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.