Just One Love (1995)--take 2

“Just” is another word like “always.” It’s funny how time slips away and how just one love turns into two and three and four before you know it. “Just one” sounds so limited and antithetical to the freedom of the road. I’m noticing this time around that this album has a darker tinge to it. Notice the key words from the song titles: night, cold, forgotten, sin, walls, smoke, cold, retreat. Willie sings the two Floyd Tillman songs solo (tracks 2 and 3). “Better Left Forgotten” is the most Proustian song on the album. “Why, oh, why, won’t my mind let go…your memory will never set me free.” Our memories hold us hostage, captive. The tension between the captive and the fugitive haunts Willie and Proust. The tension between the forgotten and the forgetter. “It’s a Sin” is another version of “Better Left Forgotten”: “It’s a sin to keep this memory of you when silence proves that you’ve forgotten me.” “Four Walls” is another version of “Hello Walls.” Another house song, another pathetic fallacy, another personification song. It’s also another “she’s gone” song. Willie’s been left again. Willie’s always being left and always leaving, too. He leaves even as he’s being left. It’s the quantum physics of love, the expanding particles in the universe, speeding toward and away at the same time with equal force. I’d like to hear Willie sing “I Just Drove By” by himself. Proust took many of these same drives, these same walks down memory lane. Drive-by memories. “I wonder if love is the way it was back then.” It never is. This version of “Bonaparte’s Retreat” comes 20 years after the original on Red Headed Stranger. This makes me want to hear Willie re-do that entire album, maybe live in concert.

What a Wonderful World (1988)--take 2

I’m afraid I need to stand by my January blog on this one. “Spanish Eyes” with Julio Iglesias is no “To All the Girls I Loved Before,” but the lyrics have richer associations for me this time around. “Please don’t cry. This is just adios and not goodbye. Soon I’ll return…Say you and your Spanish eyes will wait for me.” So many of Willie’s themes are present here: eyes, tears, waiting, goodbye. This song harkens back to “Silver Wings” and “If I Could Only Fly.” I appreciate hearing Julio sing in Spanish. It lets you understand better what Willie owes to the flamenco and mariachi traditions. Romanticism infuses this album. You have exotic Spanish eyes, moons, enchanted evenings, south of the border, buttermilk sky, Moulin Rouge, and twilight. All of these suggest the exotic, the romantic, the other. In “Moon River” Willie sings of “drifters off to see the world.” He sings of “heartbreak” and his “Huckleberry friend,” evoking Mark Twain and the Mississippi: Jim and Huck, lighting out for the territory, chasing “the same rainbows.” A slave and a freeman chasing the same rainbows? How can that be? How can they be missing the same things, longing for the same things? Mickey’s harmonica accentuates the longing of the river that both Jim and Huck share. In “Some Enchanted Evening” Willie imagines a stranger appearing, a ghost of a memory returning, haunting, laughing. “Fools give you reasons, wise men never try.” When she calls you “Fly to her side and make her your own,” and “Once you have found her, never let her go.” Never hit the road and leave her behind, never fly away. Hmmm. Willie thinks to himself: “What a Wonderful World.” Wonderful in his mind. As Hamlet says: “Thinking makes it so.” “South of the Border (Down Mexico Way)” is where Willie fell in love with stars above. His “thoughts stray south of the border.” “She smiled as she whispered manana, never dreaming that we were parting, and I lied as I whispered manana, for our tomorrow never came.” So in the night we smile and lie about tomorrow, about morning. Why is that? Manana could be the title of many of Willie’s works. Three days that give us trouble: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In “Ole Buttermilk Sky” Willie is “happy as a Christmas tree” going to the one he loves. He is looking to the moon again. Mooning, mellow and bright. In “The Song from Moulin Rouge” Willie is worrying and wondering again: “Whenever we kiss, I worry and wonder: your lips may be here, but where is your heart? It’s always like this.” Willie’s always worrying or carefree. How is it that he can be both worried and worry free, a “worried man” without a care in the world? In “To Each His Own” Willie insists “my own is you.” In other words, another person can be more you than yourself. Paradoxically, “To Each His Own” doesn’t mean we are all different, it means we are inseparable, we are one. Our uniqueness, our difference is what binds us. “Twilight Time” hits the themes of darkness and of time. In “Deepening shadows” and “deep in the dark” “your kiss will fill me.” Willie prays for the dark. It is in the dark that he can call forth memories and dreams. What is the Red Headed Stranger doing singing “Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive”? It’s all about our attitude. In the darkness we can be light, we can stay positive. “Thinking makes it so.” In the end the crying cowboy has always been a man of the mind, cerebral, ruminative. His mind either worries him to death or helps him stay positive. Like Hamlet he alternates between both extremes of human reason.

Seashores of Old Mexico (1987)—take 2

Merle’s title track, like the album and Willie’s career and style in general, has “no destination in mind.” There’s that obsession with mind again. What would it mean to have the destination in your mind? “The border meant freedom, a new life, and romance, and that’s why we thought we should go. Start our lives over on the seashores of old Mexico.” Like Proust going to Venice. The temptation, the allure, the seduction of starting fresh and new and clean. “Things will blow over on the seashores of old Mexico” the way they blow over on the road, the way they blow past you. Merle’s “Without You On My Side” reminds me of several of Willie’s songs where he says he needs a woman by his side to keep the memories and the past at bay. It seems that things don’t just blow over on the seashores of old Mexico or on the road. “The bad dreams wouldn’t leave me, and it would all start to grieve me” without a woman on my side. “When Times Were Good” remains my favorite song on the album and one of my very favorite Willie recordings. This song and the final pages of the sixth volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” both deal with resurrecting impressions from the past and trying to give them permanence. Willie, Hag, and Proust conclude that art is the only way to do that, and they resolve to “write one for the memory.” Merle’s “Jimmy the Broom” describes a man who “came to the city to forget a woman…[but] not even the havoc of the nightlife of Reno could keep her memory away, so he turned to the bottle, and somehow it deafened her call, but Jimmy the Broom never lived to be free of it all.” Another man fighting away memories, trying to keep them at bay, drowning them out with booze. But nothing completely frees a man of these memories. We’re either in search of lost time or trying to escape from it, trying to lose it. Either way we lose. Willie sings “Yesterday” on Live Country Music Concert (1966), and I discuss the lyrics in that blog from May. Twenty years later he sings it again. In 1966 he wasn’t half the man he used to be, so in 1987 he must be one fourth of the man he used to be. The notion that “Yesterday came suddenly” is a striking one. Normally we think of our kids growing up too fast and time flying by. You blink and they’re grown. And yet here, the past comes back suddenly, like those precious memories that return to Proust unbidden of the Madeleine soaked in tea. So the future rushes up to meet us, but the past rushes to us from the other side as well. And we get caught in the undertow, in the conflicting gravitational forces of time (centripetal and centrifugal). If we could only fly, if we only knew “which way to turn and go.” We “feel so good” and then we “feel so bad.” We could “bid this place goodbye.” Not sure how flying would help us avoid loneliness. “Tell me things get better somewhere up the way. Just dismal thinking on a dismal day. Sad songs for us to bear.” If we could only fly, we could flit back and forth between the road and home, we could commute between the foreign and the familiar. We could have the best of both worlds. And if we could fly fast enough, faster than the speed of light, we could outrun time and loneliness. Merle’s “Shotgun and a Pistol” just tells a good story. In “Love Makes a Fool of Us All” “The one that he’s tied to is the one that he’s lied to.” Love makes liars, cheaters, beggars of us all. It’s funny that way. It makes us say things like always and forever. It drives people like Willie and Hag and Proust to distraction. And all we can say is “just look at us now.” Look at what love’s done to us. “Why Do I Have to Choose” is the only Willie-penned song on the album. Willie wants to have it both ways, to have the road and his home, too. Why should he have to choose between the two conflicting desires? Why can’t he have both? “The love is not the same, but either love is true.” Willie wants to be true to everyone. Merle’s “Silver Wings” tries to end the album on an upbeat note (figuratively and literally). “Don’t leave me, I cry. Don’t take that airplane ride.” It’s a “she’s gone” song, but an upbeat one. Ironically, he sang earlier “If I Could Only Fly,” and here he laments that his woman can fly on silver wings, but she’s flying in the wrong direction. So flight can cut both ways. Overall this is a terribly melancholy and sad album, but it’s tender, soothing. It’s hard to know exactly how to take it. “You locked me out of your mind.” Willie doesn’t like people to lock him out of their mind because he keeps his mind open, and people are always on his mind. Like Proust he remains always open to impressions from the past that might yield new sensations.

