Willie Nelson

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Essential Albums

  • Across the Borderline
    Across the Borderline
    Across the Borderline

    Though it not’s readily apparent from the airy production, nor from the impressive marquee of guests—which includes the likes of Paul Simon, Sinéad O'Connor, Bob Dylan and dozens more—Willie Nelson's 1993 album Across the Borderline is one of his most ambitious efforts. At the very least, it reminded audiences why Nelson had long been such a creative and commercial force. Stardust had been a pop success, and Always on My Mind had found the singer breaking into the adult-contemporary world. But there’s something about the range of Borderline that feels especially impressive, in part because Nelson makes it all sound so natural. There’s plenty to offer here, both in the material Nelson turns into his own—from his comfortably stoic take on Simon’s “Graceland” to his impressionistic version of Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up”—to the wide of expanse of sounds. Across the Borderline finds Nelson tackling old Chicago blues (Willie Dixon’s “I Love the Life I Live”), as well as new Tejano ballads (“Across the Borderline”), and is augmented by tasteful guitar licks, not to mention judicious touches of congas and pedal steel. It sounds very much like a Willie Nelson album—while also redefining, once again, just how a Willie Nelson album can feel. It’s funny to think of an artist so solitary and “outlaw” becoming such a cultural uniter, but that’s Nelson. And while the polish and technique demonstrated on Across the Borderline might highlight the stylistic cross-pollination Nelson had always championed—listen to the Tex-Mex guitar accents in “Graceland”, for example—he still comes off as plain-spoken and direct. He was too old to be relevant, and too legendary to care, but he still kept trying new things. Not that any of this mattered to his label at the time, which soon refused to renew his contract. Nelson’s manager was furious: You’ve made them millions, Willie! That’s right, Nelson said—but that had been in the past. Nelson was still stuck in the present.

  • Pancho & Lefty
    Pancho & Lefty
    Pancho & Lefty

    The story goes that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard were making an album in Nelson’s home studio outside Austin, Texas, when Nelson got a call from his daughter Lana. She told him he really needed to hear this song called “Pancho & Lefty”, by a somewhat obscure Austin writer named Townes Van Zandt. Nelson obliged, and found the story of a complex friendship between two elusive men so fitting to him and Haggard, that he walked outside to the bus where Haggard was sleeping, and told him to get up so they could sing it. Haggard’s response: It’s a good song—but it can wait until morning. But the band’s already in the studio, Nelson said. They’re rehearsing. In the finished track, you can hear the hard-bitten machismo that fueled the cowboy myth, as well as a tenderness—between two men, no less—that felt both reflective and unresolved. The singers had always been foils for each other, at least when it came to temperament: Haggard was flippant when he wasn’t being deeply, sometimes melodramatically sincere, while Nelson tended to be mellower but also more averse to conflict. Nelson was the lover; Haggard, the fighter. But they were both heading toward their fifties, with plenty of life experience behind them. As a result, the 1983 album Pancho & Lefty—produced with some airy touches by Chips Moman, during what were effectively the same sessions as Nelson’s Always on My Mind—is partly a look at what it might feel like to be an American man firmly in middle age. Throughout the album, the duo are cranky but responsible (“Reasons to Quit” is followed by “No Reason to Quit”), entitled to the point of self-pity (“All the Soft Places to Fall”, “Opportunity to Cry”) and sentimental without giving in to the false sense of wisdom, or sense of conclusion, that might’ve seduced them in the past (“Pancho and Lefty”). Calling this album a bromance is too flip, while describing it as a buddy comedy would be too disrespectful, given the album’s mystery. It’s simply the sound of two men singing as friends, with all the complexity the word ultimately implies.

