Texas in My Soul (1967)--take 2

Still not much to say about this one even on my second time through, but two things did strike me:

1. The use of the word “soul.” So much of Willie’s music is about his mind. Everything and everyone is “always on [his] mind,” but only Texas is in his “soul.” Though Willie does a few gospel albums, he really is a more cerebral singer and writer.

2. This album is important because it reminds me of how important Texas is to Willie’s identity as a singer, writer, and guitar player. And though he usually spends his songs remembering lost loves, here he remembers The Alamo and everything Texas has meant to him.

Naked Willie (2009)--Take 2

This time through I notice how the “Do Right Man” meets “Johnny One Time.” Paradoxically, Willie is “both sides now.” He’s Johnny “always” and Johnny “one time.” As W. H. Auden wrote in 1959:

“I will love you forever,” swears the poet. I find this easy to swear. “I will love you at 4:15pm next Tuesday”: Is that still as easy?

My 10-yeard old daughter, Stella, made fun of my 7-year-old daughter, Vivian, today by saying: “Vivian likes Willie Nelson.” Vivian denied it, but I had heard her earlier telling Stella that she liked the music (not the vocals) of these naked recordings. So six months of Willie Nelson has worn them down into submission. They are girding their ears for 48 hours of Willie in the car ride to Maine and back. We may need to drive down and back twice, though, since I have amassed almost 4 days’ worth of Willie’s music.

Memory and mind are the key themes to the songs on this album. Tears and time. These patterns are emerging and coming into clearer focus as I listen more deeply to each album.

Always on My Mind (1982)--Take 2

It’s funny that the three songs that struck me this time around are the three songs I did not mention in my blog from January, which suggests that I do need to continue this second-time through process. First, M. Curtis’s “Let it Be Me.” A tender ballad that fits into Willie’s genre of “always” and “never” songs:

Don't take this heaven from one

If you must cling to someone

Now and forever, let it be me…

So never leave me lonely

Tell me that you love me only

And say you'll always let it be me.

Willie wants someone who will love him “forever” and “always,” someone who will “never leave me lonely.” And yet he wants this while he is perpetually on the road.

Chips Moman’s “Staring Each Other Down” may be my favorite song on the album; I’m not sure how I missed it the first time through. Not sure what to make of these lyrics:

You're hangin' on his arm

She's holdin' mine

A fool must have said love was blind

We're shouting I love you's

With people all around

And they don't hear one sound

Let her eyes do the talkin'

And her eyes do the walkin'

And her eyes do the slippin'

Around staring each other down

And we're both on to

How long a slow song

Would be for us now

This timebomb we're holding

Is so near exploding right down

So let her eyes do the talkin'

And eyes do the walkin'

Her eyes do the slippin'

Around staring each other down

Staring each other down

In terms of Willie’s theory about love, the notion that “a fool must have said love was blind” implies that love is not blind, which contradicts many of Willie’s lyrics about the foolishness of love. The length of a slow song and the “timebomb” make obvious connections to Willie’s obsession with time as it pertains to (and perhaps is) love. And then another Chips Moman song, “Old Fords and a Natural Stone”:

Papa's words ringin' in my ears son you got to get tighter with your tears

Just because she's leaving don't start believing

That your rock'n roll days are gone

Cause nothing lasts forever but old Fords and a natural stone

And when those sad songs and slow hurtin' songs

Get you down while you're alone it won't hurt long

Cause nothing lasts forever like old Fords and a natural stone

Diamonds are forever and these old cars they still keep rolling on

And all those I love you forever's they're just words that can't be depended on

Cause when they're wrong they're wrong and when they're gone they're gone

Cause nothin' lasts forever but old Fords and a natural stone

Papa's words ringin' in my ears son you got to get tighter with your tears

This song has it all. It has tears: “Son, you got to get tighter with your tears.” Does this mean you have to cry less over lost time? No use crying over lost time? But if that isn’t worth crying over, what is? Most of Willie’s career has been spent either crying over lost time or trying not to cry over lost time. Here he boldly states that we can’t trust “those I love you forever’s; they’re just words that can’t be depended on.” Diamonds and old cars last forever, but not love.

Also striking this time through are the lyrics for “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man.” It seems a bit ironic that Willie of all people would be singing about the need to be a “do right man.” Clearly he wants to be this, he desires to be this, and he believes these lyrics, and yet, so many of his songs are about doing wrong, about how hard it is to do right, about how he can never do right. And the very next song, “Always on My Mind,” is basically an apology for not doing right. It asserts that I know I’m not a “do right man,” but I meant well, I had good intentions, good thoughts. So maybe Willie’s a “think right man.”

