Tag: Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson – You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker Lost Highway B0006079-02 (2006)

A nice tribute to the songs of Texan Cindy Walker, who passed away just over a week after this album was released.  Willie plays this material with a sophisticated air, with a lively fiddle laced throughout that nods to the leading figure of western swing Bob Wills (who co-wrote a number of these songs with Walker).  In his autumn years Willie has so often seemed to be locked into a daze, churning out recordings with regularity but rarely straying from a kind of detached and — let’s face it — formulaic delivery.  But You Don’t Know Me ups the ante a bit.  Nelson seems to connect with these tunes and his whole band brings more energy to them than usual, even though this has a light, easy listening touch.  Count this among Nelson’s more successful late-career outings.

Willie Nelson – Heroes Legacy 88691960482 (2012)

After a few albums of more old-fashioned, nostalgic country, Heroes has Willie Nelson back making music with a more contemporary feel.  His son Lukas is prominently featured.  Lukas plays guitar with a smooth sound, inflected with classic rock sensibilities.  There are a lot of guest vocalists.  This one is pleasant if unremarkable, though it might have been more than that without all the guest vocalists.  Also, Lukas Nelson may be a decent guitarist, but a little more of Willie and Trigger would have been nice.  In all, Willie is making more of an effort to seem relevant, though he also seems to be deferring a bit too much to his label (back on Columbia).  This is nondescript contemporary country, and, as such, is only marginally interesting and too unambitious to make it stand out.  Its best quality is that clearly a lot of effort went into recording, so this is polished up to a degree few albums can afford to do.

Willie Nelson – Across the Borderline Columbia CK 52752 (1993)

It’s hard to mention Willie Nelson’s name without two things immediately coming to mind: marijuana and the IRS (Internal Revenue Service).  It’s the latter that provides the backdrop for this album.  Due to reliance on investment advice that turned out to be fraudulent, Willie accumulated a tax debt to which the government added numerous penalties so that it ballooned to many millions of dollars.  As it turns out, Willie didn’t manage his money well and his star (and record sales) had faded, leaving him without the funds to pay the bill.  So began a period of years when friends and fans purchased his old assets and sold them back to him–often for pennies on the dollar.  He even released an album direct-marketed over TV, The IRS Tapes: Who’ll Buy My Memories?, to help pay the IRS.  Eventually Willie won a lawsuit over the accounting firm that gave him the investment advise originally, and he settled the IRS debt and returned his full attention to the music business.  The first album after the IRS days drew to a close was Across the Borderline.

This album shows more promise than anything Willie had done since the mid/late 1970s.  Paul Simon‘s “American Tune” is a fantastic opener, and there is more great stuff in store like John Hiatt‘s “(The) Most Unoriginal Sin.”  But, the album doesn’t quite hold to that high standard throughout.  It feels like Willie is trying to follow the same path as Bob Dylan by recruiting a rock producer, Don Was (plus Paul Simon and Roy Halee).  Hell, Willie even teams up with Dylan for “Heartland” and covers another Dylan tune later on the album.  After a full decade of lazy irrelevance, Across the Borderline showed Willie still had good music in him.  But it would be in the late 1990s that he delivered his best recordings since the 70s, in Spirit and Teatro.

Willie Nelson – Yesterday’s Wine RCA Victor LSP-4568 (1971)