  • Always On My Mind
    Always On My Mind
    Always On My Mind

    The story goes that Willie Nelson was in the studio with Merle Haggard—recording what eventually would become the duo’s 1983 album Pancho & Lefty—when producer Chips Moman played them an old song titled “Always on My Mind”. Both Elvis Presley and Brenda Lee had recorded their own versions of the tune in the 1970s, but neither had ever been more than a footnote. As it turned out, one of the song’s co-writers, Johnny Christopher, was playing on the Pancho sessions, and he auditioned “Always on My Mind“ for the singers in the studio. Haggard passed. But Nelson said, Hey, let’s try it. Nelson’s 1978 hit Stardust had mixed country, jazz standards and early American pop in ways that exposed a common ancestry. But the 10 tracks on Always on My Mind—released in 1982—combined country with R&B and 1970s-style soft rock, crafting a sound that was just in time for the rise of 1980s adult-contemporary pop. “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” was passionate, but reflectively so. And “Let It Be Me”—which had been a hit for The Everly Brothers 20 years earlier—was quietly yearning. (Nelson admittedly had no idea what to make of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”, but said that the melody was good enough that it didn’t matter.) The production on Always on My Mind can be heavy-handed, and the atmosphere a little thick. But Nelson had willfully resisted the polish associated with commercial country and pop for years, so it’s easy to forgive him for tapping into the subtle, conversational phrasing that made him a compelling performer in the first place. Always on My Mind might find him settling into a comfortable pocket—but at least it’s one he stitched himself.

  • Stardust
    Stardust
    Stardust

    When Willie Nelson approached Columbia Records about making an album of classic American songs, they told him he was crazy. He was a writer, they said—why not write? Plus, they added, why would his young, country audience care about old Broadway and Hoagy Carmichael songs, anyhow? They wouldn’t, Willie said, but older people would, and the young ones would just figure he had written them in the first place. Ten songs, each of them a favourite from Willie’s childhood, a handful of them dating to before his birth in 1933. Recorded in a living room with a mobile studio in the Hollywood Hills. No touch too heavy, no tempo above a resting heartbeat. The arrangements—by Memphis soul legend Booker T. Jones, who also produced—are spacious, the sound ethereal (“Stardust”, “Georgia on My Mind”). All feelings, however big, are rendered with sweetness and distance, as though being looked back on from a point beyond life (“Unchained Melody”). Willie reaches for melodies the way one might reach to pet the family dog: lovingly, without drama or strain. There’s a folk quality to it, but also a sophistication. Just as Ella Fitzgerald’s mid-’50s recordings of Cole Porter helped prove the artistic validity of jazz to white audiences skeptical of its working-class Blackness, Stardust proved that a country scrub from Texas could sound as poised as Frank Sinatra and twice as subtle too (“Moonlight in Vermont”). With Stardust, Willie sketched a constellation of music that collapsed country and jazz, Black and white, Broadway and Nashville, highbrow and low. Some things are just plain old—Stardust is timeless. 

  • Waylon & Willie
    Waylon & Willie
    Waylon & Willie

    The leading lights of ‘70s outlaw country came together as a twosome for this 1978 album, crafting the musical equivalent of a classic Western buddy movie. As the duo delivers tongue-in-cheek anti-anthems like “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” or Kris Kristofferson’s “Don’t Cuss the Fiddle”, you can picture Willie and Waylon riding down the dusty old road together, leaving a trail of broken hearts and empty whisky bottles behind them.

  • Wanted! The Outlaws (Expanded Edition)
    Wanted! The Outlaws (Expanded Edition)
    Wanted! The Outlaws (Expanded Edition)

    1976

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About Willie Nelson

Willie Nelson is one of the most groundbreaking, history-making country artists to have emerged in the 20th century, a key architect of the Nashville Sound of the ’60s and the outlaw-country movement in the ’70s. Born in Abbott, Texas, in 1933 and influenced as much by jazz standards as country, he first found fame as a songwriter, penning standards of his own like the Patsy Cline smash “Crazy” and the Faron Young evergreen “Hello Walls”. Willie’s upbringing on Western swing’s boundary-busting jazz-country blend became an important ingredient of the special sauce he cooked up with the rough ’n’ ready outlaw-country template on mid-’70s albums like Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages and Red Headed Stranger, infusing the records with honky-tonk spirit and rock ’n’ roll attitude. Later, usually backed by his stalwart road band The Family, Willie brought his serpentine, swinging croon and Django Reinhardt-goes-cowboy guitar sound to explorations of the Great American Songbook (Stardust), gospel and more. One of country’s most influential artists, the indefatigable road dog maintained a relentless recording and touring pace into his nineties.

HOMETOWN
Abbott, TX, United States
BORN
30 April 1933
GENRE
Country

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