Willie Nelson A Beautiful Time
By Mikal Gilmore
A Beautiful Time is the fifth album in a series by Willie Nelson reflecting on life, death and things in-between, all produced by Nashville’s Buddy Cannon, who also wrote many of the songs with Nelson. God’s Problem Child led off the procession in 2017, and roughly every twelve months or so — sometimes around the time of Nelson’s birthday, April 29 — another volume has followed. (Nelson has also recorded albums with family members as well as two Frank Sinatra tributes during the same period.) The subject matter of the records — sometimes taking the form of memories that don’t die, even when you wish they would (“Your Memory Has a Mind of Its Own”), and sometimes about people who do die when you wish they wouldn’t (“He Won’t Ever Be Gone,” about Nelson’s longtime friend and onetime singing partner, Merle Haggard) — perhaps isn’t surprising for a man who will turn 89 this year. None of these works, though, has been dour or flinching. In fact, some of Nelson’s reflections on aging and what comes of it have been pretty damn funny: In one song that mocked all the rumors regularly dogging the singer that he had been found suddenly dead, Willie sang: “”Well, I woke up still not dead again today/The gardener did not find me that a-way…/I woke up still not dead again today.”
Jests aside, many of the series’ songs, with their understanding of life as something that is both evanescent and reverberant, mixed both sadness and empathy with a moving depth. “When you lose the one you love,” Nelson sang in “Something You Get Through,” on one album, about a friend who had lost a lifetime mate, “You think your world has ended/You think your world will be a waste of life/Without them in it/You feel there’s no way to go on/Life is just a sad, sad song/But love is bigger than us all/The end is not the end at all.” The songs made each album feel like a story — again, not a surprising thing, given that, starting with Yesterday’s Wine in 1971, Nelson has recorded over 75 thematic full-length works, some that unfolded as a narrative (Phases and Stages, Red Headed Stranger), others that focused on styles or ideas, or paid tributes. “We weren’t planning on making a concept record or anything,” Buddy Cannon told me at the time of God’s Problem Child, “but it kind of turned out like that.”
Still, as the works appeared, they seemed to me a growing collective body. In 2018, when Last Man Standing followed God’s Problem Child, I thought of the two as a pair — companion sets of stories. Then Ride Me Back Home, from 2019, upped the ante to a trilogy. Then, well, nope…First Rose of Spring in 2020, made it a quartet, to be sure. But I won’t call A Beautiful Time an album that now forms a quintet. Instead, let’s name this series for what it is: a mortality song cycle by one of the most skillful and enduring artists in American music history. “It’s the evolution of the music we started out doing at that time,” says Cannon. “It’s like a series of books or something, you know?” However, in the books of Willie Nelson, mortality isn’t solely defined as mortal fate. These aren’t foremost contemplations on endings but rather on life and loves, hopes and hurts, loss and grace, friendship and age, on kind (and lonely) mornings and drunken nights — on the whole gamut of experience that precedes and hopefully redeems the endings. Mortality, after all, encircles mortal — the human.
Which is to say, A Beautiful Time is another story of the human exploit as Willie Nelson tells it, and it is perhaps the loveliest and most affirming to date in this latter-day running saga. Throughout the series, the way the albums speak of people who are in life — not just the singer’s, but maybe reminding us of those in yours and mine too — and those who are no longer in life speaks as well to the essence of mortality. This time, though, the theme of living relationships appears not only in the lyrics and stories here but is also palpable in the real-world conditions of how this music came to be made, in a time when real-world gatherings have been more problematic. The musicians that producer Buddy Cannon brought together recorded the music’s instrumental music — over a handful of days during 2021, in Nashville — then Nelson added his vocal and guitar parts (on Trigger, his Martin N-20 nylon string instrument that he has played since 1969) separately, usually at his Pedernales, Texas studio. (Mickey Raphael, Willie’s harmonica player since Red Headed Stranger in 1975, also often records his parts separately.) Most of the musicians here have played together, in various formations, across these records. They know one another’s sound and sensibilities well, and they work efficiently, usually finishing a song’s tracks in one or two takes. “You don’t really have to tell them anything,” says Raphael. “When we’re in the studio there’s eye contact but nobody’s really saying, ‘You play here, I’ll play here.’ Everybody just listens to each other. They know when to come in and when to get out. That’s why I love being in the studio with them because there’s that unspoken language between the players. Everything complements the song — that’s kind of what you want to keep in your mind. Not trying to get your licks in, but just play what needs to be played.”