American Classic (2009)--Take 2

I listened to this album all day yesterday and even the day before, but never got around to blogging about it. This time around I’ll focus on the lyrics. Even though Willie didn’t write most of these lyrics, his song selection reflects his philosophy. In “The Nearness of You” Willie sings, “All my wildest dreams come true.” It’s not completely clear whether what is near to him is a person or merely the memory of the person in the night. This raises the question of what it means to be close, figuratively and literally. Close physically and close mentally. Which is more real, more true, more perfect? “Fly Me to the Moon” strikes a similarly idealistic tone. Here love transports Willie to the moon. “You are all I long for, all I worship and adore. In other words, please be true.” Again we have the desire for truth, for honesty, for loyalty. This in the face of “Funny how time slips away.” “Come Rain or Come Shine” suggests a love that transcends circumstances and the vagaries of life. “I’m gonna love you like nobody’s loved you…I’m gonna be true if you let me.” Another promise song. “I’m with you always; I’m with you rain or shine.” Until, of course, I’m “on the road again,” and then I’m only with you always in my mind. If music is sound organized in time, than love is life organized in time. Love organizes life according to almost musical principles. “If I Had You” makes a similar promise. “I could change the gray skies to blue if I had you.” Love could change everything. Here Willie confirms his faith in love to overcome all of life’s hurdles. Previously I wouldn’t have associated “Ain’t Misbehavin’” with this genre of optimistic love songs, but it fits as well. I see now that this song is asserting that time won’t slip away this time. I’m not joking this time. I mean it this time. I’ll be true. But why should we believe you this time? “I know for certain the one I love. I’m through with flirtin’, it’s just you I’m thinkin’ of…I’m savin’ my love for you.” Note the certainty, the sureness, the blind faith. And note that these are pop standards. Musically, but also lyrically. They assert the base line of true love from which all other songs vary. In “I Miss You So” Willie recalls a perfect love from the past. Here he is truly in search of lost love, lost time. What I am finding here is that love and time are one, and thus if music is sound organized by time, then it might also be said that music is sound organized by love. “Because of You” suggests that love is the ultimate cause and source of all good things. In short, love makes the world, literally, go round. “I only live for your love and your kiss.” Is this not the ultimate line? The ultimate promise? The ultimate lie? “Baby It’s Cold Outside” is a seduction song, another song about the little lies we tell in love to win, to woo. It isn’t really cold outside. That isn’t the issue. The issue is never the issue. It is always about something else, especially in love. In “Angel Eyes,” Willie laments that “My angel eyes ain’t here.” “My love is misspent on my angel eyes tonight.” This is the first dark, haunting song on the album. Here, “The last jokes are on me” and “the facts are uncommonly clear.” Someone else is now “number one.” Time and love have officially slipped away. Then Willie switches gears abruptly with the bouncy, up-tempo “On the Street Where You Live.” “Enchantment” seems to be a theme of these songs. As is nearness. The word “near” shows up in at least three of these songs. “Let the time go by, and I won’t care if I can be here on the street where you live.” So love transcends even the passage of time. “Since I Fell for You” shows the deceptive side of love. “You made me leave my happy home. You took my love and now you’ve gone…Love brings such misery and pain. And it’s too bad, and it’s too sad that I’m still in love with you. You loved me, and then you snubbed me. What can I do, I’m still in love with you. I guess I’ll never see the light. I get the blues most every night since I fell for you…” Willie wobbles over and around every word in these lines. He seems to get a phrase’s worth of emotion out of each word. Each word becomes a sentence. The word “I” seems to have a verb and a direct object the way he sings it. Here Willie is on the receiving end of cheating. His foolishly optimistic view of love, as depicted in most of these songs, finally runs into the reality of the fickleness of human nature, the inability of humans to be true, to live up to these ideals of love. Willie admits that he will never learn; he’ll keep “falling,” that is being fooled, for love. If only he didn’t fall so easily and so hard. If only he could wise up and learn. This album makes the short list of Willie albums that don’t contain a single Willie-penned song. “Always on My Mind” closes out the set. The only place love can be perfect—in Willie’s mind.

Spirit (1996)--take 2

This morning while listening to a RadioLab podcast titled “Beyond Time,” they of course played a clip of Elvis singing Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” In the midst of interviews with physicists discussing the many universes theory, they turn to Willie, who was there first, before the super colliders, to point out that time is slippery, elusive, and anything but linear. As Freud said (and I must paraphrase here from memory), “Wherever I go, the poets have been there first.” So not only is Willie a neuroscientist, he is a quantum-physicist.

