Willie Nelson – Page 4

Willie Nelson – City of New Orleans

Willie Nelson – City of New Orleans Columbia CK 39145 (1984)

This turd of an album went platinum, which is more an indication of Willie Nelson’s overall name recognition in 1984 than the quality of City of New Orleans in and of itself. Willie is in easy listening mode, again. Chips Moman produces, and he ruins yet another recording with oppressively sterile sound. Listeners won’t doubt for even a second that this album was from the mid-80s. In truth some of the performances — like the title track — aren’t bad. But does anyone need to hear Willie do “Wind Beneath My Wings?” Ever?

Willie Nelson – A Horse Called Music

Willie Nelson – A Horse Called Music Columbia CK 45046 (1989)

More pop than country, A Horse Called Music finds Mr. Willie Nelson mastering the synthetic sounds of 1980s pop. That’s right. This one is much more of a pop record than a country one. There are strings and lush background vocals on much of it, returning to country briefly, such as for yet another rendition of his “Mr. Record Man” and the opener. This thing fairly reeks of the 1980s, yet, the songs are by and large much better choices than on so many of his other albums of the era. He’s also singing fairly well. “Is The Better Part Over” was written five years earlier about Nelson’s third marriage to Connie, the wife his band liked best. “Nothing I Can Do About It Now” was the hit, Nelson’s last really big one until a duet with Toby Keith more than a decade later, but it’s really one of the lesser cuts on the album. The best stuff here is actually the orchestrated traditional pop. It does bear mentioning that this has one of the most amazing album covers on any Willie Nelson album, and the title is quite funny too.

Willie Nelson – To All the Girls…

Willie Nelson – To All the Girls… Legacy 88765425862 (2013)

Willie Nelson has kept touring and recording a hell of a lot longer than anyone ever would have guessed. Many of those later-career recordings are decent but not of much consequence. They feel tossed off and somewhat lazy. But returning to a major label he has recorded a few albums in recent years that sound much more elaborate and polished than what he was doing in the early 2000s. Another problematic feature of his recent work has been the gimmicks, from stupid genre exercises like the reggae album Countryman to faddish, star-studded guest performer albums like The Great Divide. He’s made some dubious choices when it comes to quality control. But he’s still a guy with a great voice, and when he pulls himself together and puts forth some effort he’s still capable of good things. Against the odds, To All the Girls… is an unlikely late-career success. The title reflects that each song features a different female guest performer. There is a certain stylistic diversity, allowing individaul songs to lean on the strengths of the guests — from a Bill Withers cover with Mavis Staples to western swing with Shelby Lynne. But much of this has an easy listening feel — appropriate given that Willie is now eighty years young — and he comes across as more engaged with that sort of a sound than just about any time in memory. Nothing here jumps out as particularly notable. But Willie has hardly made an album this consistently listenable from top to bottom in more than a decade. There is a gentle touch in the recordings that suit that approach quite well, with unobtrusive strings and other little embellishments that enrich the performances without taking away from the singing and guitar solos that rightly remain the focus. The guest performers for the most part all turn in nice performances (the biggest dud being the outing with his daughter Paula Nelson), and the song selections are appropriate ones for both Willie and the guests, which is perhaps the most difficult aspect in pulling off a project like this. If you can handle Willie’s more polished and lighter tendencies then you might well rank this as his best since 1998’s Teatro.

Willie Nelson – Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die

Willie Nelson – Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die: Musings from the Road (HaperCollins 2012)

Here’s one of those memoirs that is chock full of random anecdotes, and shout-outs to and from family, friends and musical associates (sometimes all at once), yet is less insightful on average than the better ones (Duke Ellington‘s Music is My Mistress). This features less of a presence from an editor than his recent The Tao of Willie which is usually a bad thing, but also allows in some nuggets that otherwise might have been cut. For instance, it’s nice to know Willie sympathizes with the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and, surprisingly, his support stems from his admiration of the late Howard Zinn. Most readers will opt for a more conventional Willie Nelson (auto)biography though.