That musical kinship is shaped not only by the pleasure of playing together but also by a shared admiration for Nelson: his reputation, his personality and his inimitable way of making music. At the same time, not being in the presence of a vocalist as singular as Willie Nelson requires practical complexity, as well as artistic imagination. “Willie doesn’t obsess over singing anything a certain way,” says Cannon. “He doesn’t need to. It’s what makes him who he is. He’s spontaneous. He’s an improvisational musician — a jazz singer and jazz player. He’s going to be different with every performance. Every time he hits one of those Willie things on guitar, I can’t help but smile. Sometimes I’ll laugh, and he’ll look at me, and he’ll laugh. Because he surprises himself as well. He doesn’t know what he’s going to play. He just picks up a guitar, puts a pick in his hand, starts playing, and whatever comes out at the end of it is what it is.”
Since interplay is key to improvisational music, the musicians have to be keenly aware of Nelson’s unconventional quality while also not being in the same room at the same time to react to him in the immediate. Often as not, they take their cue from the lyrics that they are accompanying. In one song here, “Energy Follows Thought,” Nelson sings, “Imagine what you want/And then get out of the way,” and the musicians heed that suggestion: the ethereal shimmer of the pedal steel and underlying harmonica, as well as the elegant essay of Nelson’s guitar plucking, all drop away until only a heartbeat pulse carries the words. The effectiveness of the moment made me curious: Since Nelson wasn’t there when he sang those words — in fact, he hadn’t sung them yet — I ask Cannon if, anticipating the effect, he’d instructed the players to lay out at that moment. “No,” he said, “that wasn’t a planned thing. It’s just one of those things that the musicians picked up on when we were recording. They were listening very closely to the lyric [as sung by a stand-in vocalist — “We call him a stunt singer,” says Cannon] and that was just what they felt when we were doing the song. They pay close attention — that’s one of their big contributions to the record.
“These Willie records that I’ve been producing don’t sound like any other records that I work on. They’re their own thing. This is basically the same group of guys that I’ve been using on Willie’s records for the last few albums. I’ve been trying to find what I think is the exact perfect band to play with Willie. Rather than put together a bunch of guys who are all about being exact, and precise, that’s not what I thought this stuff needed to be. Willie had a lot of success recording with his band of the 1970s. Those records that they made, they were not perfect. They had flaws everywhere, but the combination of those flaws, and the places where there were no flaws, made that whole thing what it was. My goal is to play everything great but at the same time keep it loose, and feeling like it did back when he was making Phases and Stages, and all of his classic records when he was playing with that band. I wanted to cop that.
“These musicians understand what I’m trying to get, and that I wanted it understated this time. I try not to limit them. I want to hear what their interpretation of the song is, because to me, each individual musician’s interpretation of the song, when combined with the others’ interpretations, is what makes good music anyway, no matter what you’re working on. I love the combination of musicians that’s on this record. It’s just like sitting in your living room with your feet up on the couch, playing guitar. It’s that kind of understanding between us all. Also, everybody has the ultimate respect and love for Willie. This band on A Beautiful Time is, by far, my favorite Willie band so far.”
That notion of affinity also applies to the relationship between Cannon and Nelson. The two first connected in 2008, when Nelson joined Kenny Chesney — whom Cannon also co-produces — for a duet of the 1949 song “Lucky Old Sun (Just Rolls Around Heaven All Day).” Nelson always liked the song, and after hearing the recording gave Cannon a call. “‘This is the best I’ve ever heard this song done,’” Cannon recalled the singer telling him. “‘Let’s find some songs and make a record.’ So that was the way we kicked things off.” Since that time Cannon has been Nelson’s main producer, and during the making of 2012’s Heroes they began collaborating on songs. Nelson has long sung music in a variety of styles — country, jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley — but until Cannon the productions were disparate. Something clicked between this pair, and Cannon has now produced over a dozen albums of Willie’s, including Heroes, Band of Brothers, 2015’s Django & Jimmie (with Merle Haggard), as well as the five albums of this present series. (He also co-produced Summertime: Willie Nelson Sings Gershwin and the Frank Sinatra tributes, My Way and That’s Life, along with Matt Rollings.) This time out, on A Beautiful Time, Willie and Buddy wrote five of its fourteen songs. But there’s a twist in their partnership: “The odd thing,” Cannon says, “is we never sit in a room together to write. Never have. We start with our lyrics, and he will text me or email me. Usually text messaging, actually. He’ll text message me a verse and a chorus. He just sends me stuff, and if it’s something I can wrap my head around I’ll work on it and send it back, and we just bounce it back and forth. We kind of make the melody up when I get back with him.”
