie, Trigger, bass, and a little rhythm guitar. It’s like having Willie singing in your living room for your kid’s birthday party. “Playmate” sounds like Willie has a cold, which is how “Rainbow Connection” also sounds. I think he should have done another take on both of these tunes. Willie sings “I’m My Own Grandpa” better than anyone. He sings it matter-of-fact, straight-faced, and serious. The Luck Choir again adds a homey flavor to this sing-along favorite. Amy Nelson sings “Rock Me to Sleep” and Willie accompanies on Trigger. “Playin’ Dominoes and Shootin’ Dice,” which is what Willie does at his headquarters in Luck, moves this album into the realm of adulthood. Of course Willie’s attention would wander from a children’s cd into something else, something more. Tex Woods and O.D. Dobbs wrote this song in 1952 (or renewed the copyright then), but it could be the story of Willie’s life, the story of a man whose wife finds him foolin’ around, and she beats him with his own guitar and then shoots him. This story gets told over and over again in Willie’s biography. Four or five wives getting after him for foolin’ around. And Willie sings this one straight-faced and serious. Just tellin’ it like it is. No judgment or sympathy. Willie has a knack for finding songs that other people wrote but that describe his own life perfectly. He is a master of song selection. Where does he find songs like this? And how does he have the chutzpa to sing songs that cast an unflattering light on his own behavior. He just lets it all hang out with no apologies or explanations. “Wouldn’t Have it Any Other Way” is the only Willie –penned song on the album, and he wrote it for this album in 2000. It fits Willie’s on-the-road, Hakuna Matata philosophy. “We wake up in a new world every day.” We’re on the road again every morning. We don’t care what other people say, and we live life to the fullest. Unapologetic to the core. A beautiful, simple song, and so typical that Willie would do a children’s cd that morphs into an adult cd; a cd of covers, but then he has to add one of his own. You just never know what you’ll get when you start playing a Willie album, and you get the sense that he doesn’t know either. He’s making it up as he goes along. It grows organically. And you sense the authenticity of this spirit in the songs. He needs them and he means them at that time and that studio with those people. His song selection is as quirky and of-the-moment as his phrasing. He breaks meter in every line and in every choice of song. Always surprising the listener like Thelonius Monk. Expect the unexpected. And where the heck did a rough blues song like Weldon’s 1942 “Outskirts of Town” come from? Matt Hubbard’s harmonica works overtime to bring out the blues. Willie closes out the set with two Mike Newbury tunes. In “Just Dropped in (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” Willie sings, “found my broken mind in a brown paper bag again” and “tore my mind on a jagged sky.” It’s all about mind with Willie, all in the head. Memory, mind, time. Later he sings, “I broke my mind.” Broken hearts, broken minds. Maybe they’re the same thing. “Had myself crawlin’ out as I was crawlin’ in.” My untenable top ten list has become so untenable, what the heck. Add this to the list. I think it’s at 35 and counting. It will probably end up being my top 50, which will be about half of Willie’s albums. Not very helpful. Oh well. What can I say. I like it all. “The Thirty-Third of August” is the best song on this album. “Today there’s no salvation.” A blind man can “see what [Willie] can’t understand.” “It’s the thirty-third of August and I’m finally touchin’ down/ eight days frum Sunday, and I’m Saturday-bound.” Reminds me of Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Comin’ Down.” Willie closes with some of the most haunting, chilling lyrics in his repertoire: “Now I put my angry feelin’ under lock and chain/ I hide my violent nature with a smile/ though the demons dance and sing their songs within my fevered brain/ not all my god-like thoughts, Lord, are defiled.” On a kids album? What was he thinkin’? What was on his mind? This is a far cry from “O’l Blue” and “I Am My Own Grandpa,” but what is a “far cry for some” is just a regular old cry to Willie. Willie makes no distinctions. Cry, cry, cry. It’s cries all the way down. From hungry babies crying to hungover men crying. It’s all hunger for something more, restlessness, crying, emotions. Put it in the top ten, baby. Baby, baby, baby. From babies to grandpas, we’re all human, and Willie finds that humanity and brings it out in every song. But I still worry about him covering up those angry feelings with a smile. Can we trust that smile? What’s he hiding? And why? Why hide your violent nature? Is that honest? Authentic? Where is the real Willie? And to think that he started this album with a song from the Muppet Movie. Only Willie could pull this off and come full circle from Kermit the Frog to “The Thirty-Third of August.”

A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 3) (1995)

