Lost Highway (2009)

At first I was disappointed to discover this was a compilation and not an album of new material. And then I was doubly disappointed because I couldn’t even tell what kind of compilation it was. It isn’t all duets, it isn’t all new tunes or old tunes. What ties these together? But then it hit me. For Willie, a new compilation, a new arrangement of tunes, can be just as original, just as surprising, just as pleasing as an album of new material. Why? Because Willie’s music is so diverse, so expansive, with genres, band members, instruments, and duet partners, that, to use a wine analogy, the pairings become as important as the songs themselves. Just as the quality of wine changes depending on the food it is paired with, so, too, apt pairings of Willie’s songs can bring out qualities in an entire album that are greater than the individual parts.

“Back To Earth” is new to me, and this is a powerful version.

“The Harder They Come” has a gospel back-up chorus unlike anything I’ve heard accompanying Willie before. I thought I didn’t like the reggae Countryman album, but if there are more songs like this, I’ll need to reassess my earlier judgment.

If Jefferson is the American Sphinx in politics, Willie is a musical sphinx. He rises like Jefferson, like Buddha, like Emerson, like genius, above contradiction. He seems to strike a tolerant pose in “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other,” which would likely upset Toby Keith and the “Beer For My Horses” crew (unless this song is tongue in cheek). And yet, he follows that song immediately with “Ain’t Goin’ Down on Brokeback Mountain,” which seems to strike a more homophobic stance toward queers (unless this song is tongue in cheek). How can you tell? What you can tell for certain, though, is that he Willie is delighting in deliberately baffling us with paradoxes when he boldly places them right next to each other.

The duets with Ray Price showcase Price’s vocals and make clear his influence on Willie’s own vocal style. It seems to be a collection of songs from the last ten years, mostly duets, mostly traditional country. The harmonica (must be Raphael), steel (Jimmy Day?), and fiddle (Johnny Gimble?) feature prominently on most tracks.

“Both Sides of Goodbye” from the Chip Moman Sessions (need to find this album) is one of Willie’s more credible heartbreak songs. “I’ve loved and been loved but not at the same time.” Ha! Gets at that sphinx-like, transcendental, paradoxical being two things simultaneously (on the road and home) that seems to sum up Willie’s shtick. The live version of “Crazy” with Diana Krall and Elvis Costello is not my favorite, but it is interesting and bears further listening.

All in all, this pairing of songs intrigued me and exceeded my expectations. I will return to it often. There are no duds. And though I will appreciate these songs further when I listen to them on their original albums (If I haven’t already), the combinations here release unique sparks that justify the compilation.

Me and the Drummer (2000)

I have also seen a version of this album called Tales Out of Luck. ITUNES lists the date of these songs as 1998, but the CD I have says 2000. A reviewer from Amazon writes:

After his minimalist experimentation with Canadian producer Daniel Lanois on Teatro and the somber and introspective Spirit, Willie and company are back to basics…Willie's strength has always been…his ability to seamlessly fuse his jazz oriented vocal styling with simple, understated country sensibilities. His unique phrasing and the way his vocals lag behind the beat provide the listener with the perspective that he is singing to you and you alone.

I thought that was well put. Spirit and Teatro are two of my top ten albums, and now I am prepared to add this to that list as well, which makes 1996-2000 a sweet spot in Willie’s career when his voice has that aged character but has not started to lose some of its oomph (as seen on Two Men With The Blues and American Classic, both recorded eight to nine years later). The adjectives somber, introspective, and wistful seem apt, and “jazz-oriented vocal styling” fused with “understated country sensibilities” strikes me as a compact way of describing Willie’s distinctive sound.

It took me awhile to realize why Jimmy Day’s steel sounded so good on this album. The Offenders must be the name of Willie’s pre-Raphael band (like pre-Raphaelite); that is, his pre-Mickey Raphael band. The lack of that prominent harmonica voice allows the steel to take center stage. This may be Willie’s best pure country album. With Jimmy Day’s steel and Johnny Gimble’s fiddle, and Willie’s voice still strong, this set of Willie’s classic early tunes makes my top ten. Almost every song relates to his themes of time, love, memory, and mind. I have written about many of these same songs in earlier blogs, but “I Let My Mind Wander” and “No Tomorrow in Sight” each could make a case for his definitive philosophical statement.