There’s a song here, not written by Nelson and Cannon but rather by Ken Lambert, that is about two men who know and respect — and rely on — each other’s nature. Sings Nelson, over a prime example of A Beautiful Time’s hushed mellifluence: “Me and my partner, that’s all that I’ve got/To help me survive what I am and am not.” Does Cannon think that sort of relationship applies to him and Nelson? “I’ve had that song for quite a while,” he replies, “but right about the time Billy Joe Shaver passed away, Ken sent it to me again. As I was listening to it, I thought, ‘Man, this is Willie and Billy Joe.’ I never did tell Willie that. But I thought this could be right for him, so I sent it to him. He loved it. This was just a matter of three or four days after Billy Joe passed, and they were so close.”
Cannon cites a different song on the album that the two did co-write, “Energy Follows Thought,” as a better example of what signifies his rapport with Nelson. “Energy Follows Thought” is what qualifies as one of Willie’s wisdom songs — the sort that bears company with “Still is Still Moving to Me,” “Your Memory Has a Mind of Its Own” (on God’s Problem Child) and “Something You Get Through” (on Last Man Standing). Nelson has a lifetime of spiritual and philosophical thought he can draw from. He was raised attending a Methodist church in Abbott, Texas (which is where he and his sister, pianist Bobbie Nelson, learned many of the spirituals and hymns the singer has occasionally recorded), but in addition to that more traditional upbringing he educated himself in Taoism, in some Buddhism — including Zen — and in the writings of Khalil Gibran and Edgar Cayce, among other studies. He has adapted some of those teachings and disciplines in how he thinks and how he conducts himself. More to the point, though, he has also developed his own hard-earned, real-life sagacity, much of which he has set forth — often with great humor — in his books, The Tao of Willie and Letters to America (In the latter, he shared his family motto: “#1. Don’t be an a — hole. #2. Don’t be an a — hole. #3. You’ve got it: Don’t be a goddamned a — hole.”) “Energy Follows Thought” is a summation of some of the thought Nelson has infused himself with as a way of moving through life: “Imagine what you want/Then get out of the way/Remember energy follows thought/So be careful what you say/Be careful what you ask for/Make sure it’s really what you want/Because your mind is made for thinking/And energy follows thought.” As the song moves along, it unrolls as a map for the mind that is part-psychological and part-otherworldly: “Wherever you are sleeping/And your dreams take you away/Go on with your dreaming/And listen to what they say/And if you hear spirits talking/Their wisdom can’t be bought/Apply it to your thinking/And energy follows thought.”
(Mickey Raphael names “Energy Follows Thought” as a favorite track on the album. “Whether Willie knows this or not,” he says, “this song scratches the surface of biocentrism, which kind of edges up to quantum physics. The theory is that life creates the universe, not the universe creates life. And that things don’t exist until they’re observed. I think that this song touches on that. That, plus Willie has always been very positive. The cup has always been half full and not half empty.”)
When I ask Cannon if he has ever talked with Willie about the singer’s philosophical views, he says: “Never have. I don’t really need him to explain it to me. I think I get it. For me, I can just watch him and listen and learn about that part of him. I think that’s one reason that he and I work together so well. He’s just Willie and he says whatever he says, but I mean, it’s like almost everything he says is philosophical in a way. Even his humorous stuff. That goes all the way back to the beginning of his songwriting. His songs have always made me think, or made me want to play them again to make sure I got everything. And every time I hear them, I realize I didn’t get everything before, so they make me think again. I think after I listen to a Willie song or talk to him, I feel better. Even if it’s not a happy song, it kind of relaxes your brain a little bit. That’s why I love this song. It’s sort of like reminding yourself to be careful. Be positive. Stay away from the negative, because what you think and what your brain thinks can make you react. If you want to be a good person, I guess, you got to watch what you think. But as far as our songs go, we don’t talk about them. We just write them. When I get a chance to be around him, we usually end up laughing our butts off at some dumb joke or something.”
