237. Willie Nelson, "Red Headed Stranger"

 

I have never counted myself as a huge Willie Nelson fan.  Of course, I appreciate the songwriting - I mean, the guy wrote "Crazy" and "Hello Walls" and another couple dozen incredible songs - but I just don't like his voice.  I was approaching this album with a sense of "let's just get through it and move on."

Guess what?  I kinda loved it.  

It's telling that at first Columbia didn't want to put it out because they thought it was all demos.  (Willie had negotiated a contract with complete artistic control, however, so they put it out anyway.)  "Sparse" would be doing a lot of work describing this album.  It's quiet and contemplative, but with an unexpected weight and depth that I hadn't anticipated.  It's a country concept album, about a preacher on the run from the law after killing his unfaithful wife and her lover.  Not super out there for country music, but there you have it.

One of the biggest surprises for me was learning that Willie, who made his name as a songwriter, wrote very little of the album from scratch.  Even "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain," Nelson's first #1 hit, is an Acuff/Rose song so durable it was recorded by Hank Williams.  The whole album sounds like it came from a different era, befitting the songs, like it could have been recorded in 1930 or 1955 or 1974.  One of the originals, "Denver," which in and of itself sounds like it could be from the 50's, flows immediately into a guitar melody that I immediately recognized as elementary school fave "George Washington Bridge" (but which is actually "O'er the Waves" by Juventino Rosas - learn something new every day!).  "Down Yonder," one of the few songs with any kind of drums or percussion, is a frontiertown raveup that could be playing in the background of one of Al Swearingen's places.

I also immediately recognized the melody from "Can I Sleep in Your Arms" - it's the same as "Red River Valley" - and sure enough, Wiki confirmed this.  In "Hands on the Wheel," a cover of a Bill Callery song, Willie slyly slips in the melody of "Tennessee Waltz" as a guitar solo.  There's a lot of that kind of blending and pastiche on this album, which contributes to its timelessness.  

So I'm glad I got to encounter this little gem.  It's a nice, compact 33 minutes so it won't take you all day, and it sounds like Willie's just sitting there playing for you.  I'm not sure if I'm a Willie fan now, but I'm closer than yesterday.

Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? You know the drill; there aren't enough country albums on here in general, so I'm saying yes to almost all of them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

103. De La Soul, "Three Feet High And Rising"

Image
  Sorry for the service interruption!  Monday I had, like, work stuff to do and yesterday I was picking my wife up at the airport and they lost her bag and we had to file a claim about that and by the time I got home it was well into my Work Hours and you know, I'm just sorry.  (This was tail end of quite a journey for my wife that found her taking off in Ireland and landing in Newark, New Jersey, and then sitting in a plane for almost three hours and then the flight just getting cancelled and then staying in the Courtyard by Marriott in downtown Newark, NJ [not recommended, she says] and then getting on a flight to SFO at 6:30 am and finally getting back here a solid 14 hours later than expected.) Speaking of the greater New York City metropolitan area, a group of kids from Amityville, Long Island, got together in 1988 and started making songs and released this album, one of the best in hip hop or any other genre, in 1989.  De La have been called the "Beatles of hip...
Read more

3. Joni Mitchell, "Blue"

Image
  Do you want the good news or the meh news first?  The good news is that this album is better than the other Joni Mitchell albums we've seen , or at least better for me.  I hated one of them and barely tolerated the other, so I was not expecting to like this, and after three listens yesterday, it was not as bad as I'd feared it would be.  The meh news?  I still don't love Joni Mitchell and I don't particularly like this album. Obviously, since it's the number 3 out of the Top 500 albums ever made, a lot of people feel differently.  Pitchfork called it "possibly the most gutting break-up album ever made," which may be true, who knows, but if it is it's about breaking up with a whole series of dudes, from Graham Nash to James Taylor to some guy named Carey.  (In Pitchfork's estimation, this is the 86th best album of the 1970s, so not exactly in number 3 overall territory). One thing that bugs me is Joni Mitchell's voice, which I find kind of g...
Read more

1. Marvin Gaye, "What’s Going On"

Image
  500 albums later and we're out of albums.  This album was number 6 on the last iteration of the Rolling Stone list and has now moved up to number 1 (displacing Sgt. Pepper , which was the last album to hold that spot).  I think it's a lovely album with maybe three absolutely incredible songs, a fair amount of average-to-good, and some not great songs.  I'm not a voter and will never be a voter but I just don't think this is the best album of all time. In fact, I would be perfectly fine with this list if they just sawed off the top 3 and left the rest as is: 1. Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life 2. Beatles, Abbey Road 3. Nirvana, Nevermind 4. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours And so forth.  But let's take this album on its own merits. The first of the three absolute bangers is the title track, "What's Going On," the scene-setter for the rest of the album, a loose concept album that's told from the point of view of a Vietnam vet returning to a country th...
Read more