Willie Nelson – Songbird

Willie Nelson – Songbird Lost Highway B0006939-02 (2006)

The problem with Willie Nelson’s late career has been to find a convincing reason to bother recording yet another album. He always had eclectic tastes and a fairly broad range to dabble with jazz, traditional pop, rock, and other little undercurrents in his music. But he has already been there and done that. Like the toils and troubles of Gene Hackman‘s character in Nicolas Roeg‘s Eureka (1983), who spent his life searching for a big gold strike and then hits it (right at the beginning of the film) only to struggle to find purpose for the rest of his life; it raises the question, “What next?” Nelson has tried and succeeded in so many ways, there is a tendency to be lazy in the aftermath. He has long had a lazy streak, which can be exacerbated by his new age fatalism — a sort of lopsided Zen practice that passively hopes for the best (with very much an emphasis on the “passively” part). Much of his 1980s output smacked of pale attempts to recreate past successes, often with diminished enthusiasm. It hasn’t helped that his enforced mantra of “positive thinking” largely stripped away one of his biggest talents: putting a good-natured, positive spin on hard, desolate music. It’s that, plus a lot of Nelson’s increasingly half-hearted efforts in easy listening pap have tended to be quite commercially successful, providing all the wrong sorts of encouragements.

Songbird pairs Willie with Ryan Adams & The Cardinals. Adams produces too. This is something of an attempt to recreate the success of Teatro, by again pairing Nelson with a producer having solid rock credentials. While there’s little doubt that Songbird tends toward pretty muted statements, it’s also a pleasant and consistent listen. Adams keeps this fairly mellow and inoffensive, but his band The Cardinals succeeds in giving Willie accompaniment that is contemporary without feeling forced into some sort of faddish sound. The title track is a Fleetwood Mac cover, and definitely the best offering here. Willie doesn’t exactly turn in many committed performances, but even on autopilot his vocals suffice. The closer “Amazing Grace” is a spooky, weird rendition, almost as unexpected as John Cale‘s deconstruction of “Heartbreak Hotel” on Slow Dazzle 30 years earlier. Yet another cover of “Hallelujah” is filler here, but, if you must have filler, why not a classic Leonard Cohen tune? While Songbird may not be Willie at his finest, and it may not always be exciting, it still works as sort of an inoffensive album of undemanding indie/alt country.

Willie Nelson – American Classic

Willie Nelson – American Classic Blue Note 67197 (2009)

These “standards” albums are so common, that you almost expect that mild-mannered jazz combos record piles of them just to leave “in the can,” waiting for celebrity vocalists to come along and drop in some singing on top. Willie Nelson has done plenty of these before (Stardust, Healing Hands of Time, etc.), this one merely in the format of the revived Blue Note Records pop jazz aesthetic. It’s stripped of any real charisma, ensuring that it’s a real snoozer. Yet, this one’s professional through-and-through. My mom would sure enjoy this, as she loves vapid, lowest common denominator, boring housewife sort of albums like this and Rod Stewart‘s It Had to Be You… The Great American Songbook. But I’m selling this short! It is also suited as background music for a genteel businessman’s cocktail lounge or a waiting room.

Willie Nelson – Countryman

Willie Nelson – Countryman Lost Highway B0004706-02 (2005)

Oh, Willie. Countryman is his reggae album “10 years in the making” (says the album sleeve — in reality it must be that no one wanted to release it). The one inspired choice is a cover of Johnny Cash‘s “I’m a Worried Man,” which Cash wrote about a man he encountered in Jamaica, sung here as a duet with Toots Hibbert of Toots & The Maytals. Otherwise, this tiresome genre exercise has nothing to offer. “Straight” country versions of reggae songs (like he does for “The Harder They Come” here) would have worked better than Willie singing against a reggae beat. Still waiting on Willie’s hip-hop album.

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel – Willie and the Wheel

Willie Nelson & Asleep at the Wheel – Willie and the Wheel Bismeaux Records BR 1287 (2009)

Willie Nelson has always loved western swing. Recent albums like You Don’t Know Me evidenced that fascination. Teamed with Asleep at the Wheel, Willie and the Wheel is as self-consciously retro as it could be. Every song reaches to reproduce the sound of a classic 1940s cut by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. This record is a ton of fun. Yet, it also can’t get past its obligations to maintaining its “retro” sound. So this glides by somewhat on the surface. Willie has offered quite a lot of music at that level in his later years. It’s almost a very good one, but lacks a little something hard to put a finger on.