Disc 3 opens up with the remaining tracks from the “Sugar Moon” album. It strikes me as awkward that four songs from “Sugar Moon” end disc 2 and then the remaining six tracks open disc 3. I could have sworn it was Johnny Gimble on fiddle, but the liner notes say it is Jimmy Belken. I think this is Merle Haggard’s band who recorded in Willie’s Pedernales studio and Willie just dropped in and recorded some impromptu jazz and pop standards. I can’t believe they never released this album. Floyd Tillman’s bouncy “I’ll Take What I Can Get” is another version of Stephen Stills’ “If You Can’t Be with the One You Love, Love the One You’re With.” It fits with Willie’s Taoist, Hakuna Matata philosophy. On “If It’s Wrong to Love You” Willie sings, “If it’s wrong to love you, wrong I’ll always be.” There’s that word “always” again. Willie pledging eternal faithfulness in the face of unrequited love. Willie needs to record more with horns. “Struttin’ with Some Barbeque” is an old Louis Armstrong song, and it strikes me that Willie and Louis have a lot in common. “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and “make believe it came from you.” Another example of Willie using his mind to create this platonic ideal of love that transcends time and memory. “Till the End of the World” and “I’ll Keep on Loving You” continue this paradoxical theme of always and forever. The crux of honky tonk tunes is the tension between the desire for eternal love and the reality of the fickleness of the human heart. The twin desires of freedom and commitment. These last two songs are what I would call promise songs. I’ll-love-you-forever songs. So many of Willie’s other songs give the lie to these songs, but he can’t help singing them even though he sees right through them. He is able to believe and disbelieve simultaneously. I said it in the last blog, but this is one of Willie’s very best albums; right up there with “Stardust.” He needs to do an album like this with Wynton Marsalis. Tracks 7-10 can be found on “Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes.” The next ten tracks (11-20) are Willie singing Hank Williams tunes with Jimmy Day (who played with Hank) on steel guitar. Willie claims he did the songs in the same key and tempo as Hank. He even tries to sing right on the beat like Hank. Johnny Gimble joins in on fiddle, and many of these songs were recorded in one take. “A House is Not a Home” fits in with Willie’s house songs. “A house with love is not a home.” Is love without a house a home? Is a bus with love on the road a home? “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” seems to be a metaphor for the human heart: it just can’t be filled no matter how much love is poured into it. There seems to be a break, a crack in the human heart, the human condition, which does not allow us to be satisfied. As Augustine writes, “Our hearts are restless till they find rest in thee.” “Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do”? Why don’t you love me “always.” Why doesn’t love last? Why does love change, fade, cool? Why is the human heart so fickle? Why is love so funny like that? Why does it always slip away? Why does our reach for love always exceed our grasp? This is the puzzle of every country song. The puzzle of Proust and Gatsby. It strikes me, too, that being on the road is a kind of discipline. Playing the same songs every night 200+ days a year takes incredible commitment and discipline that few possess. Should we call it the discipline of freedom? “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” gives us that word “never” again. Superlatives abound in honky tonk tunes. Promises about never and always. My love will never fade; it will last for always and forever. Promises, promises, promises that turn to lies, lies, lies. Thus the ubiquity of cheatin’ songs. “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me” may be my favorite track in this set of Hank Williams songs. Johnny Gimble shines on fiddle. “Why Should We Try Anymore” gets at the notion of living a lie, a half-hearted love. “The vows that we made are only to break…The kisses we steal we know are not real.” And yet we kiss all the same, as if they were real. “False love like ours fades with the flowers.” And what loves doesn’t? What is true love? “Our story’s so old…on the past let’s close the door, and smile don’t regret, but live and forget, there’s no use to try anymore.” Close the door on the past? That would erase every Willie Nelson song, which is based on opening the door to the past. Just listened to a Radio Lab podcast about memory, and they mentioned a study where people took a drug to erase, or defang, painful memories. Imagine if Willie had taken this drug and removed the pain from all his old memories. Would he be happier? He certainly wouldn’t have much to write about. The guy who wrote “Proust was a Neuroscientist” was interviewed, and he mentioned how we re-live and re-create our memories every time we remember, and thus the memories get less and less accurate each time we re-member. So the more you think about the past, the more it becomes about you and the less it is about the past. So your memory literally re-writes the past. The ultimate 1984 propaganda machine. Maybe love is propaganda. Maybe time and memory, too. And yet what beautiful and powerful propaganda.

A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 2) (1995)

Tracks 1-4 on disc two in this collection can also be found on “The Complete Atlantic Recordings.” Track 5 can be found on “Singin’ with Willie.” Tracks 6-16 can also be found on “The Complete Atlantic Recordings,” but tracks 17-20 are worth the price of the collection. I have not found these tracks from the “Sugar Moon” album anywhere else. Johnny Gimble kills me on fiddle. “I’m a Fool to Care” is as good as anything on “Stardust,” maybe better. The liner notes say the “Sugar Moon” album was recorded in the mid 1980s and that it is stylistically related to Willie’s 1981 “Over the Rainbow” album. I think “Sugar Moon” may be Willie’s first Preservation Hall style New Orleans jazz album. He has horns blasting away like Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives. I think “Sugar Moon” makes my untenable top ten. It’s right up there with “Stardust.” Another hidden gem that should be better known.

A Classic & Unreleased Collection (volume 1) (1995)

Over a week without Willie is a bad thing. I have been listening, just not blogging. Too busy grading exams. Now, though, it is time to settle down and listen to the rest of Willie’s collection this summer. Volume one of this collection opens with a special introduction recorded by Willie himself. The liner notes are very helpful and thorough. The 1957 recording of “No Place for Me” also appears on the “One Hell of a Ride” compilation, but the flip side of that Portland, Oregon record, “Lumberjack,” appears for the first time (for me, at least) on this compilation. This recording alone is worth the price of this compilation. Many of the demo recordings from Pamper Records (tracks 4-16) also appear on “The Ghost” (though I prefer the mixing on “The Ghost” compilation; it brings the vocals out more), “Face of a Fighter,” “Crazy: The Demo Sessions,” and “Love and Pain.” Track 13, “Who Do I Know in Dallas,” is the one exception (dare I say the lone exception) that does not appear on any of the other compilations, so it is another reason to buy this collection. “Shirley consoled me in Phoenix. And Jeanie in old San Antone. But who do I know in Dallas that will help me forget I’m alone? I can’t spend the night without someone. The lonelies [not sure how to spell this neologism] would drive me insane.” Being on the road is such a funny thing. You hit the road to get away from people and problems and commitments and relationships that tie you down, and yet you can’t sleep at night alone, and you need a woman in every city to take away the loneliness you created by leaving home in the first place. Tracks 16-21 all appear on “The Complete Atlantic Recordings.” So basically you need to buy this disc for two songs that you can’t find elsewhere. It’s worth it, though.