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.