The dice in the hollow spine of the CD case adds a nice touch to these Tales Out of Luck, recorded at Willie’s Pedernales studio.

Marcel Proust could have written these lines, or written every song Willie ever wrote:

I let my mind wander

And what did it do?

It just kept right on goin'

Until it got back to you…

Can't trust it one minute

It's worse than a child

Disobeys without conscience

It's drivin' me wild…

Try to keep my mind busy

On thoughts of today

But invariably memories

Seem to lure it away

My lonely heart wonders

If there'll ever come a day

When I can be happy

But I can't see no way

'Cause I let my mind wander

Willie wonders about love, but his mind wanders while he is wondering. He can’t control his own mind any more than he can control time or love. Even if mind and memory can control time and love, it is to no avail because we can’t control our own minds; they wander like disobedient children. This version of “I Let My Mind Wander” may make my top ten WN songs if I ever create such a list.

The lyrics to “Something to Think About” plumb the depths of Willie’s meta-obsession with thinking about thinking:

You’re wondering just what I’ll do

Now that it’s over and done

Well that’s something to think about

And I’ve already begun

Willie lets his mind wander, but his lover is wondering, too. He’s thinking about what she’s wondering about.

In “No Tomorrow in Sight” Willie sings:

I hope we can salvage a few memories

To carry us through the long nights

The clock’s striking midnight, yesterday’s gone

And there’s no tomorrow in sight

It’s like “Yesterday’s Wine.” Memories are our salvation. We are somehow estranged from both yesterday and tomorrow, so we must live in the eternal present of our own memories.

In “A Moment Isn’t Very Long” he sings:

For a moment I almost forgot you

But a moment isn’t very long.

So he wants to extend the amount of time that he can forget. He wants to expand his forgetfulness. But his moment of forgetfulness doesn’t last long, and then he remembers. Time either moves too fast or too slow, but never just right, never just as we would want it to. Do we even know how we would want time to flow? Could we ever be at home in time at any speed? 78, 33, 45? 4-4? As Dylan says, Time Out of Mind.

Forgiving you was easy

But forgetting seems to take the longest time

I just keep thinking and your memory is forever on my mind

You were always on my mind (though you thought I had forgotten about you). And yet forgetting you has taken me so long. I keep thinking about you; your memory is always on my mind. I am so thoughtless, when I forget you, and yet you fill my thoughts.

In “What a Way to Live” Willie sings:

A lonely man with lonely time to kill…

The paths my memory takes

Just make my poor heart ache

I think of her, I guess I always will

On one hand, I’m trying to remember better so she’ll know she is always on my mind (so I won’t hurt her). On the other hand, I’m trying to forget her faster so she won’t know I ever cared about her (and she won’t be able to hurt me any more). We simply desire to control time, to speed over the bad parts and slow down for the good parts. And yet we can’t control the tempo, we can’t TIVO life. We must dance to whatever tempo time sets for us.

Two Men With the Blues (2008)

Fast forward thirty years from Stardust (1978) to Two Men with the Blues (2008), and it becomes apparent that Willie’s voice is not what it once was. Vocal-wise, these versions of “Stardust,” “Georgia on My Mind,” and “Nightlife” pale in comparison to numerous earlier versions. But Willie continues to impress with his audacity and openness to playing Hank Williams’ “My Bucket’s Got a Hole In It” live with Wynton Marsalis. Mickey Raphael goes toe to toe with Wynton on this one: horn versus harmonica. It’s hard for me to take Willie seriously singing the blues. Buddha doesn’t do the blues. Buddha escapes suffering and transcends it. Blues singers embrace it, wallow in it, glory in it, revel in it. Buddhism and the blues. That sounds like a book that needs to be written. It reminds me of the Gupta era literature and how there isn’t a Hindu tradition of tragedy. With reincarnation nothing can be tragic because nothing is irrevocable.

All of this reminds me of Lord Byron’s poem “They Say That Hope is Happiness”:

They say that Hope is happiness;

But genuine Love must prize the past,

And Memory wakes the thoughts that bless:

They rose the first - they set the last;

And all that Memory loves the most

Was once our only Hope to be,

And all that Hope adored and lost

Hath melted into Memory.

Alas it is delusion all:

The future cheats us from afar,

Nor can we be what we recall,

Nor dare we think on what we are.