Perhaps it’s in recognition that the music here materialized out of camaraderie; or perhaps it’s to counter the sort of times we’ve been living through — times in which we can’t always be in the presence of each other’s company: Either way, A Beautiful Time refutes the dark distance in our recent lives with songs that put a premium on the brace of close friends and community. “Me and My Partner” is one such song, as is a cover of the Beatles’ “With a Little Help from My Friends” that sounds just like…a Willie Nelson song — one that belongs here. Nelson isn’t singing it to register himself near the Beatles’ realm, not even as a tribute. He’s singing it because it’s a truth in his life: he has gotten by, in no small part, because of a lifetime colony of friends. Just as important, there’s a statement of value here: people need the community and help and accountability and courage of one another, and the song has always been a witness to that. (“I was thinking of getting a bunch of people to sing on it,” says Cannon, “guest singers, with the end game being to get Ringo on it, you know? But then I thought that was too obvious. I listened to it again and figured Willie sounds great on it by himself. It actually works better this way.”)
Interestingly, two of the other songs here about friendship, “A Beautiful Time” and “We’re Not Happy (Till You’re Not Happy),” depict more or less factually how comradeship has worked in Willie’s life — that is, they’re true stories — yet Nelson didn’t have a hand in writing either one. Rather, they are by Shawn Camp, who lives in Nashville and has written and recorded several albums of his own and who appeared as a session guitarist on Nelson and Merle Haggard’s Django and Jimmie, as well as on albums by John Prine, Nanci Griffith and Guy Clark, among others. (He also produced Clark’s My Favorite Picture of You, the title song of which Nelson covered on 2019’s Ride Me Back Home.) Camp tells me that Willie Nelson effectively gave him his first valuable lesson on guitar — when Shawn was still a child. “I started guitar at five,” he says, “but the first time I ever listened to an album and learned a solo off it as a guitar player was with Willie Nelson’s ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ I thought, ‘Now I’ve got an understanding of how to play a solo.’ I waited until he was on the CMA awards show — I think it was 1975 [Camp would have been nine]. I got my guitar out and I was going to play along with Willie when he played ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ — and he played a free-form improv solo. It wasn’t anything like the record. That was an epiphany for me: You don’t have to play everything the same. After that, just the way he floated through music always really impressed me — the thing of his resilience, like letting stuff roll off of him as he kept going, kept moving.”
Camp, now 55, penned the title song here: a day-in-the-life account of Nelson’s life on the road in long-past yesteryears. In the early 1970s, Willie had left Nashville and moved back to Texas, where he was honing a confident new style night after night, often driving his band from one show to another. “Well, I do the drivin’,” the song goes, “They do the drinkin’/That’s how I keep us alive” — which is how things worked. It was in that time that Nelson settled into life as an itinerant musician — a way of life he never relented on until the pandemic. Camp’s words for Willie could be Willie’s words for Willie: “If I ever get old /I’ll still love the road/Still love the way that it winds/And when the last song’s been played/I’ll look back and say/I sure had a beautiful time.” The song isn’t only about Willie’s formations, but it’s also about friendships and vocations that make for a communion. The men in that car love what they are doing, the meaning they find in doing it. They are moving through life together on that road — at least for a time.
Says Camp: “I had written the song just imagining Willie in the period before Red Headed Stranger. He used to tour in a station wagon and pull a trailer down in Texas. This was just my imagination about picturing him in that situation. Man, those old Texas roads are long and hot.” Shawn first played the song several years ago — in a somewhat different form — for Willie after a David Letterman appearance that he accompanied the singer on. Nelson liked it and told Camp he wanted to record it, but between Willie and Buddy they have a long list of songs they love and intend to get to. “I’ve been waiting around ten years for him to record this,” Camp says. “All of a sudden, out of the blue, here it is.”
Camp’s other song, “We’re Not Happy (Till You’re Not Happy),” recounts another way Nelson spends time with friends: at his notorious all-night card games in an anteroom that is part of his homestead, Luck, Texas. Nelson loves the fun of the games, but he nevertheless takes them seriously. Camp wrote the song after tagging along with Cannon to one of the affairs, and he based its lyrics on what he saw and heard: “We’re not happy till you’re not happy/Here comes ol’ moneybags again,” Nelson sings in the album’s lightest moments. “We’re not happy till you’re not happy/But we’ll gladly let you buy back in my friend.” Shawn recalls: “Willie’s sitting there, and all these big cats are sitting around playing $500 buy-ins, and this guy that owns a big steak steakhouse chain around America, he walks in and he had been there for two or three nights in a row. Willie kind of says under his breath, ‘Here comes old money bags again.’ The guy, he had lost $10,000 the night before, or something. Willie has a sign on the wall in his little poker room — he calls it Django’s Orchid Lounge, like in the song — and the sign says, ‘We’re not happy till you’re not happy.’ Willie kept trying to get me to buy in, get in on the game. I said, ‘Look, Willie, I am never going to play cards with you, but I will shoot pool with you because I’ve seen you shoot pool, and that’s one thing you can’t practice on that bus, shooting pool.’