Today I return to possibly my all-time favorite Willie album. If I have to pick one, this is probably it. I won’t re-cap my comments from my January blog on this album, but this time around I will focus more on the way Willie wrestles with time.

The opening track, “Matador,” wordlessly gets at the seductive nature of time. How we lunge for it, try to pin it down, try to put our fingers on it, but it always eludes us, slips away. This is Willie’s version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle that we can never measure both time and place with accuracy. We can only be certain of one or the other.

It strikes me now that “She’s Gone” may not be about a woman. In this case (and perhaps in every case), the woman is Time. Time is a woman, fickle, elusive, seductive, like the Fates in Greek Mythology. Maybe all of Willie’s lamenting for lost women is really symbolic, allegorical. What he is really lamenting is the passage of time, the way it slips away, Proust’s lament and search for “lost time.”

She is gone, but she was here,

And her presence is still heavy in the air.

Oh, what a taste of human love.

Now she’s gone, and it don’t matter anymore.

Again, the presence, the taste of love lingers in memory, ripens, becomes more intense in the mind than it was in the flesh. So is she really gone? Or is her presence even fuller, richer now than ever? And if this is so, does it matter whether she’s here or there?

Passing dreams in the night,

It was more than just a woman and a man.

It was love without disguise.

And now my life will never be the same again.

Love that is more than a woman and a man? Love that transcends the body? Love without the disguise and artifice of the body? A pure, platonic, timeless love. Again and again Willie seems to long for this perfect, guileless love. And yet again and again he acknowledges that so much of what we think of as love is guile, deception, illusion, in short, a lie, a fiction, a romance, in the medieval sense of the word, in the courtly love tradition of the Troubadours and Petrarch. And then comes “Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave.”

Been feelin’ kinda free,

But I sure do feel lonesome.

Baby’s takin’ a trip,

But she ain’t takin’ me.

I been feelin’ kinda free,

But I’d rather feel your arms around me

‘Cause your takin’ away everything that I wanted.

There’s an old hollow tree

Where we carved our initials,

And I said I love you, and you said you love me.

It’s a memory today, it’ll be a memory tomorrow.

I hope you’ll be happy someday.

Your memory won’t die in my grave.

This is straight out of Shakespeare and Edmund Spencer. The desire for love to outlive time. And yet it is a conflicted, paradoxical desire, because he enjoys being free, feeling free, and yet he desires to feel her physical arms around him. He wants to be both free of those arms and embraced by them at the same time. It’s another “She’s gone” song, but it’s another song more about time than a woman. The only lasting love is carved in trees, written in songs and poems and novels, but never in reality. “I’m Not Trying to Forget You Anymore” continues the theme of memory. Here Willie just basks and luxuriates in his fond memory of a lost love. I picture him sitting in a warm bubble bath of memory. And even though it’s gone forever, he doesn’t bemoan the loss:

It did not last forever

Oh, but that’s alright…

And if I had the chance, I’d do it all again.

Here he seems almost indifferent (but tenderly so, if that’s possible) to the inevitable loss, the inevitable slippage of time. He has given up trying to hide from memories, and he has embraced the notion of enjoying them, coming to terms with them. “Too Sick to Pray” I treat pretty thoroughly in my January blog. It may be the most honest song in Willie’s entire catalog. Here he acknowledges a presence outside of time. From there he goes to another instrumental, “Mariachi,” where Johnny Gimble’s fiddle evokes whatever Willie’s voice cannot. Then he returns to the theme of always and forever in “I’m Waiting Forever”:

I’m waiting forever for you,

For this is my destiny, this is what I am to do.

But forever ain’t no time at all,

It’s only the time between telephone calls.

And the love that I hear in your voice is so clear comin’ through,

Keeps me waiting forever, waiting forever for you.

I’m waiting forever for you,

For this is my destiny, this is what I am to do.

But waiting is no waste of time,

I just play out the scenes on a stage in my mind

And I love makin’ love to your memory

It’s all that I do

While I’m waiting forever, waiting forever for you.