So much of Willie’s music is melting into memory. The melancholy notion “Nor can we be what we recall.” But perhaps these lines capture Willie’s music best:

They say that Hope is happiness;

But genuine Love must prize the past

Genuine, ideal love can only be in the past, like Gatsby’s Daisy. Vocals aside, this album will bear many future listenings because of the instrumental work of the harmonica, trumpet, piano, and guitar.

Heidegger, in his 1924 lecture “The Concept of Time,” said that “time has no body but is merely a medium in which events take place” (paraphrased by David Denby in The New Yorker 2/1/2010, page 83). A Romanian director plays with time the way Willie does.

I’m on my third or fourth listen today, and I’m still enjoying it. I think it gets better with each listen.

Stardust (1978)

I’ve been putting this one off for awhile, but I just can’t hold out any longer. I think it is a lock for my top ten, but now is the time to see if it lives up to my own hype. Willie has his standard road band with him (Bobbie, Paul, Mickey, Bee, and Jody). What’s different is the producer: Booker T. Jones. The liner notes are revealing. How could Booker T. and Willie possibly have these same songs in common? How could these songs be Willie’s “favorite all-time songs”? Really? But that says it all. A mix of pop, jazz, and country. Willie has always been open to them all. In fact, in the liner notes Willlie claims that “Moonlight in Vermont” is his “favorite song of all time.” Hyperbole? Perhaps, but still. What kind of outlaw says this? This album may feature Mickey Raphael’s harmonica more prominently than any other of Willie’s albums. Booker T. somehow showcases the harmonica and brings it out as prominently as the vocals.

It’s as slow as any of Willie’s albums, but Booker T’s organ and the R&B drums and bass give this album a bouncier rhythmic feel than Willie’s other albums. In 1978, too, Willie’s voice seems to be in its prime. Willie’s guitar picking is so clean and precise. Even the strings don’t seem out of place on this album. I think it’s the harmonica, though. This has to be the highlight of Mickey Raphael’s career. This album is perfect like Gatsby, like a sonnet. Every word, every line, every rhyme fits just so. How would you begin to compare or rank songs on this album? They are all of a piece. This album has a sense of wholeness and completeness. Maybe it’s because Willie loves these songs so much, because he believes them so much, because he respects them so much, because he has known them so well and for so long. Georgia’s on his mind, but so is Vermont. Willie reconciles Texas and New England just as he reconciles jazz, pop, blues, country, and R & B. In “Unchained Melody,” Willie returns to his Proustian theme: “Time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much.” Willie sings so slowly, and sings so slowly about the slowness of time. Unchained from the beat, breaking meter. Unchained from home, on the road. “September Song” is another one of Willie’s seasonal songs. Perhaps the most melancholy on this melancholy album. For a hakuna matata philosopher, Willie surprisingly likes autumn best. He may be the happiest melancholic to ever live. A true nightingale. The drums flutter like the wings of a bird. This song feels so delicate, so fragile, it could almost break. “The days dwindle down to a precious few” as the Harmonica flutters on the edge of dissolving, gasping for life. “And these few precious days I’ll spend with you.” These Precious Days could be the title of Willie’s biography. So precious he tries to savor them, make them last longer, like notes, like the beat. “On the Sunny Side of the Street” skips and flits along, and yet it maintains an undercurrent of nostalgia. The harmonica makes sure of that. You can’t play a sad song on a banjo, but you can’t play a purely happy song on the harmonica, either. A harmonica cries no matter what you do. You can try to cry happy tears, but it cries nonetheless. Willie says he loves “Moonlight in Vermont” because it is all prose and doesn’t rhyme. He calls it “the prettiest melody I’ve ever heard.” Willie warbles along with the harmonica on this song. I’m studying the romantic era in European Studies right now with juniors at Asheville School—Beethoven, Keats, Turner, Shelley (Frankenstein). This album has that sublime romantic quality. “My mind’s more at ease…but why stir up memories.” On one hand, Willie has made a career of stirring up memories. Worrying them, disturbing them, like a sleeping dog that should be let alone. On the other hand, he wants to keep his mind at ease, and running and drinking are good ways to keep memories at bay. To numb them or outrun them. Willie’s sort of like the girls who play hard to get and run away from the boys, but they are looking over their shoulders secretly hoping they’ll get caught. Willie tries to numb and/or outrun his memories, but he secretly hopes they’ll catch up with him in his home motel. The fact that Willie has always loved reggae kills me. As much as I dislike his reggae album, Countryman, I respect his total openness to genres. “I Can See Clearly Now” works. I think it is worthy of the other ten that made the cut in 1978. The reference to blue skies would have been a neat connection to “Blue Skies.” Mickey Raphael goes to town on this track. The drums and bass bounce. It may be a bit too trippy and meandering. It might have broken the consistency of the mood of the original album. Probably a smart move to leave it out, but I’m glad they re-discovered it. It has a “Freebird”-esque rocking finale. “Scarlet Ribbon,” from the bonus tracks, clearly is not up to the level of the perfect ten that made the final cut for the album. Nevertheless, I feel very confident in saying now, just a little over a month into my year-long journey, that no album will bump Stardust from Willie’s top ten. No way.