The Troublemaker (1976)—take 2

In “Uncloudy Day” Willie sings of “A home far away…where no storm cloud arrives.” In one way or another, Willie is always singing about home. How great it is, how far away it is, how unattainable, how much he longs for it even (and especially) when he runs away from it. Interestingly, Willie seems to have arrived, in 2010, at that “uncloudy” state of unfettered happiness. And yet, one has to wonder how this squares with Willie’s early angsty honky tonk outlaw songs. The title of this album is “Troublemaker,” and yet every song is about the antithesis of trouble, the redemption of trouble. We begin with an “uncloudy day,” and then look to heaven in “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder,” looking forward, with hope, to the future bliss. This is not looking for bliss and ultimate contentment in the present (which Willie claims to subscribe to at other times—see Outlaw bio) or to the past (where he has often found solace in local memories that linger). From “yonder” to “Whispering Hope” to a “Fountain” of hope to an “unbroken” circle. Uncloudy days and unbroken circles for troublemakers and outlaws. Then a “garden”, a place “Where the soul never dies,” the “sweet bye and bye,” a place to “gather” (as opposed to scattering like outlaws, who by definition head out and do not gather and come together; if they did that, they would be in-laws), “precious memories,” and lastly “amazing grace.” Of course, none of these songs are written by Willie, so he may be constitutionally unable to sustain such unfettered optimism and bliss in an album of his own songs. He has to sing other people’s songs when he seeks this kind of contentment. I wonder what this tells us. “Whispering Hope” impressed me more this time around. “Wait till the darkness is over.” It has a more melancholy optimism. A more honest, realistic hope grounded in genuine struggle and suffering and pain. “Hope is an anchor,” but it is an anchor in a stormy sea. Hope does not calm the seas and clear the skies. It calms your mind and spirit amidst the still very real storms. I wonder if “Redeeming love” really has been Willie’s “theme.” To what degree has he sung “thy power to save”? I really don’t know. I think he has and he hasn’t. “Do you love the hymns they taught you, or are songs of earth your choice?” Now that’s a question to put to Willie’s whole career. “Songs of Earth.” He seems to sing of both with equal vigor. His voice and his lyrics, his life and his manner, are nothing if not earthy. But what of his spiritual side? Can he be both earthy and ethereal? Maybe earthereal? The spare solo title track maintains its status as the best song on this album. “In the Garden” has that more plaintive feel of “Whispering Hope.” It isn’t a shouting hope, but a muted, mournful hope. A hope emerging out of brokenness, not out of triumphant confidence. A hope that springs out of need and dependence. A hope responding to grace. The hope of the truly prodigal son, of the truly repentant. Mickey’s harmonica comes into its own on this nostalgic track. It’s hard to imagine the crying cowboy in a place where there are no “sad farewells” or “tear-dimmed eyes.” No opportunities to cry, no place for time to slip away to. Does this mean nothing is funny or wry in the sky, in the place “where the soul never dies”? “Sweet Bye & Bye” slows it down again. “We shall sing on that beautiful shore the melodious songs of the blessed, and our spirits shall sorrow no more, not a sigh for the blessings of rest.” So does this mean still is indeed still moving? It sounds like still won’t be still moving, and we won’t miss all that moving. We won’t miss the road when we reach the shore. When we “gather at the river,” the shore, the uncloudy day, the unbroken circle, the fountain, the roll call up yonder, we won’t miss all our moving. Willie seems to be asking: How will we feel when our “pilgrimages cease”? “Precious Memories” lingers as one of my two favorite songs on this album. At 7:37, this song lingers literally. “Old home scenes of [his] childhood” race across the “The lonely years,” outrunning even the wheels of the bus on the road. “In the stillness of the midnight, precious sacred scenes unfold” that no amount of running away can prevent. The origami of the mind, once folded, the creases can never be completely removed. “Old times singing…glad times bringing.” This stillness of the midnight, this flooding of memories, the preciousness and sacredness of time and mind and memory, is all very Proustian. Notice how midnight, darkness, is the time of perfect stillness. How could we get such stillness in the light? Don’t we need the darkness in some way? What happens if we completely block it out? If we close our eyes to the darkness? The final four live recordings from 1974 at the Texas Opry House are as good as anything Willie has done. Great fiddle and harmonica. Jazzy and trippy like all the other songs from this concert. 1974 may be one of Willie’s best vintages for musicians, for his voice, for everything about him musically. I love the way these gospel tunes meander like his melancholy medley of Funny/Crazy/Nite Life. There’s just a touch more hope and optimism to these gospel tunes, and great energy in the crowd.

San Antonio Rose (1980)—take 2

7/24/2010

There’s only one Willie-penned song on this duet album with Willie’s mentor Ray Price. In Ray Price’s own “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)” the two outlaws pledge undying love and loyalty, unconditional love. In so many of their songs they’re either boasting of their ability to love this way, or lamenting their inability to do so. I’d like to see Willie sing Harlan Howard’s “I Fall to Pieces” more often. A slow and sparse 2010 version could be even more powerful than this solid 1980 rendition. “Time only adds to the flame.” So many of Willie’s songs are about pieces, which is what time is and does. It breaks life up into pieces, sections, increments. It divides, parcels mortality. Willie’s “lonely all the time” in “Crazy Arms.” It’s another song about the mind being willing but the body being weak. The arms want what they want. “They reach to hold somebody new,” but the “troubled mind” won’t go along. The disconnect between mind and body provides much fodder for Willie’s songwriting. In “Release Me” Willie declares, “I don’t love you anymore.” He begs his lover to release him so he can “love again.” He wants out of his unconditional, “always” commitment from the previous songs. He wants a loophole to allow him to pursue warm lips to replace the ones that have turned cold. “Release Me” is time begging to slip away. It’s funny how Willie asks to be released when he lamented his lover asking for the same thing in so many other songs. You’d think he would get tired of hurting lovers by asking to be released from his commitments, but it sounds like humans in general never get tired of hurting each other. Even, and perhaps especially, when they know how it feels, when it’s been done to them before. Gimble’s fiddle and Raphael’s harmonica put some extra hurt into this song. I’d like to hear Willie do this song more often, though George Jones does it best. “This Cold War with You” basically states “fish or cut bait.” We’re either in or out, but let’s quit debating and hemming and hawing. But that’s what real love is: a constant negotiation. Willie wants a definitive love, a platonic, ideal love. True or false, “do right” or “we’re through,” there’s no in-between. Funny how the only Willie-penned song on the album, “Funny How Time Slips Away,” is still my favorite. It stands out like Willie’s voice, like Mickey’s harmonica, like Gimble’s fiddle. This version is growing on me, moving up the ranks of the numerous

Clean Shirt (1991)—take 2

7/23/2010

Here’s another album without a single Willie-penned tune. It opens with Waylon’s “If I Can Find a Clean Shirt.” “Come on now, Willie, don’t look at me that way…no I ain’t goin’ down to the border tonight, drinkin’ tequila and takin’ chances with our life.” Waylon is trying not to let Willie talk him into a wild adventure. Then Waylon thinks, “On second thought, if I can find a clean shirt I might.” It’s those second thoughts that can sometimes get you in trouble. Not thinking before you act and thinking too much are two different ways to get into trouble. Sometimes your first thought is your best thought. See Hamlet. Look before you leap. He who hesitates is lost. “I Could Write a Book About You” picks up on an idea raised in the first song. Earlier Waylon mentioned how he knew Willie like a paperback book, one which he had read carefully and knew every page. Here, both Waylon and Willie insist that they could write a book about each other, but both insist “That’s not how I remember it.” Though they claim, “I know you like a brother,” they disagree about their memories. They saw it differently though they were both there. In the end they agree not to write the book after all. Interesting that Max Barnes wrote half the songs on this album. Troy Seals wrote several as well. I think they also wrote several for Randy Travis around this time. “Old Age and Treachery” always overcomes “youth and skill.” They’ll try almost anything: “What Waylon won’t Willie will.” These songs all seem to be a conversation between Waylon and Willie. “Two Old Sidewinders” is no exception. “That ain’t no hill for a couple of climbers.” Willie and Waylon seem to be lamenting being over the hill. Maybe they are trying to side-step time. “Tryin’ to Outrun the Wind” is like tryin’ to side-step time. “Her memory turns over and over again.” Why do memories do that? “He’s like an old stallion longing for freedom, trying to out-run the wind.” Who is? Willie? How is a guy who has fooled around chasing lots of women but now remembers a more perfect woman and a more perfect love like a stallion longing for freedom? Sounds more like a free stallion longing to be penned. Or maybe it’s a song about the tyranny of freedom. “The dreams all ended too soon” in “The Good Ol’ Nights.” This is a song about picking and choosing your memories. Willie asserts control over his own past, his own memories, his own time. He remembers what he wants to. “Guitars That Won’t Stay in Tune” follows the previous song that mentioned guitars and women that were both in tune. Both songs also mention Cadillacs. In the last song Waylon said he didn’t care about them because he never owned one. Here he worries about making payments on one. Actually both Willie and Waylon are saying they don’t like payments on a caddy or guitars that won’t stay in tune. In “The Makin’s of a Song” Willie sings, “When you start to feel at home out on the highway you’re damn sure qualified to sing the blues.” So feeling at home on the road is the blues. That’s a puzzle and a paradox. Because Willie sings in the next song: “I been on the road most all of my life…in search of some pleasures and treasures and things…whatever pleased me the most.” Yet “Home is where the heart is…my heart is there in the middle of Texas beside the old Alamo.” “Put Me on a Train Back to Texas” seems to be about returning to the roots you have tried to run away from all your life. No different than the Dixie Chicks on “Long Time Gone.” Country music is always about leaving home and longing for it at the same time. It’s like the Fragile X handshake in that way. Wanting so badly to leave and stay at the same time. “Rocks From Rolling Stones” is about the twin longing for roots and rootlessness. For freedom and form. And if you “can’t make a rock from a rolling stone,” why do we keep trying. “There’s a river of freedom runnin’ through your veins.” We want something foreign and familiar, new and old, and we want it at the same time, like sweet and sour. We want to break free from the past and return to it with equal vigor. The centripetal and centrifugal pulls of the past and memory. The gravity and tides, the moons of memory.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow (1985)—take 2

7/22/2010

I didn’t comment on any of the lyrics in my January blog, so I’ll focus on those this time. I also notice this time around that this is one of the few albums with no Willie-penned songs.

