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.