“I thought, ‘If Willie don’t write a song about that, I’m going to write a song about it and give it to him.’ That’s when I got with my buddy Charles Humphrey, who used to be with a group called the Steep Canyon Rangers. When he comes to Nashville, we’ll usually try to write a song. I knew Willie was looking for a song about gambling. I also knew that Charles knows all the terminology of poker. I’ve never played poker really, so it took both of us to put that one together.”
In contrast to A Beautiful Time’s accounts of people who are close in one another’s lives — the men in the station wagon, touring Texas; the unlucky gamblers who end up in Django’s Orchid Lounge at Willie’s — there are also songs about what remains when relationships fall away: when one person holds a presence in his mind of somebody who is no longer there. One such tale of absence is “Dreamin’ Again,” by Jack Wesley Routh, who has written songs recorded by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Karen Brooks, Tanya Tucker, Emmylou Harris, Reba McEntire, Tanya Tucker and Linda Ronstadt. (In 2021, Willie Nelson recorded a version of Routh’s “Dreams of the San Joaquin” with Michael McDonald and Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo to benefit refugee and immigrant services.) Routh has known Buddy Cannon for nearly fifty years — they met in Nashville and played for a time together in a band — but it wasn’t until a short while back that Routh thought of offering him “Dreamin’ Again,” a song he’d written in 1984 with a friend, Douglas Graham. He recalls being at a Super Bowl party not long after, where Willie and Merle Haggard, Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall were in attendance. “They were all passing a couple of guitars,” he says, “and I could hardly get the guitar in my hand among those guys. Of course, I was a young guy, but I’ve kicked myself ever since for not getting that song sung to Willie at that time.”
In 2020, Routh finally did: He recorded a demo of it on his phone, just his voice and guitar, and sent it to Buddy. “The overall vibe of the song,” says Cannon, “is like a throwback to the days when Willie was doing things like ‘Hello Walls’ — things that people don’t really do anymore. That is, it sounded like a Willie song. Willie could have written it.” The producer, his band and Nelson recorded “Dreamin’ Again” early last year. It’s indeed what its title claims it to be, a dream song, but when Willie sings it he also makes a palpable reality of the person the song is dreaming about: “I turned in my bed and found myself reachin’ for you/Frost on the window and the warmth of the love we once knew/I reached out to hold you and to feel your breath on my skin//But then I awoke and I knew I’d been dreamin’ again.” He goes on to ask himself questions he likely asks himself every night in the dark: “What’s a dream to a dreamer when the ghost of the love is all gone/What’s a song to a singer when the last of the crowd has gone home/What’s a gift to a giver when there’s nobody there to receive/What is faith to a lover when there’s nothing left to believe/Tonight I’m alone and I know I’ll be dreamin’ again.”
The specter of the longed-for person who is gone but remains forever present in the singer’s heart also figures powerfully in two other songs here: Willie and Buddy’s “My Heart Was a Dancer” and Rodney Crowell and Chris Stapleton’s “I’ll Love You Till the Day I Die.” In the former, the singer is recalling somebody who was once the best part of his life — somebody perhaps he wasn’t fully worthy of — but she is now accessible only in memory: “My heart was a dancer/She made her living on her toes/And what she ever saw in me/Only God in Heaven knows…/My heart was a dancer/I’d love to see her dancing now/Pretty and graceful/Still beating just for me somehow/My heart was a dancer /Another lifetime ago.” Says Cannon: “Willie…it may mean something different to him, but it seems to me like it’s a reflection of someone that he really loved at one time who’s no longer in the picture. The line about ‘made her living on her toes’ — that’s some sad stuff that can also almost makes you smile.”
“I’ll Love You Till the Day I Die” describes a scenario in its opening that seems it could only be a fictional construct: “I only saw you once and that was a long, long time ago,” Nelson intones, like he’s breathing his way into a faraway memory that’s never really faraway. “You probably don’t remember me, but I thought I’d let you know/That one short conversation is still the reason why/I’ll love you till the day I die.” The song goes on: “I didn’t know my heart back then, what was there to know/If I could do it all again, I’d never let you go/Twenty minutes twenty years ago is still the reason why/I’ll love you till the day I die.”
Is this an imagined remembrance? A romantic illusion?