In the opening track, “Mona Lisa,” Willie asks, “Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa, or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?” A poignant question that could apply to much of Willie’s work. The mystery, the paradox of that Mona Lisa smile puzzles Willie as it has puzzled Proust and every other artist who wrestles with the psychology of love. Freddie Powers and Willie take turns singing “Exactly Like You.” “Now I know why momma taught me to be true; she meant me for someone exactly like you.” Interestingly, Willie insists in this song that his love is better than the movies: “No one does those love scenes exactly like you.” This runs counter to many of Willie’s songs which depict women who fail to live up to the platonic, Hollywood ideals. Willie asks why he should spend money on picture shows (on art or music or literature) that depict ideal love when he has waited and found that perfect love in the flesh. “Who’s Sorry Now” has Willie crying again. His heart is “aching for breaking every vow.” Being true isn’t as easy as he made it sound in “Exactly Like You.” In “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” Willie swears he loves her: “honest I do.” But he’s afraid that someday she’ll leave him. All his life depends on her, but he knows he dreams dreams of her in vain. This whole notion of confessing, of telling truth, of lying, of leaving, of pledging, promising, vowing. The truth gets so tied up in love and emotion. The legality and logic of relationships. “Won’t You Ride in My Little Red Wagon” reverts back to an optimistic, hopeful view of love. The fiddle work on this album ranks up there with the best in Willie’s repertoire. Johnny Gimble and Paul Buskirk really go at it on the strings. The title track, “Over the Rainbow,” may be my favorite track

Pancho and Lefty (1983)—take 2

7/21/2010

Re-listened to this on the drive to Detroit yesterday and again today in the hotel room before the International Fragile X conference. I commented on every song in my January blog, but this time I notice this line: “Lefty, he can’t sing the blues all day like he used to.” I wonder why Lefty can’t sing the blues anymore. What can make you so blue that you can’t even sing the blues? What can put you beyond the blues? I’m intrigued by the notion of police, federales, letting a criminal go “out of kindness.” What kind of sympathy or empathy is this? It’s almost a Les Mis moment. A moment of grace. They could have had him any day, but they let him go. This fits with Willie’s general attitude toward judgment (“Beer For My Horses” excepted). No fault, no blame. An outlaw is outside the law. He requires grace and mercy. I’ll be re-listening to “The Troublemaker” soon. What is it about outlaws and troublemakers that gets closer to the truth, closer to being fully human? Could it be their awareness of their own need of grace? Like the prodigal son? The transition from the adventurous “Pancho and Lefty” to “It’s My Lazy Day” is a startling one. I don’t think Pancho and Lefty ever took anything easy. Hag wants to go fishing, but he sings, “I got to thinkin’ it over,” and it turns out he is too lazy to fish. But even at his laziest, he has to think things over. In “My Mary” Hag is “dreamin’ those dreams again.” Hag is “dreamin’ of the hours [he] spent with Mary.” He is alone spending time with the past, spending time with memories. These are Wordsworth’s “emotions recollected in tranquility.” In a way, you can experience them more deeply afterward, in tranquility, than you can live in person. And thus you can experience them more intensely in art. So the role of the artist is to capture emotion, distill it, frame it, so we can walk around it and see it whole, fully faceted. The artist does what our brains do at night, de-frag our thoughts. This is why we can practice a piano piece all day and never get it right, but when we wake up the next morning we can play it perfectly. Our brains work on it all night, cleaning out all the insignificant info from the day and clarifying the important, deeper connections which we can now see in fuller relief. “Half a Man” reminds me that many animals can let half of their brain sleep while the other stays awake. Maybe this is what Willie desires. A reptilian brain. Cry with one eye and sleep with the other. We could function more consistently this way without the vicissitudes of emotions slowing us down. But then again lizards don’t sing the blues and we’d have no country music and no Willie Nelson. The interesting implication of this song is that love dehumanizes us. It makes us less human. Destroys us. If “the low is always lower than the high” and the reasons to quit keep getting bigger each day, how come they don’t ever “outnumber all the reasons why”? “No Reason to Quit” suggests an answer. Willie has “no reason for livin’ right. And there’s no other way to forget.” So we’re back to memory again. He can change and sober up, but he can’t forget. “Still Water Runs the Deepest” suggests that Willie is the upright, dependable spouse who has been “done wrong.” The unwitting victim. The cheated upon, not the cheater. So he’s leaving. “Too long we’ve been together.” Not sure how this song relates to “Still is Still Moving.” “My Life’s Been a Pleasure” takes the direct opposite view. “You’ve proved your love is true…and I’ll still love you as I did in yesterday.” What evidence bears this out? Since when does our love today ever match our love from yesterday? Words like “still” and “always” are fraught with problems as so many of Willie’s songs have shown. In “All the Soft Places to Fall” Hag and Willie sing about how “These memories are fun to recall.” It’s safer to recall all these rowdy outlaw memories of “rocks and brambles” within the safe confines of a secure home life with clean sheets and a “safe place to fall.” Then Willie ends this album with three Willie standards: “Opportunity to Cry,” “Half a Man,” and “My Own Peculiar Way.” This isn’t one of my favorite versions of “Opportunity to Cry,” but I applaud the idea of a trippy, jazzy version. This version of “My Own Peculiar Way” may be the only five-star song on this album. It may even be my favorite version of this song. Certainly one of the most interesting. Willie again asserting that he will “always” love her, but in his own peculiar way, which is in his mind. She will always be on his mind. Don’t let anyone say that he has “ever been untrue.” Willie has never been untrue. Not sure what kind of definition of truth this is, but there is a sense in which this statement is true, in the same way that Willie sings in time, in a certain sense of time, a quantum, Willie-sense of time.

Waylon and Willie (1978)—take 2

Proust might have written “Mama’s don’t let your babies grow up to be writers.” Artists are notoriously unstable and reckless. Dangerous additions to the family. Again, I covered this album pretty thoroughly in my January blog, but this time around I notice the presence of time even more. “Time slips away till you die.” Waylon sings of “the future of the homesick and the brave.” And in “Pick Up the Tempo”: “Some people are saying that time will take care of people like me.” As I am reading the final volume of Proust’s six-volume “In Search of Lost Time,” I am seeing more and more connections to Willie’s lyrics. Willie is living too fast and he can’t last much longer. Proust lives too slowly, yet he, too, wastes away. We can die from living too fast or too slow. Why is it we don’t want to live in normal time, in 4-4 meter, in the present? Why must we swing life, living ahead of or behind the beat? Why do we always have to “pick up the tempo”? Proust could have written “If You Can Touch Her at All” about Albertine. “She can be worth the world if you can touch her at all.” But Albertine, like Daisy, remains untouchable, elusive. Waylon’’s “Lookin’ for a Feelin’” is written in a similar vein. “I’m lookin’ for a feelin’ that I once had with you…that I lost when I lost you.” Proust’s novel could have been titled “Lookin’ for a Feelin.’” The lovers “never seem to do.” That Platonic ideal of love always eludes Willie and Proust. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” is the only Willie standard on this album. This may be the slowest, lonesomest song on the album. Mickey’s harmonica accentuates its melancholy edge. Willie slows the whole album down right before he picks up the tempo with “I Can Get Off on You.” I just noticed Willie’s humming at the end of “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” He doesn’t do that on any other song I can think of. I guess “I Can Get Off On You” is the flip side of “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” It could be titled “I’m Supposed To Be Able to Get Off on You.” Still one of my favorite up-tempo Willie songs. Right up there with “Sioux City Sue.” Stevie Nicks’ “Gold Dust Woman” could also have been penned by Proust about Albertine:

Well, did she make you cry, make you break down,

Shatter your illusions of love

And is it over now, do you know how

Pick up the pieces and go home

Willie picks up the pieces and goes to Venice after Albertine leaves him. Then he goes home to Paris in volume six. Proust’s novel could be called “Illusions of love.” Maybe time, like love, is an illusion. Maybe we are disillusioned equally by both. Albertine and Gilbertte and all of Proust’s lovers are gold dust women. Too good to be true. Daisy’s voice is full of money. And Proust’s dreams, his prose, are truer than reality. Willie delves further into the recesses of time with Shel Silverstein’s “A Couple More Years.” Willie’s not wiser from age alone but because he’s spent “more time with [his] back to the wall.” So he has suffered into knowledge, truth. Willie picks up years like pieces, like lovers, like memories. Time is a woman. A woman we are always trying to “hook up” with. Picking up the pieces of the past while “in search of lost time.” Where do you find pieces of lost time? Where do you look? In your mind? Willie and Proust win “The Wurlitzer Prize” for not wanting to get over anyone. “I Don’t Want to Get Over You” could be the title of Proust’s novel and all of Willie’s songs. Even if Willie says he is over her, or wants to get over her, don’t believe him. He lies. He likes not getting over people. He hits the road and seems to easily get over people, but he doesn’t. He never outruns his memories. They catch up with him even on the road. They are his muse. What would he sing about and what would Proust write about if they got over these past lovers? Getting over lovers would be tantamount to getting over art itself. Art is a way of not having to get over anything. The lovers on Keats’ Grecian Urn never get over each other. They never have to because they are frozen in art. Art allows us not to have to get over people.

Me and Paul (1985)—take 2

This version of “I Let My Mind Wander” (track 3) may be my favorite. It’s hard to believe this could be on the same album with the smokin’ version of “I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train.” It’s jazzy, trippy, and wandering, meandering like Willie’s mind. Mickey has a lovely solo at the end. “She’s Gone,” it goes without saying, is a “She’s Gone” song. This version seems especially mournful and melancholy. Mickey’s harmonica sounds like loneliness itself. Once again, I clearly underrated this album the first time around. I missed the wonderful slowness of several of these songs. I missed the sadness of Mickey’s harmonica. This version of “I Never Cared for You” anticipates the flamenco-inflected version on Teatro. Ironically, this version of “Me and Paul” is not my favorite. I think this song is better live. A line from “One Day at a Time” leaps out at me this time: “Yesterday’s dead and tomorrow is blind.” Willie seems to want to live only for today in this song, but so many of his songs are about yesterday. About wanting to live in the past and dwell in a land of memories. This album is clearly one of Mickey Raphael’s best. He steals the show on “Pretend I Never Happened.” This is the only occurrence I have found of Willie singing Billy Joe Shaver’s “Black Rose.” Willie should sing and record this more often. This woman has the tools to “make a new fool every day.” And I think I was a fool not to put this in my untenable top ten.

Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson (1979)—take 2

In “Me and Bobby McGee” Willie is “Feelin’ nearly faded as my jeans.” Willie’s clothes match his philosophy about time. Clothes and memories fade, and yet they gain a certain majesty, a certain authority, as they fade, like the lines and wrinkles on Willie’s face and hands. Willie alters the connotations of words so that faded becomes a positive thing. Time, as always, is everywhere. Even the “windshield wipers [are] slappin’ time.” Here again we see that Willie feels best when he feels bad: “feelin’ good was easy when Bobby sang the blues.” In other words, it’s easy to feel good when you feel bad. Huh? And yet it makes sense. Willie always feels worse when he feels better. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” but Willie always feels better when he’s losing things. Freedom is, in fact, a terrifying state, because it means you have nothing else to lose, and all of Willie’s songs are about loss. In my last blog I talked about how Willie sells songs about loss, so he is essentially selling loss, selling nothing, selling what he doesn’t have. If he loses everything, though, he has nothing left to sell, no loss left. Thus Willie has devised a system for saving his losses; he has developed a container for his collected emptiness. His mind, his memory, is that container for controlled losses. Sort of like a controlled burn. You can lose things again and again in your memory. This is why Willie, like Proust, would “trade all of [his] tomorrows for a single yesterday.” He can control the losses of yesterday better than future losses or even present losses. He needs help to “Make it through the night” of the present night. He can find his way around the past more easily. “All I’m takin’ is your time.” That’s all? All I’m taking is everything. “Let the devil take tomorrow.” The devil can have the future. “Yesterday is dead and gone, and tomorrow is out of sight.” Earlier he said he’d trade all his tomorrows for a single yesterday, but here he seems willing to trade all yesterdays and tomorrows for a single today. But of course you can’t have a single today because it becomes yesterday so fast. You can’t make today stand still the way you can with the future and the past. I can see Proust writing “Help Me Make it Through the Night” about Albertine. “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” describes a homeless man “wearing yesterday’s misfortunes like a smile. Once he had a future full of money love and dreams which he spent like they was goin’ out of style.” So this man has lost his past and future and only has today. “He’s traded in tomorrow for today.” Another example of the bartering, the deals we cut with time. Earlier Willie was trading the future for the past; here he is trading the future for the present. Like Willie, “he’s a walking contradiction.” In “Why Me” Willie laments that he has wasted his time and his life. Willie wants to repay the time he’s essentially taken from God. You get the sense that our past, present, and future are all gifts from God that we should strive to appreciate more and put to better use. From wasted time, Willie transitions to “For the Good Times.” “Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together. There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burnin’.” No need to worry about the present or the future. Let’s just enjoy the past. It’s Willie’s unique spin on the carpe deim, seize the day, “eat drink and be merry” philosophy. His version is: seize yesterday, when we ate, drank, and were merry. “Don’t say a word about tomorrow or forever. There’ll be time enough for sadness.” We have a love-hate relationship with forever. We want it, but we don’t want to talk about it. Willie’s “got the time” in “You Show Me Yours (And I’ll Show You Mine).” She’s got “rings on [her] fingers and time on [her] hands.” Again, time is everywhere in these songs. In “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again)” Willie’s “wiping out the traces of the people and the places that I’ve been.” He’s forgetting the past, and his lover is “teaching me that yesterday was something that I’d never thought of trying. Talking of tomorrow and the money, love, and time we had to spend.” I’m puzzled a bit by these lyrics. But it seems to be messing with the trinity of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The three days that Willie hates. Willie marvels at “The easy way she opened every door in my mind. But dreamin’ was as easy as believin’ it was never gonna end.” Willie doesn’t have the answer for why love was so easy in this situation and why it is so hard so often. Again we see the belief that this one, this love, is the big one, the one that is “never gonna end.” The “always” love than never “slips away,” that never hits the road. “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” focuses on a poignant sliver of time, a day, which, like a season, like a river, is both always the same and always new. “There’s something in a Sunday that makes a body feel alone.” Something about a slice of time that hurts, that makes us feel mortal, vulnerable, finite, limited. We ourselves are slices of time, notes on a musical staff. “Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.” Sunday seems to be the yesterday of the week. It savors of the past. It seems to be the most nostalgic, most melancholy of days. Unlike hopeful Mondays, fresh starts.

I’m elevating this album to my untenable top ten list. The trend seems to be that I underrated albums the first time around and they get better the second time through. This one I drastically underrated, or maybe my tastes have changed. Isn’t that what good music does. It doesn’t change with time, but it changes our minds, literally, chemically. It changes us, teaches us, trains us to hear better and more.

Who’ll Buy My Memories: The IRS Tapes (1991)—take 2

I listened to this album again in the car driving back from Maine on July 10th, and I have to say it was better than I remembered it, and I remembered it well. It struck me this time that when Willie was at his lowest, when his possessions were being sold out from under him, where did he turn? Not to some future scheme. He turned to the past. The past is his go-to resource when times get tough. He finds comfort and security in the past. Paradoxically, he is able to keep moving forward so smoothly by ceaselessly returning to the past. It’s so counter-intuitive, so Gatsby-like. One step back and two steps forward. I just re-read my lengthy January blog on this album, and I stand by my statement that this may be his best album. I commented on almost every song in January, but I’ll bring to bear this time the larger context of six months of listening and almost 100 albums as well as two more volumes of Proust.

In the haunting title track, Willie sings, “I’d like to start my life anew, but memories make me blue” and “When I remember how things were, my memories all lead to her.” Another “she’s gone” song and another connection between time and love. We remember best what we love most, and we love most what we remember best. I’ve never been a big fan of “Jimmy’s Road,” but this time I notice the line “Jimmy went to war, and something changed his mind around.” The biggest changes seem to happen on the inside, in the mind. “It Should Be Easier Now,” but again and again we see that time doesn’t heal, it reopens the wounds. “I made up my mind that you’re gone,” but it turns out we can’t really control our own minds, and we may not be able to control our own wills, according to Daniel Wegner in his book “The Illusion of the Conscious Will.” “They say everything happens for the best.” Who says this? Dr. Pangloss? Leibniz? Candide? Alexander Pope? Willie Nelson himself preaches this a fair amount in his other songs (see “Healing Hands of Time”). Time should heal, but “the wounds in my heart you’ve carved deep and wide,” maybe two wide for time to suture. Wounds “hollowed and washed by the tears that I’ve cried.” A stitch in time may not be able to save the memories in our mind. In “Will You Remember Me” Willie ponders “the test of time” and “the sands of time.” This is another “she’s gone” song. “Gone are the times.” Time is a woman. Time is love. And both are gone. Yesterday I heard on the radio a new song called “What Kinda Gone” by Chris Cagle.

I hollered, baby, is there somethin' wrong?

Thought I heard her say somethin' soundin' like I'm gone

But these days gone can mean so many things

There's gone for good and there's good and gone

And there's gone with the long before it

I wish she'd been just a little more clear

Well there's gone for the day and gone for the night

And gone for the rest of your doggone life

Is it whiskey night or just a couple beers?

I mean what kind of gone are we talkin' 'bout here?

Well it's gettin' dark out she ain't back yet

Ain't called home turned off the phone

Ah man ha this might not be good

I would have stopped her when she went to leave

But i didn't 'cause i didn't really think what i'm thinkin' now

I'm still not sure what gone is all about

Is it the kind of gone where she's at her mom's coolin' down?