The paradoxes are everywhere. “Forever ain’t no time at all” reminds me of his line “How long is forever this time.” And, of course, “funny how time slips away.” Funny how forever slips away. But for Willie, “waiting is no waste of time.” He can keep love alive “on a stage in [his] mind.” Just as Proust and Gatsby and Petrarch and Shakespeare do. “Makin’ love to your memory” could be a defining line for Willie’s music. It’s all he does in every song. And it’s all always in his mind, the sound in his mind. The song. Because music is simply ordered sound, sound ordered in time. I’m not sure what to make of “We Don’t Run.” It seems to contradict so many of Willie’s songs. He’s always running, hitting the road. What can he mean when he says “We don’t run, we never do”? He lives on the road. I’ll need to puzzle over this song some more. In “I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes,” the “place called paradise” seems to be his woman’s image of him. Willie sings, “I hope I’m here forever, but I think it’s time we both realize, that I guess I’ve come to live here in your eyes.” He seems to be saying that he wishes it could last forever, but realistically speaking, the best they can hope for is perfect memories, perfect images, perfect ideals of love in their minds. They shouldn’t hope for more. And that’s okay. Sounds like a compromise, which he insisted in the song before he never made: “We don’t compromise.” “Tears and doubts consume [him],” and he fears “someone will take it all away.” But no one can take away memories, the images we hold in our eyes, in our minds, and in our mind’s eye. “It’s a Dream Come True

VH1 Storytellers (1998)—take 2

They say time changes everything, but six months has not changed my view of this album. It is still in my top ten, and as I wrote in January, I don’t see it going anywhere. This is Willie at his best in his best setting: solo acoustic. At times I wanted a little Johnny Gimble fiddle, but that’s it. Maybe a little Mickey Raphael harmonica. Funny how the first three albums I reviewed have stood the test of time and are still in my top ten. I listened to this album two or three times while cooking dinner, and it just keeps getting better.

Teatro (1998)--take 2

For my recent trip to The High Hampton Inn, I made a new playlist of the 200 Willie Nelson songs (out of a possible 1600) that I marked as 5-stars in my ITUNES. I put it on shuffle and listened to my 5-star Willie Nelson mix. 200 songs distilled from 111 albums and selected from over 1600 songs. I also made a 4-star mix made up of all the songs I marked with 4 stars.

Today I begin working my way back through the 100 or so albums I have already reviewed. As I get my hands on the remaining albums I’m missing, I’ll review those, but till then, I’ll just re-listen to the ones I have already reviewed (in the same order). So I will start again in 1998 with Willie’s flamenco-inflected “Teatro.”

Willie opens with the instrumental “Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour” (Where Are You, My Love?). He begins, like the play “Hamlet,” with a question. A wordless, instrumental question. A state of questioning, longing. Then he moves to the gnomic, paradoxical “I Never Cared For You.”

I know you won’t believe the things I tell you…

Your heart has been forewarned

All men will lie to you

Your mind cannot conceive

Now all depends on what I say to you

And on your doubting me

So I’ve prepared these statements far from true

Pay heed and disbelieve

I’m not even sure how to paraphrase these zen-like koans. I think he is saying, “I know you won’t believe me. You think all men will lie to you. But everything depends on what I have to say to you and on the fact that you will not believe me. So I have prepared false statements for you. Pay attention, but don’t believe them.” What can that possibly mean? Reminds me of the “All Cretans are liars” paradox. If a Cretan tells you this, what are you to make of it? Either way it’s true, either way it’s false. Willie’s songs are based on the desire for truth, but the recognition of lies, deception, and cheating when it comes to matters of the heart. Nothing is what it seems. Trust no one and nothing, even the advice to trust no one and nothing. Even that advice “ain’t necessarily so.” Willie here seems to be paraphrasing Hamlet’s famous “Get Thee to a Nunnery” scene in Act III, scene 1 of “Hamlet.” The question is, can we take Willie or Hamlet seriously? Are they crazy, foolish, mad (as they so often claim to be)? I reprint the entire scene at the end of this blog, but the key idea is that Hamlet says he loved Ophelia once, but then he says he never loved her. Just as Willie says, “I never cared for you.” Is he being ironic or serious? How can we tell? Should we (or Ophelia) believe either of them? And then the larger question raised by all of Willie’s music, is true love even possible in this fallen world, or should we follow Hamlet’s advice to “Get thee to a nunnery”?