Willie Nelson – Band of Brothers

Willie Nelson – Band of Brothers Sony/Legacy 8884 301921 26 (2014)

It’s a rather sad state of affairs when an album as bad as Band of Brothers becomes Willie Nelson’s most commercially popular new release in 28 years (since 1986’s The Promiseland). This one has a special twist: Willie is writing new songs. Nine of these songs are new, and it has been about two decades (!) since he released an album of mostly new material. Now, while much has been made of Willie’s new songwriting, it bears mentioning that it’s not strictly true. Willie co-wrote the nine new songs with Buddy Cannon, who also produces. Not that it matters that much, but it is a strong hint that the buzz around this album is marketing-driven rather than musically-driven. The new songs seem decent enough. They recall the writing of the Willie of 40-50 years ago. But the recordings bear almost no resemblance to that creature. This is music that could have come from nearly any country performer today. Willie just happens to be singing. He has outlived most of his long-time touring band, so he’s performing with a lot of relatively new faces. So even though Willie is no longer being lazy when it comes to songwriting, he’s merely become lazier than every about performing these songs. If you want an album that sounds like any other country album, congratulations, you’ve found one. If you want one with its own character, keep looking.

Willie Nelson – The Willie Way

Willie Nelson – The Willie Way RCA Victor LSP-4760 (1972)

Willie Nelson’s albums for RCA tend to be maligned, as he was catering to the Nashville system and so often those recordings were leaden with sappy string treatments, overbearing backing vocalists, and gaudy steel guitar. Some fans note that 1971’s Yesterday’s Wine broke the mold. But the changes go deeper than that one effort. In late December of 1970 Nelson’s home Ridgetop in Tennessee caught fire, forcing him (and members of his band and entourage) to relocate to the abandoned Lost Valley Ranch in Bandera, Texas for a while. The move gave him a respite from the pressured atmosphere of the Nashville area, and renewed his ties to his home state of Texas. Life on the ranch was something of a subsistence, communal one. Together with Nelson’s interest in certain rock phenomena, like the Woodstock and Atlanta Pop festivals, this introduced elements of a liberal rock aesthetic. Or perhaps they just stirred up things that had circulated in Nelson’s band from tours to places like San Fransisco in the 1960s, when they took to wearing flamboyant costumes.

After returning to his refurbished Ridgetop home in fall 1971, Nelson recorded his final RCA sessions. Among those were preliminary takes of material that would be rerecorded later for Phases and Stages on Atlantic Records. Although superficially Nelson was back in the Nashville fold, it’s clear that his music was different. The recordings on The Willie Way demonstrate the changes. A harpsichord on “Home Is Where You’re Happy” lends, just slightly, the flavor of psychedelic rock or mod British Invasion pop. There is a bit of that influence on the reading of the Appalachian folk classic “Mountain Dew” here too.

A lot of listeners skip right past much of the RCA years, at least after Yesterday’s Wine, to Willie’s efforts on the fledgling country department of New York-based Atlantic. That is a mistake — forgivable though given the lack of promotion and limited pressings of the albums of this era. The two albums RCA released from from Nelson’s last six sessions in 1971 or 1972 The Words Don’t Fit the Picture and The Willie Way are perhaps his very best from his entire decade-long tenure on RCA. They balance the conventions of Nashville with inklings of forward-looking rock influences. By this time Willie knew the Nashville approach and was actually getting pretty adept at playing that game, even in an offhand way. Willie also was actually writing some good songs, like the opener “You Left a Long, Long Time Ago.” His other songs selections, like Kris Kristofferson‘s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” are excellent too. The Willie Way may not quite match The Words Don’t Fit the Picture (it trails off a bit at the end), but it’s still among Willie’s best albums from before his commercial breakthrough a few years on in the mid-1970s.