She'll come around or the kind that says you had your chance

And she ain't comin' back

What kind of gone indeed. There are so many ways to be gone, to be lost, and only one way to be home. There’s the rub. G.K. Chesterton wrote often about this. C.S. Lewis, too. So many ways to leave. “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover.” Maybe the variety is what seduces us. Only one way to stay home. “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone” is a “she’s not really gone” song, and it focuses on our belief about time, our faith in time, our trust in time. How we feel about time, what we believe about time matters, so much so, that we think we can fight it with our minds, control it, manipulate it. “Yesterday’s Wine” is a drink at the bar with time. Time is wine. Time itself gets better with time. It has vintages. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” and “It Should Be Easier Now.” We think we know how the story’s supposed to go. Love and time, however, refuse to conform to our suppositions. We hope and pray that things will be different. That “you will not forget you Country Boy,” but people do forget, or they can’t forget. It’s not supposed to be that way, but so often it is. In “The Sound in Your Mind” Willie feels bad when time heals his wounds. Forgetting hurts more than remembering. Time does heal his wounds, but somehow the healing hurts more than the wound. Healing hurts more than hurting. It’s another “she’s gone” song (they all are, it seems). “Permanently Lonely” fits the bill as well. It’s a “She’s gone but I don’t care” song. Like “I’m Alright” by Jo Dee Messina. “So Much to Do” could also be titled “She’s Gone.” Every song seems to be about different ways to be gone, and different ways to deal with people leaving you. And as I’ve said before, she = time, and time leaves us like a lover. Leaves us in the dust, literally. It has more than fifty ways to leave us mortals. We are Lonely Little Mansions looking for someone to live inside of us for this brief span of life. Renters, really, are what we are looking for, even sub-letters. Home is what we leave, the place where the road starts. It defines the road. The road is everything that is not home. Everything we desire outside of what we have because we can’t desire what we already have, so we can’t desire home. Wanting = lacking, so we can’t lack what we have. The lacking is the vacuum that creates the desire. How do we maintain the pull of the vacuum when there is no emptiness? When the house is full? “Summer of Roses/December Day” fits the seasons category of song. These are mostly about autumn. Seasons help “soften the snowflakes,” help us face the winter snows, the hard times. Seasons resolve the paradox by having change within order. Variety within pattern. Innovation and individuality within form and formula. How can we do the same with home. How can we have the road within the home, or home within in the road. How can still truly be still moving? Like rivers, always changing and always the same at the same time. Finite and infinite at the same time. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed these lines before: “Love’s summer college where the green leaves of knowledge are waiting to fall with the fall.” Love’s summer college indeed. We learn about love from the leaves. They are green, but they know they will be brown soon, and they will fall. So what comes of all our knowledge about love? What’s the point? Do we forget it each time and have to learn it anew each season, with each new season of love? Proust seems to suggest so. We never learn, as the seasons never learn. They can’t anticipate fall. It won’t help. What can they do? “Pretend I Never Happened” suggests one answer. We can pretend we’ll never fall, pretend we never fell. Pretend love will last forever. Is that what art does—pretend! Erase our prior knowledge of love so we can start anew, with youthful idealism. Ignorance is bliss. Just forget about it. Except, of course, that we can’t. “Slow Down Old World” because “I live too fast” and I’m “too blue to cry anymore.” But how can you live slowly on the road? It’s another “still is still moving” song. “My life ain’t mine anymore.” Then whose is it? The woman who left you? Did she take it with her? Hurry slowly. The Taoist way. He’s too blue to take this opportunity to cry. Maybe you don’t need to “exchange the words I love you for goodbye.” Maybe they are the same thing. Maybe “I love you” is just the beginning, the prelude, to goodbye. So despite our summer college knowledge, despite the lessons of the leaves of fall, our “lesson in leaving,” Willie falls in love again (and again and again) in “I’m Falling in Love Again.” “If You Could Only See” what’s goin’ through my mind, you would know you were “Always on my mind.” But since you can’t, you’ll have to take my word for it, my art. Willie’s life has been spent trying to show us what’s going through his mind. Only with his art can he even begin to show us. “If you could see our love directing time.” So love directs time. It is time, but it directs it, too. Like a trinity, time and love and mind, father, son, and only ghost. Three persons, but one entity. “If you only knew the values of the unknowns.” Love = God = unknown. We love what we don’t know. And we love most what we know least, and since God = love, and we know him least, we love him most. He sees the “transitions going on,” but we can’t. “I’d rather You Didn’t Love Me” fits with “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way,” “It Should Be Easier Now,” and “Pretend I Never Happened.” These songs are all about us wishing things were other than they are. “I’d Rather You Didn’t Love Me,” but you do. Things are rarely the way I’d rather them to be. “How can I name the one to blame?” Who’s fault is it? “I suppose it’s the way you believe.” If you don’t love me, then you can’t leave me. That’s one solution. Take your ball and go home. You’d think that would make your heart safe, but “What Can You Do To Me Now” proves that wrong. We are always susceptible to falling in love again. We can always love again; we can always hurt some more. In Buddy, Willie asks, “Don’t let her get the best of me” and don’t let me “start feeling lonely.” “Let’s talk about things as they were, Buddy, before I got mixed up with her.” Yet another “She’s gone” song. Another “how do I deal with her being gone” song. Here he asks a friend to help him cope, to help keep the memories at bay, to help him slay the memories if needed, handcuff them, tame them. In “Remember the Good Times” Willie suggests another way to cope. “Don’t waste a moment unhappy.” Really? From the crying cowboy who feels bad when he feels better? Shouldn’t the advice be just the opposite? Remember the bad times, they yield better songs. No pain, no platinum (records, that is). Forget the good times, no one wants to hear you sing about them. Ironically, listening to sad songs makes you feel better. Listening to happy songs makes you feel envious and bitter. “Wake Me When It’s Over” suggests yet another method for facing time and love. Sleep it off. The truth is, the blues will never get up and leave your bed. They have set up permanent residence at the “Home Motel” on lost love avenue. “Who’ll Buy My Memories” could also be titled “Who’ll Buy My Lost Love.” Who’ll buy what I’ve lost? Willie is essentially selling everything he’s lost. Ironically, he is selling what he doesn’t have. And making a killing at it.

It Always Will Be (2004)—take 2

7/9/2010

I was pretty thorough in my January blog on this album, so I’ll try to focus only on aspects that I ignored last time. In the title track Willie, like Proust, feels that “There is nothing I can do about this loneliness I feel when we’re apart.” I am currently reading about Proust’s response when Albertine leaves him. This problem of loss and longing and loneliness will “always be” a part of the human condition, perhaps the part, the defining aspect, the hallmark. And we will always have an obsession with “always,” because we are one-way creatures trapped within the one-way direction of time. We crave always, anything that savors of always. We just want a taste of eternity. We see glimpses of it. Tom Waits’ “Picture in a Frame” suggests the need to frame time and love within a manageable perspective, the need to bring order to the chaotic whirlwind of love’s emotions. Jimmy Day’s “The Way You See Me” also suggests the need to frame, to imagine love. The way we picture love in our mind seems to matter more than the way it really is. The frame is everything. It’s all in how you frame it. Framing love, framing life, framing time. Time frame. We want time to have a frame, but it doesn’t. Proust uses almost these exact words when he instructs Saint-Loup to fetch Albertine. Tell her I’m doing fine without her. I look great. There’s a current country song out with the same idea. Tell her anything, but don’t tell her the truth: that I’m distraught and look like a mess. The image of the river appears here again, but rivers of tears don’t fit in frames. Paula Nelson’s “Be That As it May” has Willie singing “I’ve been pining on and on about how everything is wrong.” Pining and longing. Living in a world where everything is wrong. Where wrong is the rule and right is the exception. Lukas Neslon’s “You Were It” reminds me of Proust’s Albertine. “You were it, you were the only one.” Always and only are words Willie loves, or loves to hate. Always, only, and once. “I once had a heart, now I have a song.” Once is the anithesis of always. Once is unrepeatable, eternally in the past. Once never lasts. Once is finite and human. A song is more than once, though. Art outlasts life and love and time. Art turns once into always. Art makes an always out of every once. I still don’t care for Sonny Throckmorton’s “Big Booty,” but it is another “She’s Gone” song. Like Albertine, she’s gone and she ain’t comin’ back. “And don’t come back to me a moanin’.” “My Broken Heart Belongs to You” furthers the country theme of brokenness, loss, wrongness, fallenness. We own and possess and cling to our own brokenness. It is an emptiness within a frame. Proust could be writing this song to Albertine. “I feel your presence everywhere…my fears are coming true.” Fears come true in this song, but then “Dreams come true” in the very next track. Only Willie could alternate songs in such a contradictory way. He delights in jerking our hearts around this way. Willie says he “would do anything” to make her dreams come true. Proust promises the same to Albertine. Promise the world, promise always, promise eternity. Is this one of those pretty disguises Paula Nelson writes about: “a promise is a lie with a prettier disguise.” “I know that it seems like I’m full of hot air.” Yes, it does. “But my heart is in the right place, I swear, I swear.” What place could this possibly be? In what place can a heart be that is right? And what are these oaths worth? Lucinda William writes in “Overtime” that “You won’t cross my mind and I’ll get over you overtime.” That’s what Proust hopes about Albertine, but he knows he won’t get over her. No amount of time will be enough. The double irony that time is both too long for us and too short. We can’t love long enough; we can’t sustain love for always. Conversely, perversely, time is too short for us to get over lost love. There’s too much time to stay in love, and not enough to get over it. Willie encapsulates an entire life in “Tired.” A tired life. It wears people down. All they want is rest. But it isn’t to be found in love, in time, in life. “No rest for the weary, you just move on.” But what of “Still is still moving”? How do you apply that Buddhist principle to these lives? In “Love’s the One and Only Thing,” “She tries to give up on love every morning.” And that’s the damndest thing because you can’t even give up on love. It’s a human habit you can’t quit. “A heart’ll do just about anything to feel love.” Proust couldn’t have said it better. “That loneliness, that needing and that wanting, they’re all part of the longing.” Texas is Willie’s Venice. Texas is the only place where his “spirit can be free.” Venice is that place for Proust. I guess “Midnight Rider” is a way to end this album similar to “Still is still moving.” When in doubt, just hit the road and see what happens. It may not be better, but it’ll be different, which is something. Riding night, riding time, body surfing the tides of time. Trying to last a little longer. Maybe ride it out a bit ahead.