As it turns out, Rodney Crowell tells, me it’s a true story: “It goes back to the late 1980s,” he says. “After a gig one night in a rock and roll club in Minneapolis, the Cabooze, there was a very attractive woman standing alone, and as I was done, she said, ‘I enjoyed that.’ We just struck up a conversation and I said, ‘Well, come on the bus.’ We sat on the bus and just talked. We had this conversation, and it was love at first sight. I was married — happily married — and had children, and…I just felt deeply in love with this woman. But it was time to go. The bus was leaving, and I had a choice there: Do I declare how I feel about her and see what happens, or do I let it go? She got off the bus and the bus rolled off, and that was the last time I saw her.
“I had that first verse, but I would never allow myself to go on with it, because I got back home and I was married. That marriage ended and I was married again. I would sneak up on the song a little bit and take it a little bit further, but I never would commit entirely to it until Chris called. He was coming over to see what we could drum up, so I said, ’Chris, I’ve sat on this idea for years and years and years. I’ve sat on it for twenty years. What do you think?’ We started and then he gave me the line. He said, ‘Twenty minutes twenty years ago…,’ and I said, ‘Okay, you’re in now.’ We went from there. Until then, I didn’t give myself permission to finish it because I felt I was dishonoring the women that I was with. But my wife now, Claudia, she gets good writing. It doesn’t matter what the backstory is. ‘If it’s the truth and you get it right, good enough for me.’ So that song was born out of the truth. I really did fall madly in love with a woman that I had a twenty-minute conversation with.
“The song sat there a long time — the emotion, and that moment of having first laid eyes on someone whose name I cannot even tell you. I know what she was wearing, and I know the color of her hair, and I know the color of her eyes, but I don’t know her name. Closer to thirty years later, I’m sitting with Chris, telling him about it, and it’s still as present. It’s almost like the perfume is still in the room. I thought this would have to be a good song because of the raw materials of its making. I tend to think that my better songs come from some experience like that, where I can’t make up the truth. I’m pretty good at making up the truth if I need to, but not as convincingly as it is when it is the absolute truth. I recorded a version of it that’s in the can, as they say, but I just had an album out. It’d be a while before I was going to release it, so my publisher said, ‘You mind if I send this to, Mark Rothbaum [Willie Nelson’s manager]?’ He recorded it right away, and it didn’t surprise me because to me, it sounded like it was right in his place. In the original melody that I first showed to Chris, it was probably just me subconsciously conjuring Willie’s phrasing and his tempo.”
Now, all this time later, what does Crowell feel Willie’s voice brings to his story? “When you live long enough, to where regret becomes self-acceptance, you can make a song more timeless and more lasting.” To be sure, Willie Nelson can sing that way.
Crowell goes on to tell me further about his experience of Nelson: “I started listening to him on radio in Houston in 1964, right around the time I was hearing Dylan and the Beatles. I had a paper route, and as I was on a bicycle, delivering, I was getting ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues,’ ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ and Willie’s ‘I Never Cared For You’ in the same workspace.” In 1972 ,Rodney moved to Nashville to find a career as a songwriter, and he credits Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, with bringing him to Willie’s attention. In his song, “Nashville 1972,” on Close Ties, Crowell sings: “I first met Willie Nelson with some friends at a party/I was twenty-two, yeah so, and he must have been pushing forty/Now there was hippies and reefer and God knows what all, I was drinking pretty hard/I played him this shitty song I wrote then puked out in the yard.” Is that another of Crowell’s true stories? “Yeah, it is true. It was the first time that I was in Willie’s presence, along with a bunch of songsters at John Lomax’s place. Willie was there and we all got to have our go at playing one of our songs. I didn’t play it directly for Willie. He was sitting there, and I played this really forgettable song and was so ashamed of it that I drank harder than I might have and did wind up throwing up out back. So, yes, there’s a real element of truth in the song, though it’s not like I played it for Willie to consider for his next recording.”
Later, Crowell was playing in Emmylou Harris’s band, “and we did about a year’s worth of opening for Willie and Family. One of my first performances with Willie was at the Palomino Club in L.A.; this, again, was courtesy of Mickey Raphael. I’m in the audience and I’m pretty buzzed on the smoke and drink, and Willie just says, ‘Hey, I’m going to do a song by Rodney Crowell. I think he’s in the audience. Rodney, you there? Can you come up and sing with me?’ I wasn’t ready for that. I do remember — and forgive me if it seems self-aggrandizing — but as I was walking up, I thought, ‘I’m being knighted right now as a songwriter. I’m okay, I’m in the right place. I’m doing the right thing.’ I don’t think I’ve ever looked back since that particular moment. And it was Willie. I don’t know if I sang well with him or not that night. It didn’t matter. It was a recognition from somebody who meant so much to me.