Country Willie: His Own Songs (1965)

Willie kick’s off his Proustian ramblings with “I live ‘One Day at a Time,’ I dream one dream at a time. Yesterday’s dead and tomorrow is blind.” But is it true? Isn’t Willie constantly thinking about the past and lost time? Doesn’t he dwell on the past? “Don’t ask me how long I plan to stay. It never crossed my mind.” Really? Doesn’t it cross his mind all the time? Isn’t every one of his songs about how often and how intensely it crosses his mind? “[A sparrow] searching for a patch of sunlight, so am I. I wish I didn’t have to follow. And perhaps I won’t in time.” Willie is that sparrow searching for a patch of sunlight, and in time he continues to follow it. Like Gatsby, Willie “beat[s] on, [like] boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Fighting the current of time, kayaking upstream at times, at other times drifting, giving in.

Willie’s love is indeed peculiar:

It would be a comfort just to know that you never doubt me

Even though I give you cause most every day.

He wants a love that can never be doubted. An unconditional love that will never falter or fade even if he forsakes it or runs away “most every day.” Who besides God can offer this kind of Agape love? And then he asks his lover:

Don't doubt my love if sometimes my mind should wander

To a suddenly remembered yesterday

Willie’s mind wanders from his present love to a more perfect, platonic ideal of love in the past. He assures his lover that

my mind could never stay too long away from you.

Love is all in the mind. “You were always on my mind.” Except when you weren’t. Except when I was in love with my own mind.

In 1965, Willie lays out the paradoxical problem of love that will occupy him for the next 45 years. We want love to be perfect and frozen like the lovers on Keats’ Grecian urn, but we don’t want it at the same time. We both desire and fear unconditional love (see C.S. Lewis on this).

Chet Atkins’ “Nashville Sound” has been much maligned, but this album seems tasteful and understated without syrupy strings or cheesy background choruses.

“Night Life” may be the slowest, sparest recording I have ever heard. Willie sings like Cormac McCarthy writes. I could do without the snaps in the background. The guitar work in the background is virtuosic.

“Funny How Time Slips Away” tops my list of Willie-penned songs, and this ranks as one of the top versions. I’ve been singing this song all day today, but I’ve been singing it like Dave Matthews on his live solo acoustic version I found on-line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzQYNT19hkw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7th5Tm5-64

“Healing Hands of Time” I need to quote in its entirety:

They're working while I'm missing you those healing hands of time

And 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

They let me close my eyes just then those healing hands of time

And soon they'll let me sleep again those healing hands of time

So already I've reached mountain peaks and I've just begun to climb

I'll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time

Willie is in love with time. Love causes pain, but time heals (or does it?).

I prefer the version of “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” on Teatro to this one.

Talking to walls, windows, ceilings, and crickets. Some call it the pathetic fallacy, but it works for Willie in this song. Love does seem to imbue our inanimate surroundings, as if they were complicit, in on our heartbreak. The Japanese capture this in their courtly love poetry as well. Murasaki, in her Tale of Genji, would have loved Willie’s music. As would the Tang dynasty poets in China.

“Are You Sure” may be the most credible song on this album. “Please don’t let my tears persuade you. I had hoped I wouldn’t cry. But lately teardrops seem a part of me.” Neither Petrarch nor the courtliest of courtly lovers could cry more than this guy. He is a teardrop. He has taken so many opportunities to cry that he has become a human teardrop. Pure love, pure pain, pure anguish. Teardrops are so often distilled pain from the past, memory concentrated into physical form through pain.