Across the Borderline (1993)—take 2

7/8/2010

In January I predicted this album would grow on me. I haven’t revisited it since, so we’ll see if it has. The first thing I notice is how long these songs are. Many are in the 4-6 minute range, which suggests that Willie is pushing, stretching, expanding the traditional country format. The line that strikes me this time from Paul Simon’s “American Tune” is “So far away from home.” Willie is always on the road, always “so far away from home,” and yet the road is his home. He is both far away and near at the same time. Later he sings, “I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.” This is the Augustinian dilemma that we are restless till we find rest in thee. Willie sings, “I can’t help but I wonder what’s gone wrong.” And then, “That’s all I’m tryin’ to get some rest.” The quest for rest. Is that the ironic holy grail of Willie’s wanderlust? We constantly must leave and hit the road so that we can find true rest and peace at the last? Wouldn’t a better way to find this be to stay put, to stay home? The RadioLab episode about pop music has an interview with Aaron Fox, a musicologist who has written a book called Real Country Music. He claims that country music originated with Jimmie Rodgers’ 1927 hit “little old log cabin.” He claims that it was only at this time, when most Americans no longer lived in the country, that living in the country became a nostalgic idea, and thus a new genre of music. If this is true, then Willie, who was born in 1933, was basically born at the birth of country music. He was born into this nostalgia. Raised on the remembrance of things past. Much like Proust in findesiecle France. Fox describes the essence of country music as a longing for the past, a desire for things to be the way they once were. Simpler, purer. He says that Dolly Parton is wildly popular in Africa, as is Don Williams. You can sell out 40k-seat stadiums with a Don Williams concert, and the Africans know all the songs. Robert Krolwhich calls it migration music. Fox says it is the 100-200 year move from rural peasant life to modern urban life. It is a universal longing, and the music speaks cross-culturally because the instruments themselves seem to be crying, and the cry-breaks, the grammar of the vocalizations, reflect that longing, that loss. Bonnie Raitt has a heartbreaking catch in her voice in “Getting Over You.” This T.S. Bruton song is about breaking up, the pieces falling apart. So maybe all the “she’s gone” songs are also symbolic of the land being gone, the rural country. She being the farm, a rural way of life. Willie sings, “There’s a vantage point, and it takes some time to find where you can see how all the pieces fit as you watch ‘em fall apart.” So he’s seeking a perspective that transcends time, that situates this loss within a larger context. The pieces in the puzzle still fall apart, but at least he can see how they once fit together, and that is comforting. “Other people say stop living in the past, but when there’s nothing left, it’s your memory that lasts.” So memory can overcome this loss, can defeat time. Memory and art, which is memory made manifest in paint, sound, or stone. So art helps us get over lost lovers and lost ways of life and the loss of life itself. It helps us face our own mortality, our own finiteness. Not sure what John Hiatt’s “Most Unoriginal Sin” means, but I like it. “This love is a ghost,” elusive, fleeting, unattainable. This song seems to be a testament to the utter Proustian, Augustinian, Gatsbyian restlessness of the human heart. Always longing for greener pastures in the past or the future. This album was produced in 1993, the year I got married. No info in the liner notes about musicians. “Most Unoriginal Sin” seems to suggest that we should throw in the towel and resign ourselves to our human fallibility. But Willie then follows it with Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up,” ever vacillating between hope and hopelessness. “In this proud land…a man whose dreams have all deserted.” Another song about loss. The loss of dreams, the loss of land, the loss of the “place I was born on the lakeside.” This song clocks in at 6:59. Some trippy, Miles Davis-like muted trumpet at the end. Dylan’s “Heartland” is overtly about the loss of the country. Land literally being lost to the banks. “a big gaping hole in my chest where my heart was”; “My American dream fell apart at the seams.” People waking up with land and “a loan that [they] can’t pay.” “Heartland” is fitting. Country music is about broken hearts in the heartland. Loss of love and loss of land. Maybe they are the same thing. John Hiatt’s “Across the Borderline” describes a place “just across the borderline,” a Valhalla, Daisy’s green light, where all your dreams might come true in the future. But “you could lose more than you’ll ever find.” “When you reach the broken promise land, when every dream slips through your hand.” Country music is about a “broken promise land,” about broken dreams. Yet rivers feature prominently in many of these songs. Rivers transcend time and land. They keep flowing when land changes hands. No one owns or can own the rivers because they keep changing. And “hope remains when pride is gone, and it keeps you moving on, calling you across the borderline.” And Willie deftly transitions into a Paul Simon song about the Mississippi delta, a river song, a hopeful song, “Graceland.” “She comes back to tell me she is gone.” Another “she’s gone” song about the loss of love and the loss of land. “Losing love is like a window in your heart. Everybody sees you’re blown apart. Everybody feels the wind blow.” Then Lyle Lovett’s more cynical “Farther Down the Line” wishes a cowboy better luck next time. “The classic contradiction, the unavoidable affliction”: “one day she’ll say she loves you, and the next she’ll be tired of you. And push will always come to shove you on that midnight rodeo.” Proust could have titled his six-volume work “Midnight Rodeo.” You can try to ride the rodeo bull of love, but you will always get thrown in the fickle ring of the human heart. True to form Willie switches back to optimism with his own “Valentine.” Must be Mark O’Connor on fiddle. “You’re the sweetest of all sweethearts.” Willie is Candide. He remains ever hopeful, ever optimistic about love, about his latest Cunnegonde with the “candy heart.” Dylan’s dark “What was it You Wanted” shows what happens when Willie’s sweet valentine turns bitter. The puzzles, the questions, the complexity of love rears its ugly head. “Whatever you wanted slipped out of my mind,” so you weren’t always on my mind. “Are you the same person who was here before?” How can you love people who change, who won’t stand still? “Still is still moving to me,” and I want people to stay the same so I can keep loving them, but I want to keep moving and changing. “Is the scenery changing?” Country music is about our relationship to change. How we want it and don’t want it at the same time. We are caught in the cruel crossfire of wanting and not wanting change. Willie goes positive again with Willie Dixon’s “I Love the Life I Live.” His perfect alternation between positive and negative songs on this album depicts the eternal push and pull of love. Lyle Lovett’s “If I Were the Man You Wanted” build son this idea that it is hard to love people who change. The old saw that women hope men will change and men hope women won’t and both are always wrong but we keep falling for each other anyway. “If the cards could all be laid on the table, then love could be more than a game.” But of course they can’t, and lies and deception lie at the heart of hearts. Daisy can’t be the woman Gatsby wants, and Albertine can’t be the one Proust wants. I see now how the dark “She’s Not for You” fits into the black and white alternating nature of this album. “Sometimes she lies” and sometimes we all lie in love. We have to. Willie ends with the rousing, screw-it-all (literally and figuratively) “Still is Still Moving to Me.” “If that’s what it takes to be free,” Willie will do it. He can be moving or still. Either way he’s moving. Still is still moving means that stillness keeps moving, stillness continues to move. And this album keeps moving with each listen. It moves into my untenable top ten. It rewards repeated listening. I can sense depth and richness that will be revealed in future listens. I can’t hear that richness yet, but I hear the potential richness, the latent richness. Not sure how that’s possible. It’s like hearing into the future. On a related note, Proust writes about places (Paris and Venice), and about the longing for places past and future. He desries place the way place is desired in country music. And he writes about trains and planes, the traveling between times and places. The longing of travel and speed and motion. Proust, who stayed in bed and never moved, was still moving in his mind, ranging widely.

Yesterday's Wine (1971)--take 2

7/7/2010

This may be Willie’s most questioning album. He begins by asking, “Where’s the Show?” He is asking God to explain his role on earth, on the world’s stage. He asks for “last-minute instructions” before being born. He is asking for the purpose and meaning of life. “In God’s Eyes” seems to be God’s answer to Willie’s questions about how to live. “Never think evil thoughts of anyone. It’s just as wrong to think as to say. For a thought is but a word that’s unspoken. In God’s eyes he sees it this way.” This is the sermon on the mount, the spirit over the letter of the law. I gave several of these songs 3 stars in January, but I find myself giving them 5 stars in July. Perhaps having heard so many poorly produced albums over the past six months, I appreciate even more the sparseness of this early album. In “Family Bible” Willie admits the Buddhist truth that life is suffering, and in this album he looks to God more than in any other of his non-gospel albums. He admits the importance of the God-like perspective in life. “It’s Not for Me to Understand” tells a touching story of a little blind boy standing alone on a corner. Willie prays to God and asks, “Why must this be?” How can a good God allow such evil? Voltaire’s question. God responds to Willie as he responds to Job. “It’ not for you to reason why. You, too, are blind without my eyes.” Now Willie prays, “Thy will be done.” He accepts God’s providence. The medley on track 5—“These are Difficult Times” & “Remember the Good Times”—offers a perfect example of the duality in Willie’s philosophy. He laments the difficult times, he sings the blues, but then he looks on the sunny side, remembers the good times, and sees that all is for the best. He does both on the same album, and, in this case, within the same song. This is Willie’s Remembrance of Things Past. I discuss “Summer of Roses” at length in my January blog, but suffice it to say here that it furthers Willie’s theme of time and seasons. Ditto with “December Day” and “Yesterday’s Wine.” Interestingly, in “December Day” Willie refers to “September wine.” Is that the same as “Yesterday’s wine?” “The ending that won’t go away” echoes through these songs as Willie’s memories race through his mind. In “Yesterday’s Wine” Willie personifies time and memory. He addresses his memory like an old friend: “Fancy meeting you here. The last time I saw you was outside of Houston. Sit down and let me buy you a beer.” This image of Willie sitting down to have a beer with his past may be the most apt. This seems to best describe his relationship with time, with love, with the past, with his history, his mortality. Reminds me of Ingmar Bergman playing chess with death in the Seventh Seal. Not sure exactly what he means by “Aging like time, we’re yesterday’s wine.” Who’s we? And how does time age? We age within the perspective of time, but how can time itself age? How can death die? Also not sure how “Me and Paul” fits in this album. The song has become so famous on its own that it is uniquely difficult to understand and hear it in the context of this album. I’m afraid there is no way to go back and hear it properly after so many listenings to so many other versions on other albums and in other live performances. “Goin’ Home” gets better with each listen. “The closer I get to my home, Lord, the more I want to be there.” Does he mean death? A longing for death in 1971? And he’s still going strong in 2010? Willie seems to be imaging his own funeral, and the tears shed for him and his wild ways, his reckless life. He reminds me of Tom Sawyer attending his own funeral. If Willie had died young, as he probably thought he would, this song would be prophetic. As it is, he seems to have proved others and himself wrong. It is fitting, though, that in 1971 Willie was looking ahead, trying to look into the future. He’s always looking back and looking forward, never content to be in the present. Or always wanting to appreciate and enjoy the present more by leaping ahead or harkening back to get a richer, wider perspective on each moment. Seeking broader contexts and vistas within which to appreciate the scope and depth of experience. “There’s a mixture of teardrops and flowers, crying and talking for hours about how wild that I was and if I’d listened to them I wouldn’t be there.” “Teardrops and flowers” sums up the duality in Willie’s music perfectly. He covets and craves both with equal vigor. A bouquet of teardrops and flowers. “Lord, thanks for the ride. I got a feelin’ inside that I know you. And if you see your way, you’re welcome to stay ‘cause I’m gonna need you.” Willie needs God more in this album than in any other except maybe “Spirit.” He is more vulnerable, more humble. I rated this album highly in January, but not highly enough. I am now convinced that it is in his tenable top ten, maybe top 5.