“Having gotten to know Willie over the years, being around him, realizing that what you see is real — the nonchalance and the kind of Zen approach to things, ‘there’s nothing to get excited about here’ — it’s very pleasurable to be around that high level of intelligence. The years it was going to take me to grow like that…I’m still headed toward that self-acceptance. If Willie is ever self-conscious — and self-consciousness is, I always say, the enemy of great art — if Willie has some form of self-consciousness in the most negative form of what we think that is, I’ve never been able to see it. That’s why I always said he’s the Buddha. There’s certain things about Willie at 89 that he already was at 39, but it’s deepened. When I was younger, I was around him a lot. But in recent years, it’s been more a blessing to have a little time with Willie because he’s a touchstone. He’s a campfire. You can go stand by him and warm your hands a little bit, and pause for a minute. If this is Willie at 89, it’s like, come on 99.”
A handful of other songs, in addition to “Energy Follows Thought,” also illustrate that Buddha-like quality of Willie’s that Crowell attested to: songs that span death (“I Don’t Go to Funerals”), fate (“Live Every Day”), age (“Dusty Bottles’’) and grace (“Leave You with a Smile”). “I Don’t Go to Funerals” and “Live Every Day” — both by Nelson and Cannon — have slightly jarring moments, but a hell of a lot more love. “I don’t go to funerals/I won’t be at mine,” Nelson sings in the former, over the most genially uptempo beat on the album, before going on to soften the blow: “I’ll be somewhere looking back/At loved ones left behind/My life has been a wonder/And I found my place in time/But I don’t go to funerals /And I won’t be at mine.” The song is in the vein of “Still Not Dead,” “Last Man Standing,” “Heaven is Closed” — dark-humored songs in which Nelson acknowledged an awareness that all things must pass, but in which he also reveled in enjoying an anticipatory last laugh in the here and now. “You’re right,” says Cannon. “It’s one of those. We’re closer to it than we were last time we made a record, you know? It’s just a fact of life, and that’s that.”
Though there might be a laugh here and there in “I Don’t Go to Funerals,” Nelson isn’t joking with the title’s claim. “I don’t know when he came up with that that title,” says Cannon, “but I thought it was funny when he sent it to me. I mean, I laughed — then jumped on it. We passed it back and forth three or four times and had the full lyric to it. But it’s true: Since I’ve known Willie, I don’t know of a funeral he’s been to. He’s going to be just as sad whether he goes to the funeral or not, and the people grieving are going to be just as sad whether he goes to the funeral or not. I admire that he can put his grief on the shelf.” Even, it turns out, any grief for himself.
“Live Every Day” — the title alone is fit for these times — is the Golden Rule (an idea that stretches back pre-Buddha, to the Confucian age) prescribed the Willie way: “Live every day like it was your last one/And one day you’re gonna be right,” Willie sings as congenially as one can sing lines like that, then again softens his blow: “Treat everyone like you want to be treated/And see how that changes your life…./If there’s someone you love and you haven’t told ‘em/You oughta tell ’em today/If there’s someone you’ve wronged/And you’ve not said I’m sorry/It might be a good thing to say/Pick up the phone and send them a message/It’s time to make everything right/Live every day like it was your last one/One day you’re gonna be right.” I ask Cannon: Did the fearful state of the last couple of years inspire both the admonition and the tone of kindliness that are in the song? “Not really,” he says. “This pandemic thing, I think everybody would like to forget about it, but you can’t forget about it. I mean, we didn’t plan that idea up front. We didn’t say, ‘Hey, let’s make a record like this.’ It’s just a collection of songs basically, but if it helps anybody escape from the madness in the world right now, then, hey, we did a good job. This song is saying you better be good, because there might not be another step out in front of you.”