Willie Nelson had a recording session scheduled in May 1971.  He had grown lazy as a songwriter over the years, and he didn’t really have material lined up for the album. The night before recording began (!), he wrote much of the material — at least seven of the songs — that ended up on Yesterday’s Wine.  The result is a major departure from his “typical Nashville” albums of the previous ten years.  This subdued concept album about coming to terms with religion in adulthood strips the music back to spare, intimate settings.  Often there is little more than Nelson’s voice, acoustic guitar and bass, with piano or steel guitar appearing only briefly, even just momentarily.  Although mellower and more laid-back (the Willie Way!), it’s a format a bit like Bob Dylan‘s albums Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding (not all that surprising, given that session man Charlie McCoy appears on both Dylan’s and Nelson’s albums).  The singer-songwriter movement sweeping the music industry seems to have had some effect on Nelson.  Recorded with a mix of Nelson’s touring band and a few session men, the album’s experiments don’t fully succeed.  There is a stiffness in the performances, with the backing band often just plodding along — it’s hard to blame them for lack of practice, though, when the songs were written the night before!  Nelson seems tentative in his vocals too.  He’s in new, unfamiliar territory, and he hasn’t entirely sorted out where he’s headed.  His vocals shed much of the crooning style that he relied on so much the previous decade.  The album’s greatest strength remains the excellent songwriting.  Chief among the new songs is the classic road rambling tale “Me and Paul,” written in honor of Nelson’s touring drummer and former pimp/hoodlum Paul English.

Willie Nelson – Spirit Island 314-524 242-2 (1996)

Not as well-known as Willie’s great albums of the 1970s, Spirit is one of his few later-career efforts that belongs in that same category of his very best.  1976’s The Sound In Your Mind was his peak as a vocalist, but Spirit is his peak as a guitarist.  His iconic nylon stringed guitar Trigger never sounded better.

Willie Nelson – Tougher Than Leather Columbia QC 38248 (1983)

Anthropologist F.G. Bailey wrote in his book Humbuggery and Manipulation: The Art of Leadership (1988) that a leader has a need for an entourage, who make up a buffer and a sort of subordinate set of leaders to insulate the ultimate leader from the mundane.  But, such a leader must control his entourage, usually through strategic use of uncertainty and discord among the ranks.  If we take Bailey’s theories (right or wrong) and apply them to Willie Nelson, then maybe they provide an explanation of what went wrong in the 1980s.  Nelson developed a Pollyanna-esque “positive thinking” approach to life and steadfastly refused to focus his energies or attention on anything negative.  He did have an entourage, which between his backing band, drivers, bodyguards and assorted others, had grown quite large by the early 80s.  But his laid-back approach to life didn’t allow him any room to control this entourage.  So he was too often enveloped in a strange cocoon of celebrity.  His recordings, increasingly pop- and easy listening-oriented, suffered because of it.

Near the peak of his popularity Willie collapsed a lung, and had to recuperate in the hospital for a time.  While there, he planned his 1983 album Tougher Than Leather.  It marked a return to the stripped-down old-time acoustic country sound of Red Headed Stranger.  It ends up being Nelson’s finest album of the decade by a fair margin.  He had a lot of range, but he was always known first and foremost as a country artist for a reason.  He plays to his strengths here.  There are some old tunes and even some traditional chestnuts like “Beer Barrel Polka” tossed together with another loose (and barely recognizable) concept.  This time it has to do with reincarnation — a topic Nelson genuinely believed in.  The time spent on thinking this through provides warm returns.  This is the most consistent and convincing album Nelson would deliver for a while.  The reason may well be that being less reliant on his band and having more time to himself in the hospital Nelson freed himself briefly from the confines of his entourage.  This may not be his finest moment compared to the entirety of his career, but renditions of the likes of “My Love for the Rose,” “Changing Skies” and “Summer of Roses/December Day” (and more) are very good.

Willie Nelson & Family – Willie Nelson & Family RCA Victor LSP-4489 (1971)

Another middling offering from the time just before Willie really broke through.  He veers into the territory of singer-songwriters, with a cover of James Taylor‘s hit “Fire and Rain.”  The nagging problem is that Willie is making this music too grandiose, and is still clinging slightly to a crooner’s style in his vocals.  That, and the glitzy, Vegas-style backing singers, horns and strings on “I’m a Memory,” “Today I Started Loving You Again,” and “Kneel at the Fee of Jesus” seem too much for Willie’s style of guitar playing and singing.  Rather than take simple, spare music and dress it up as he does here, his next album Yesterday’s Wine would instead strip things back to simple, spare performances with greater success.  This plays well enough all the way through, and is better than some of Willie’s early Nashville albums, but it still pales in comparison to what was just around the corner from him.