Country Favorites: Willie Nelson Style—take 2

Listened to this again on the way back from a day of shopping in Rockland, Maine. Still don’t know anything about the personnel on this album, but still like it. A very pleasant, solid album. Nothing fancy, unusual, or surprising on this album, but it remains pleasingly consistent and straightforward. In “Columbus Stockade Blues” Willie lives in Georgia but longs for Tennessee. His “friends have turned their backs on me.” It’s another “she’s gone” song, and another “don’t let the door hit you on the way out because I don’t care that you’re gone” song. He sings, “go and leave me if you wish to, never let me cross your mind. In your heart you love another. Leave me, little darlin’, I don’t mind.” It’s funny to here Mr. “always on my mind” sing “I don’t mind.” This perfectly exemplifies Willie’s paradoxical, dual nature. Love is always on his mind, and yet he never minds if someone leaves him. He always minds, and yet he never minds. And he always does both at the same time. Always and never are the yin and yang of Willie’s world. It’s crazy to believe in always, and it’s crazy not to. You’re crazy if you do and crazy if you don’t. So Willie does both. The speed of the fiddle and the vocals thrill me on every listen of this opening track. I can’t think of another album where Willie sings this fast. “Season’s of My Heart” appears only here and on The Early Years: The Complete Liberty Recordings. I comment extensively on the lyrics in my blog for that disc, but I think I prefer this less varnished version to the one from 1963. The Proustian implications of “I’d Trade All of My Tomorrows (For Just One Yesterday)” are obvious. “My Window Faces the South” fits with Willie’s hakuna matata, look on the sunny side philosophy. “I’m never frownin’ or down in the mouth.” This from the world’s bluest man. Who else could be so sincerely and relentlessly optimistic and blue at the same time? Willie sings both kinds of songs with equal conviction. How can this be? The cryin’ cowboy smiles on this song, and the fiddle carries me away in a Panglossian cloud of optimism. “Go on Home” appears only here. Willie declares, “I love only you.” Only and always, two of Willie’s favorite words. He also swears that he loves his pretty little “Fraulein.” “I loved her and left her, now I can’t forget her.” It’s a “he’s gone” song. A love’em and leave’em song. But he left her and misses her. He can’t forget her. As so often happens, his memories come back to haunt him. “When my memories wander away over yonder to the sweetheart that I left behind. In a moment of glory a face comes before me.” Remembrance of things past. The sheer speed of “San Antonio Rose” thrills. I wish I knew who was on fiddle. “I Love You Because” appears only here and on 2007’s “Last of the Breed,” and I’m not sure why I didn’t comment on it in my February blog on that album. “I know your love will always see me through. I love you for the way you never doubt me.” There’s that word “always” again. She never doubts him, and he never doubts that her love will “always” be with him. This version of “Don’t You Ever Get Tired (of Hurting Me)” still can’t hang with George Jones’s classic performance, but it’s good to hear Willie make his own interpretation, and it is important to note the significance of Willie’s song selection. When Willie picks a song to record, it tells you something. The lyrics resonate with his entire oeuvre. “Home in San Antone” may be the fastest song yet. Willie says “Wade play” before the fiddle solo on this album, so this must be Wade Ray. Proust could have written “Everyday you love me less, each day I love you more” about Albertine. Willie’s got “Heartaches by the number and troubles by the score.” What happened to his south facing window? What happened to looking on the sunny side? And if “the day that I stop counting, that’s the day my world will end,” then Willie seems to be saying that counting heartaches is what he lives for. Tears are his food and drink. They sustain him. He can’t live without tears, without a “love that [he] can’t win.” Winning = death. Winning = losing. In “Making Believe” Willie insists that he’ll “keep loving you.” He will always be faithful, if only in his mind. He will make believe if he has to. Not only is she “always on [his] mind” when he’s unfaithful, but she’s “always on [his] mind” when she’s unfaithful. He keeps both parties faithful in his mind. “I’ll always dream, but I’ll never own you” reminds me of Proust’s volume 5, The Captive. The desire to own and possess, which kills love. The dream, the mind, is stronger than reality. And this album gets better with each listen. It goes nicely with Willie’s latest release, Country Music (2010). Both albums are “Willie Nelson Style,” whatever that is. It’s like saying “Beethoven style.”

Shotgun Willie (1973)—take 2

7/5/2010

Shotgun Willie (1973)—take 2

I can’t believe how short my January blog for this album was. I like the studio version of “Whiskey River” better this time around. The slowness doesn’t bother me as much. In fact, it makes me like it better. It makes the torture of her memory more torturous. The title track remains one of my favorites. I wish Willie did more with horn sections. Willie has his road band with him for this album. “Sad Songs and Waltzes” only appears here and on the 2006 “Songbird” album. Willie needs to play and record this song more often.

“A true song as real as my tears.” For Willie, there’s nothing truer than tears. As Buddha says, life is suffering. Life is tears. This is also another “she’s gone” song. “I’d like to get even with you ‘cause you’re leavin’.” Willie laments that “sad songs and waltzes aren’t sellin’ this year,” but of course he’s been selling them for 40 years since this album came out. I rated many of these songs lower in January than I would rate them now. “Again the local memory comes around…rids the house of all good news, then sets out my cryin’ shoes.” Memories haunts Willie, make him cry, give him the blues, “lets loneliness back in.” To Willie, memory is personified, real, physical. It has a will and a mind of its own. “I once had a way with the women till one got away with my heart.” Sounds like Proust again. Interesting that Willie asserts, “My life ain’t mine anymore.” Whose is it? Willie seems like such an individual, a rebel, and yet here he claims to be a slave to fate, to time, to love. He wants the world to slow down, so he slows down his songs, the meter, the beat, to make time adjust to him rather than the othert way around. Maybe that’s what art does. It freezes time, as in the Grecian Urn,” tames it, domesticates it, makes it seem manageable, if only for the length of the song or painting or novel. Art slows time down, makes it orderly, limits it, the way we often wish we could but never can in real life. Art frames life and time and love. “Stay All Night (Stay a Little Longer)” this time around reminds me of “Local Memory.” The local memory hangs around longer than Willie wants, but here he’s begging someone to stay longer. “Devil in a Sleeping Bag” only appears on this album. It is very autobiographical, mentioning “Connie and the kids” and “Kris and Rita” and how “travelin’ on the road is such a drag.” Willie loves and hates the road. Next he sings, “It’s your heart; I can’t tell you what to do, but She’s Not for You” and “I’m the only one who would let her act this way.” Here he laments a lover who is always looking for “greener pastures.” Sounds like a field calling a pasture green. “She’s not for you” and neither is Willie, because he’s always looking for the next new thing. In Cindy Walker’s “Bubbles in My Beer” “Scenes from the past rise before me…visions of someone who loved me bring a lone silent tear to my eye.” “I’m seeing the road that I traveled, a road filled with heartaches and tears, and I’m seeing the past that I’ve wasted watching the bubbles in my beer.” Tears and time. “You look like the devil when you’re crying” but you “have a great big smile for everybody.” Not sure who Leon Russell is talking about, but I read somewhere that Paul English inspired this song. And then there’s “So Much to Do since you’re gone, too much to do all alone.” Too much life to live, too much time to pass, “without you.” Too much time to go it alone. In “A Song For You” Willie sings “and I know your image of me is what I hope to be. I’ve treated you unkindly but, darlin’, can’t you see. There’s no one more important to me, so darlin’ can’t you please see through me.” Leon Russell’’s lyrics describe Willie perfectly. Willie wants to be the platonic image you have of him. He wants you to know you were always on his mind. He wants you to see through the physical, tangible, fallible Willie to the ghost, the memory of “when we were together,” beyond “space and time,” the transcendent, beatific, bodhisattva Willie. In other words (Floyd Tillman’s), “I gotta have something I ain’t got. I gotta have some lovin’ and I need a lot. I gotta have something to drive away these blues.” Wanting what we don’t have is Proust’s definition of love. As soon as we have it, though, it isn’t something we don’t have, so we don’t want it anymore. How can we want something we have, because the definition of want is lack. If loving is longing and wanting and desiring, how can it continue if we have what we want? This is the puzzle of love. To continue to want what we have. Willie’s “so ashamed” of himself for still loving her after she’s gone, for still wanting what he can’t have, and yet he can’t help it. In Leon Russell’s “My Cricket and Me,” he denies that he’s crying. “Oh no, I’m not crying. These ain’t tears in my eyes. I’m so happy, I’m dying of laughter…We’re not lonesome, my cricket and me.” Willie’s the queen of denial, denying love, and time, and tears. I’ve blogged elsewhere about Willie’s battle with time in “Both Ends of the Candle.” “Save Your Tears” only shows up here and on the demo sessions. Willie needs to sing and record this more often. Jimmy Day’s “I Drank Our Precious Love Away” appears only here.