Nelson didn’t write “Dusty Bottles” — Jim “Moose” Brown, the keyboardist on many of Nelson’s recent albums, co-wrote it with Scotty Emerick and Don Sampson — though it’s another example of others writing directly to his experience. It is a song about getting older — a subject Willie hasn’t shied away from, nor faced with any apprehension. “There’s something to be said for getting older,” he sings here, with both comfort and authority. “Dusty bottles pour a finer glass of wine…/Don’t get me wrong/It’s good being young/But there’s something to be said for getting wrinkles/Every song worth singing’s got those lines.” I ask “Moose” Brown: Was it hard to conceive the song from Willie’s vantage of age? ”We’ve all been writing for a long time,” Moose says, “and it’s tougher and tougher as you get older and don’t write the kind of stuff that’s on radio. We were all tapping from an honest place. It was only after we finished it, we realized, ‘Man, this would be perfect for Willie.’ We didn’t set out with that goal in mind.” But, admits Brown, being around Nelson has had a certain effect. “I think he’s as inspired — if not more inspired — now as ever, and has more to say. It shows in his vocals and in his writing. I hope I get to live to be 89, and I hope that when I am 89, I’m as inspired as Willie is. He’s still really driven.”
A Beautiful Time’s closing song, “Leave You with a Smile,” is by Buddy Cannon, Bobby Terry (a guitarist on this series’ albums) and Matt Rossi, and it manages to sound all the thematic notes that have rung across the album: friendship, mortality, wisdom and absence, as the singer communicates his love to somebody he perhaps hasn’t always done his best by and knows he will eventually leave. That is, time will run out for them, but before it does he wants to prepare his leave-taking in the right way, in the right voice, on a grace note: “I just wanna leave you with a smile/Even though that hasn’t always been my style/I’ve messed up best intentions, but I’ve loved you all the while/And I just wanna leave you with a smile.” Says Bobby Terry: “One thing I noticed from playing on these records over the last few years is that everything Willie sings is something that is real to him. He’s not making anything up in the lyrics, and so we were just trying our best, me and Matt and Buddy, to sound like it’s coming from him. There was nobody else that this song was in mind for. Not every day do we sit down to write for someone specifically, but this was one of those days.” It certainly worked for Nelson. Says Buddy Cannon: “Bobby Terry and Matt Rossi were pretty far down the road with this song when they asked me if I wanted to help them complete it. I did. We finished it up in one day, I think. Then Bobby — he plays guitar and steel guitar on these Willie records; he’s a wonderful musician — recorded a track at his studio, a sparse demo. I sent that to Willie, and he liked it a lot and told me to cut him a track on it. I had Bobby do it out at his house. He played everything on this track except harmonica.”
“Leave You with a Smile” is A Beautiful Time’s benediction; “a good way to close the record down,” says Cannon. If it were to end up as the track that in fact closes this series, then it would be a fitting grace note for that purpose too, though I wouldn’t count on that. “We’re getting ready to make a new album,” Cannon tells me. “We’ll start it pretty soon here. It’s a country record, but I don’t want to talk too much about it, except to say I think it requires some more energy in the tracks this time around.”
In “Still Not Dead,” at the outset of this series in 2017, Nelson sang: “I run up and down the road making music as I go/They say my pace would kill a normal man/But I’ve never been accused of being normal anyway.” He hasn’t been able to run up and down that road much for a couple of years now due to the necessary limits imposed by the pandemic, but he would if he could, and likely he will again when he can. “Willie, I’m sure, is chomping at the bit to get out there and play,” says Mickey Raphael. “For him it’s not about the money. He loves to play. Willie knows who he is. He’s cognizant of where he’s been and also where he’s going. I mean, this music he’s making now is age appropriate. It’s not like he’s singing a song about young love. It’s more along the lines of the Toby Keith song he sang on Last Rose of Spring, ‘Don’t Let the Old Man In,’ that awareness of age and pushing back against it. But he also has a sense of humor about it. I mean, that song ‘I Don’t Go to Funerals,’ that’s tongue-in-cheek. If he can make fun of his mortality, I think that’s great. But he doesn’t dwell on it. He’s not saying, ‘Oh, I’m so old.’ I mean Annie, his wife, is substantially younger than he is, and somebody asked them, ‘Aren’t you worried about the age difference? Being with someone so much older?’ And Willie goes, ‘If she dies, she dies.’ His sense of humor, I think, is pulling him through.”
I asked Buddy Cannon at the time of God’s Problem Child, five years ago, why Nelson pushes past the point where many others would have relented. “He’s a born troubadour,” said Cannon. “It’s the greatness: That early genius that was him and his songs is still there. Some of these lyrics he sends me — a lot of stuff we haven’t even recorded or put down yet — I just get it out and read it sometimes and it’s pretty amazing. It’s just wherever that stuff comes from for him, and always has. It’s like he says: He thinks him and his guitar will both break at the same time. But I’ve never heard Willie say anything like, ‘We’re going to do it one more year, and that’s it.”
As Rodney Crowell said, if this is Willie at 89, come on 99.