“Could there somewhere be a lonely man like me?” Art and songs on the radio remind us that other people are as lonely as we are. This may be as good an explanation for the purpose and existence of art as any.

“It Should Be Easier Now,” but it isn’t. The healing hands of time don’t heal. This reminds me of the current New Yorker article about facing death, grieving, and mourning. The rivers of his tears have carved canyons in his heart. In her essay, “Good Grief,” Meghan O’Rourke surveys the literature on grief. She focuses on Elisabeth Kuber-Ross and her 1969 classic, On Death and Dying. Kuber-Ross outlines the five stages of grieving. You could read her book, or listen to Willie’s album, recorded four years earlier. The poets and artists are always there first, before the scientists. Freud said that everywhere he went, the poets had always been there first. Robert Burton got there in 1676 with his Anatomy of Melancholy, which I need to read. It probably covers the same ground as Willie’s oeuvre. The stages, according to Kuber-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Don’t all country songs fit into those five categories. Five different ways to deal with loss (in love or death).

“Too much to do all alone.” This album may be the most concentrated and consistent collection of songs focused purely on loneliness, heartache, time, memory, and love. Time contracts and expands with our emotions. Emotions like gravity bend time. A honky tonk e=mc squared.

Rich Kienzle writes a lot of the liner notes for Willie’s albums. I couldn’t find any of his music criticism or a book about Willie online. Still looking for a definitive critic of Willie’s music.

“Although I stand outside, my heart’s within your crowd.” Like Beethoven, Dante, Fitzgerald, and Petrarch, so many artists have been driven to create great art to compensate for the inability to obtain unobtainable, inaccessible women (Beatrice, Daisy/Zelda). Like the mechanical rabbit luring the greyhounds around the racetrack.

This album was completed in a mere three days. Rich Kienzle calls these songs “melancholy, anguished originals.” Jerry Reed and Ray Edenton shine on guitar, as does Pete Drake on pedal steel. Henry Strzelecki (bass) and Buddy Harman (drums) are steady and unobtrusive. “Night Life” was first recorded in 1959 (I guess as a demo or single), but this is Willie’s first LP. Atkins produced over 44 RCA sessions from ‘64 to ‘72 before they finally found any real success.

Moonlight Becomes You (1993)

Not sure why it isn’t as good as Stardust, but what album is? Jacques Barzun defines sentimentality as emotion that doesn’t lead to action, which would seem to describe Hamlet and Willie Nelson perfectly. “Sentimental Journey” could be the title of Willie’s musical career. It is, by definition, a journey in the mind. Like the lovers frozen in time on the Grecian Urn in Keats’ poem, in that ecstatic moment just before the kiss. This is where Willie’s music tries to take you and keep you for as long as you will listen. He seems to be suggesting, you can always go there in your mind, in his music. Songs can take you there.

Willie opens and closes this album with two of his own tunes, but the rest are jazz and pop standards. The harmonica is noticeably absent, but the piano makes this album distinctive. I prefer the version of “December Day” on Yesterday’s Wine. “Moonlight Becomes You” is pleasant and well executed, but I can’t put my finger on why it doesn’t move me the way Stardust does. The snare and bass provide a pleasing platform for the piano and Willie’s vocal. I’m struck again by how Willie transitions from a pop or jazz standard to a more traditional country song like “Afraid.” He seems unafraid of switching genres mid album using the same instruments. “A heart gets careless/When vows are made,” and the just time slips away. Vows of eternity disappear in a moment. We desire and fear eternity. Willie claims that if he had “The Heart of a Clown” he’d “laugh every time you made me blue” and “you wouldn’t see me cry the way you do.” So once again Willie is talking about crying, Petrarch style, but he has lived his life, hakuna matata, by laughing to avoid the blues. Later he claims you can’t play a sad song on a banjo, and it would seem equally true that you can’t sing a sad song if you are Willie Nelson. He is a human banjo. Incapable of being sad for long. There is never any danger that he will be “Permanently Lonely.” This takes something from the credibility of the song, as Chesterton maintains that a thing must be irrevocable, permanent, for it to be truly romantic, truly risky. Otherwise it is just sentimentality. Nothing is at stake but the collapsing of my platonic ideals, my dreams, my memories. Unless of course the memories are as real as reality, or realer. Some have claimed so (Lewis and others).