Phases and Stages (1974)—take 2

7/3/2010

Phases and Stages (1974)—take 2

I listened to this in bed Saturday morning. My son Willie got sick in the night, so we brought him into our room for the night. He woke up and read books while I listened to the eleven tracks from the original album and re-read the extensive liner notes included with this deluxe edition of The Complete Atlantic Recordings. I’m reminded that Willie turned 40 in 1973, just as I turned 40 in 2010. This album is almost as old as I am now, and Willie is almost 80. “Walkin’” contains some of my favorite Willie Nelson lines. “After carefully considering the whole situation, and I stand with my back to the wall…” Willie is the most careful cowboy who ever lived. And as painfully honest as he is in his songs, he admits here that “I’ve been lyin’ to me all along.” Love will do that to you. It’s another “She’s Gone” song, another walkin’ away song, another “On the Road Again” song. Don’t run, don’t hide, don’t apologize, just walk calmly away if you can in a very reasonable manner. “Pretend I Never Happened” features Willie’s theme of defeating memories by erasing them, by denying them. “Erase me from your mind. You will not want to remember any love as cold as mine.” Willie is a manager of memories. What I’m also noticing, though, is that for Willie, love is all in the head. If you erase the memories of love from your head, you’re fine. But for most people, love resides in the heart, and it cannot so easily be erased by simply wiping the hard drive of the mind clean. So much residue remains. It’s in the blood, and how do you erase blood, erase emotions? Even if you could erase them, how would you even find them all, where would you locate them? Johnny Gimble’s fiddle on “Sister’s Coming Home” and elsewhere on these three albums rivals (and sometimes outshines) Willie’s vocals. In “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling In Love Again,” Willie asks the eternally unanswerable questions about love. “I may be makin’ mistakes again, but if I lose or win, how will I know?” How can we ever know where we stand with love? It’s the very same question Proust wrestles with for 6 volumes. I am reading volume 5, which contains sections called “The Fugitive” and the “The Captive.” Love seems to hold us hostage, and not the other way around. It calls the shots. It leaves us asking questions, which is why so many of Willie’s songs have that questioning, introspective tone. And the questions are usually about why she left. This whole album is about leaving. In “Bloody Mary Morning” “She left me without warning” and now “Forgetting her [is] the nature of my flight.” In “No Love Around” she taped a note to the door, a “Dear Willie” note. She is gone and love is gone. “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone” is the quintessential “She’s Gone” song. Willie can’t believe it. “What did I do that was so wrong?” “There’s just too many unanswered questions.” There always is. So many of his songs are about mistakes, about what went wrong, and about how to deal with the consequences. “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way…you’re supposed to know that I love you, but it don’t matter anyway if I can’t be there to control you.” Control is something we want but cannot have in love. Control is the opposite of love, and yet we desire it almost as much (or more) than love itself. Proust writes, “We love only what we do not fully possess” (133). In other words, we love only what we cannot fully control, so if we got what we thought we desired, complete control, we would lose love. “Heaven and Hell” fits with the questioning nature of this album. How will I know if it’s heaven or hell? How can I tell? Love feels like both. I have written about “Pick Up the Tempo” elsewhere, but suffice it to say here that it delves into the paradoxical nature of time. I like the fiddle on track 12, an alternate take of “Washing the Dishes.” Mickey’s harmonica spices up track 13, an alternate take of “Sister’s Coming Home.” The otherwise detailed liner notes don’t say who is on fiddle on these alternate takes, but I’m guessing it’s Gimble again. I was also struck last night, reading Moby Dick, the “Cetology” chapter, that Melville thought his massive novel, some say the Greatest of the Great American Novels, was just a draft of a draft. He said it would never be complete, could never be complete. The same holds true for Proust. The last 2 volumes weren’t completed till after his death, though he raced against time to complete them. Nothing true can be said clearly about God, and nothing clear can be truly. Anything that pretended to be complete could not be true love because it would not be free enough, expansive enough. Love eludes closure, abhors satisfaction, like those maddeningly unresolved scales in Chinese opera. Men and women desire each other because they desire a return to wholeness, to unity, just as they desire a return to God, to find rest for their restlessness. In the same way, music, like Stravinsky’s, builds tension and never resolves it, teasing, torturing our ears. Our ears want satisfaction, closure, resolution. Willie withholds it as well by singing behind the beat. Syncopation is coming down on the up beat. In a way we crave surprise, we crave not getting what we crave. We are satisfied by dissatisfaction. When Willie slows down the tempo of “Pick Up the Tempo” on the alternate take (track 20), my mind and ears are inexplicably pleased.

Live at the Texas Opry House (1974)—take 2

7/2/2010

Live at the Texas Opry House (1974)—take 2

Somehow I have neglected to include The Complete Atlantic Sessions in my Untenable Top Ten. Clearly every true Willie fan must own this three-disc set. The medley from Set 1 on Sunday makes my untenable top ten list of songs. Johnny Gimble is the best part of this album. I can’t get enough of his fiddle. And Mickey’s harmonica is as good as it gets as well. We listened to this as we drove the last hour from Augusta to Northport.

Today we also listened to four versions of “Opportunity to Cry.” I prefer the early demo version, but Kate likes the gospel version on “Pancho and Lefty.” We actually listened to each version twice. The live version from Panther Hall is my least favorite, though I love that album, and the IRS tapes version is 2nd or 3rd on my list.

The Sound in Your Mind (1976)—take 2

7/1/2010

The Sound in Your Mind (1976)—take 2

This album still makes my untenable top ten. I listened to it on day one of our 24-hour car ride to Maine. I stand by my January 8th blog about this one. This version of “That Lucky Old Sun” gets better with time. Willie envies the Sun because it isn’t bound by time. Think about it. The sun is lucky because it is time itself. It determines the time of day. It has nothing to do but “roll around heaven all day.” It has no troubles because all of our mortal troubles revolve around the fact that we revolve around the Sun and thus are victims of time’s unceasing march. The Sun at the center feels none of these limitations. Willie wants to feel like that. He wants to feel free of time like the Sun. And his music on this album has that feeling. It seems to break free of time in a lazy, “roll around heaven all day” kind of way. Willie seems to triumph over time in “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve got the Time.” He owns time. In a “Penny for Your Thoughts” Willie sings, “Memories are haunting you, and they’re making you feel blue…are you thinking of the past and a love that didn’t last…I hope and pray that some tomorrow I can take his place.” Here Willie owns thoughts. He is buying time and mind. Willie hopes and prays about the future while comforting someone who is haunted by the past. In so many of his songs memories haunt, stalk, and generally hang around. In “The Healing Hands of Time” these memories heal as they haunt. This strikes me as a good way to describe Willie’s music: a haunted healing, or healing through haunting. “They’re working while I’m missing you…soon they’ll be dismissing you from this heart of mine…they’ll lead me safely through the night, and I’ll follow as though blind, my future tightly clutched within those healing hands of time. And they let me close my eyes just then…soon they’ll let me sleep again…and I’ll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time” Time works hard to help Willie get over painful memories, and yet time is memory, so the disease is also the cure. Time helps Willie get through the night, and yet the night is time. Willie heads into the future blind. His future is clutched tightly to time, and yet he clings tightly to time. So he is clinging tightly to his future. “Thanks Again” has that wry quality found in “Funny How Time Slips Away.” “Thanks for what little love you gave to me.” In other words, thank you very little, or thanks for nothing, or thanks for the painful memories. And yet with Willie, his irony isn’t ironic. He really is thankful. He means what he says and the opposite of what he says. He gets to have it both ways, and thus can be ironic without being cynical. He is utterly sincere and utterly ironic at the same time. Who else can pull that off? “I’m not sorry for giving all my love to you.” Willie gets to have his regrets and not have them, too. “My reason for existing is now revealed: I’m just here to show the world how blue a man can feel.” “I’d Have to be Crazy” may be Willie’s oddest song. “I’d have to be weird to grow me a beard just to see what the rednecks would do.” An interestingly autobiographical line revealing Willie’s delight in pushing buttons and boundaries even with his own audience. “Now I don’t intend to, but should there come a day when I say that I don’t love you, you can lock me away…I’d have to be crazy to fall out of love with you.” Clearly Willie is crazy because he fell out of love with lots of people after 1976, and he was crazy to ever think he wouldn’t, crazy to promise to love anyone forever. And yet time does that to people. Time drives us crazy. It’s funny that way. Which makes the medley at the end of this album so poignant with both “Funny How Time Slips Away” and “Crazy.” Though I love the hymn “amazing Grace,” this is the least interesting track on the album. I am struck this time around by the phrase “how sweet the sound,” which comes right before the “sound in your mind.” “The sound of a love that I lost one day.” It’s a bittersweet sound. Only Willie can feel bad because he’s feeling better. “It’s a little like rain, but it’s a lot like a sunny day.” “It’s a little too late to start thinking about starting all over…I can’t take another slam in the mind…but remember my love is the sound that you hear in your mind.” Being too late is an ongoing theme in Willie’s music. He’s so late he’s on time; he sings so far behind the beat he’s in front of it. Running around like the lucky old Sun “Laughing at half of the memories…you’re not hard to remember.” This time around I have to give the nod to the 1974 live version of the Funny/Crazy/Night medley, but this one is a close second. Mickey’s harmonica performance stands out on this album.