This time around I have a sense of every song Willie ever sang as I re-review these albums, so I have a better sense of the whole in the part. In “Everywhere I Go” Willie seems to be referring to taking a memory of his love around with him in his pocket, in his mind. It’s another version of “You Were Always on My Mind.” Even on the road, at every show, the memory of your love will be with him. Is this true love? It is permanent, but it is purely mental, platonic, ideal. Does it really exist? Is it “just a memory.” “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” is another “she left me” song, but an upbeat, two-step sad song. In “My Own Peculiar Way” Willie describes an unusual kind of love indeed. He insists, “Don’t doubt my love,” and yet he and Hamlet asserted earlier that she should trust none of us, we are arrant knaves all of us. Though Willie’s mind wanders to yesterdays, to past loves, she should remain certain of her love living on in his mind? What kind of assurance is this? Should she take comfort that she will live always in his mind, but if his mind wanders, then what? Is there even stability in the mind and memory? “These Lonely Nights” is another teardrop song, another promise song: “I would love you till no end.” In other words, “I’ll always love you,” except of course if I never love you, and in either case, don’t believe me. “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye” may be the scariest song in Willie’s repertoire. He kills his love so she can’t hurt him anymore by leaving him and saying goodbye. It is the scariest solution to the “she left me” predicament. It is the closest Willie comes to Keats “Ode to a Grecian Urn.” Here love is truly frozen in death, made eternal, perfect. And yet we see here perfectly, literally, that to freeze love, to make it last, is to kill it. This version of “Home Motel” may be the best, and the only song I know of where Willie sings solo vocals with just a piano and nothing else. I can’t make sense of Daniel Lanois’ “The Maker,” but it seems to be about man’s longing for yet separation from God. “I’ve just destroyed the world” could be the soundtrack for Hamlet’s nunnery scene with Ophelia. “Fools in love…never learn till it’s too late.” Hamlet has destroyed his own world and any hope of finding love. “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” may be one of my top ten favorite Willie songs. As haunting and heartbreaking as he gets. This is the funkiest version of “Three Days” I’ve encountered. “I’ve loved you all over the world” offers the paradox that Willie will follow his heart wherever it takes him (which implies unfettered freedom), and yet he vows to love his woman “until death do us part” and “all over the world.” His love is boundless in every sense of the word. It can’t stay put; it is always flowing willy-nilly over all banks and borders, across geography and time. It can’t be tied down in both the good and bad sense of the phrase. He ends with another instrumental song, a technique he’s used before. Open and close in wordlessness.

Hamlet, Act III, Scene i

And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!

The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remember'd.

OPHELIA

Good my lord,

How does your honour for this many a day?

HAMLET

I humbly thank you; well, well, well.

OPHELIA

My lord, I have remembrances of yours,

That I have longed long to re-deliver;

I pray you, now receive them.

HAMLET

No, not I;

I never gave you aught.

OPHELIA

My honour'd lord, you know right well you did;

And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed

As made the things more rich: their perfume lost,

Take these again; for to the noble mind

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

There, my lord.

HAMLET

Ha, ha! are you honest?

OPHELIA

My lord?

HAMLET

Are you fair?

OPHELIA

What means your lordship?

HAMLET

That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should

admit no discourse to your beauty.

OPHELIA

Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than

with honesty?

HAMLET

Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner

transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the

force of honesty can translate beauty into his

likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now the

time gives it proof. I did love you once.

OPHELIA

Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET

You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot

so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of

it: I loved you not.

OPHELIA

I was the more deceived.

HAMLET

Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a

breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest;

but yet I could accuse me of such things that it

were better my mother had not borne me: I am very

proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at

my beck than I have thoughts to put them in,

imagination to give them shape, or time to act them

in. What should such fellows as I do crawling

between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,

all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.

Where's your father?

OPHELIA

At home, my lord.

HAMLET

Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the

fool no where but in's own house. Farewell.

OPHELIA

O, help him, you sweet heavens!

HAMLET

If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for

thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as

snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a

nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs

marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough

what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go,

and quickly too. Farewell.

OPHELIA

O heavenly powers, restore him!

HAMLET

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God

has given you one face, and you make yourselves

another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and

nick-name God's creatures, and make your wantonness

your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath

made me mad. I say, we will have no more marriages:

those that are married already, all but one, shall

live; the rest shall keep as they are. To a

nunnery, go.

Exit

OPHELIA

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword;

The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!

And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,

That suck'd the honey of his music vows,

Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,

Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;

That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth

Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,

To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

Re-enter KING CLAUDIUS and POLONIUS

KING CLAUDIUS

Love! his affections do not that way tend;

Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,

Was not like madness. There's something in his soul,

O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;

And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

Will be some danger: which for to prevent,

I have in quick determination

Thus set it down: he shall with speed to England,

For the demand of our neglected tribute

Haply the seas and countries different

With variable objects shall expel

This something-settled matter in his heart,

Whereon his brains still beating puts him thus

From fashion of himself. What think you on't?

LORD POLONIUS

It shall do well: but yet do I believe

The origin and commencement of his grief

Sprung from neglected love. How now, Ophelia!

You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said;

We heard it all. My lord, do as you please;

But, if you hold it fit, after the play

Let his queen mother all alone entreat him

To show his grief: let her be round with him;

And I'll be placed, so please you, in the ear

Of all their conference. If she find him not,

To England send him, or confine him where

Your wisdom best shall think.

KING CLAUDIUS

It shall be so:

Madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.