Again, this album is so smooth, competent, relaxing, and pleasant, but somehow not moving. I guess I just want more heartache, more fiddle. Johnny Gimble’s on this album, but not enough. This album “puts the blues on the run,” but that’s the problem. I like the blues, and I think Willie, like Keats, is also “half in love with easeful death.” Maybe this album succumbs too much to the temptation of sleep, of Lethe, the loss of memory, the opium-like numbing of pain. Ignorance is bliss, but there may be too much bliss on this album. “I’ll Keep On Loving You” is a perfect book end to songs like “The Grass is Blue.” One type of song asserts “I’m not sad you left me; I’m just fine” (and if you believe that, “I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona”). The other type asserts that “I will always love you,” as long as the sun keeps shining (which of course it will). How can you sing and mean both kinds of songs?

“I never thought my heart could be so yearnin’/ Why did I decide to roam?” That’s the $64,000 question. Yearnin’ and roamin’? Why do we do it? Why is the grass always greener? Road/home, road/home, road/home? Or home motel. Still is still moving and moving is stillness.

Willie writes and sings on the last track, “Never think evil thoughts of anyone/ It’s just as wrong to think as to say.” Very sermon-on-the-mount-like sentiments. The spirit over the letter of the law. Lusting in your heart as bad as adultery. And yet, the converse is not true, that therefore it is the thought that counts. It is in the negative, but not in the affirmative. That “You were always on my mind” means nothing if you never call or write. Words and thoughts without actions are meaningless. And yet there is something to this god-like perspective. The view that transcends time, which Willie and Proust and all great artists aspire to, and sometimes even seem to achieve briefly, when they are at the height of their art, they give us a glimpse of this all-encompassing Walt Whitman-esque prospect. I still like the version of “In God’s Eyes” on Yesterday’s Wine better, but I admire how Willie keeps returning to his old songs and using them in unique, structural ways to frame his new material. This recursiveness of his career keeps him forever young. Spiraling back through old material even as he propels forward to new material.

Take it to the Limit (1983)

Chips Moman and Willie clearly spent a lot of time together in the 1980s. The background on “No Love At All” is over the top. Horns, tambourines, and the kitchen sink. I have no idea what this is.

And then, this is so Willie, he transitions directly into a pure country tune. “Why Do I Have to Choose.” A horn weaving in and out of the guitar and harmonica makes this a bit trippy (or could that be my 8th grade son practicing clarinet in the basement; I can hear him squeaking through the floor and through the earphones of my I-Pod).

Why, Baby, why, did Willie record “Why Baby Why”? I don’t have any info on musicians (the problem with re-issues is they tell you next to nothing about the recordings).

The Big Chill organ on “We Had It All” gives this the nostalgic feel popular in the early 80s. “I can hear the wind blowing in my mind.” That’s Willie. Hearing winds in his mind. The wind of memory and love and time. “I know that we can never live those times again, so I let these dreams take me back to where we’ve been.” But we can live those times again in art, in song. Strings, harmonica, guitar, piano, and Willie’s vocals working together polyphonically to take us back in time.

Willie actually makes “Take It To The Limit” new for me. A song that has become so cliché and worn out can be reinvigorated by Willie’s unpredictable phrasing and timing.

“You can spend all your time makin’ love. You can spend all your love makin’ time.” Seems like Willie does both. He makes love out of time, makes love to time.

Ditto for “Homeward Bound.” I have to retract a statement I made in an earlier blog that no one should re-make Paul Simon tunes. I love this tune so much, but I love how Willie makes it new. And being homeward bound is like being in search of lost time. He wishes he was homeward bound, and yet he’s always on the road running away from home. Staying in his home motel. At home on the road yet longing for home? The Jerry Garcia type guitar riffs on this album transcend the cheaper pop trappings of the production.

“Blackjack County Chains” tells a great story.

“Till I Gain Control Again.” Can you gain control when you are taking it to the limit? Isn’t going home the opposite of taking it to the limit? And why do we have to choose between the road and home? Between going home or going to the outer limits?

“Old Friends” is not the Paul Simon song, but it fits the theme of this album, or the opposite of the theme. Old friends, like homes, provide limits, people and places to return to. They are, by definition, limiting.

“Would You Lay With Me (In A Field Of Stone).” Solid, but unremarkable.