WILLIE NELSON — RIDE ME BACK HOME
by Mikal Gilmore
With Willie Nelson’s Ride Me Back Home, the artist rounds out a trilogy about mortality that began in 2017 with God’s Problem Child and was followed in 2018 with Last Man Standing. To sure, the 86-year-old singer has never overplayed the theme — it’s sometimes more implicit than conspicuous — nor have these albums made for dour work. As often as not Willie’s had fun with the subject matter. In God’s Problem Child’s “Still Not Dead Today,” a high-stepping honky-tonk zinger number inspired by the many death report hoaxes that dogged the singer — and family, friends and band — around that time (including a website report that Nelson had been found dead on his property by a groundskeeper, Willie retorted: “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.” In Last Man Standing’s title song — kicked off like a stampede heading for a rowdy midnight saloon — Nelson sang, “I don’t wanna be the last man standin’/Or, wait a minute, maybe I do…/Go on in front if you’re in such a hurry/Like heaven ain’t waitin’ for you.” Yet, even though it was a roaring two-step, there was still deadly serious matter at its heart, as Willie added: “It’s getting hard to watch my pals check out/It cuts like a wore out knife/One thing I’ve learned about running the road/Is forever don’t apply to life/Waylon and Ray and Merle…/Lived just as fast as me/I’ve still got a lot of good friends left/And I wonder who the next will be.” He was referring to the deaths of his friends — Waylon Jennings, Ray Price and Merle Haggard. When I once remarked to him that his recent records — which, in addition to this trilogy, has included a duet volume with Merle Haggard and tributes to Ray Price, George Gershwin and Frank Sinatra) amount to an extraordinary period for him, his dark brown eyes flinched. “Considering the fact that we’ve lost a lot of good friends, ‘extraordinary’ is one word for it,” he said. ‘Unfortunate’ is another. You get mixed emotions about all those things.” Buddy Cannon, Nelson’s producer and co-writer of many years (they first worked together in 2008), noted at the time that it’s only in the songs that Willie is willing to address the subject. “I haven’t had any, like, ‘death conversations’ with Willie,” he says. “As far as our songs go, we don’t talk about them. We just write them. But it’s pretty obvious, you know? None of us are getting any younger. People are falling away too quickly anymore.”
Each album in this trilogy has looked at mortality from a different angle — in ways that have been far-reaching, even surprising. In God’s Problem Child Willie wrote about memory as something that doesn’t necessarily fade with age, even if you wish it did. “Your memory has a mind of its own/I can’t tell it what to do/I can smoke and I can drink/Till it’s out of view/But I can’t hold it off, it’s too strong.” Last Man Standing had songs about forbearance. Which is to say that when Willie sang about death and loss, he was also singing about as the necessary passage we have to get through, even at its most devastating: “Life goes on and on And when it’s gone it lives in someone new/It’s not something you get over/But it’s something you get through.”
Ride Me Back Home, though, brings a different component of mortality into view: empathy. It isn’t just something we need when we near the end of our road, but more important, it’s something we need to extend outward along the way. Which is to say that Nelson goes well beyond the concerns of self here to focus on others who also face prospects of perishing — not just perishing into death but into the unconcern of the world around them — and he does so with a handful of songs by other songwriters whose insights affect him. The title track, by long-revered Nashville songsmith Sonny Throckmorton, is ostensibly about a horse whom the narrator is grateful for and wants to protect. He recalls riding the animal into battle — the horse took wounds meant for the singer and pulled wagons so others could hide. “Now they don’t need you and there’s no one to feed you,” sings Willie. “And there’s fences where you used to roam.” The man in the song longs for something better for the horse — “Somewhere where they would just leave you alone” — but you suspect he’s also envisioning a refuge of his own as endings near: “I got a small place up in the foothills/Where green grass is precious as gold/I paid a fortune for what little I got here/But you know that I’d sell my soul/To have all the mountains, the rivers and valleys/The places where you need to roam/Well I would just gather up all of your brothers/And you would just ride me back home.” The refuge the song envisions actually exists. “There’s a group called Habitat for Horses,” Nelson told SiriusXM recently, “and they told me about some horses that were getting ready to be slaughtered or sent overseas, where they eat horses. I said, ‘Well, I have all this land out here [Nelson’s 700 acre Luck ranch, near Spicewood, Texas], so bring them out here. Let’s meet some horses.’ I had maybe 10 or 15 of my own, then we brought 60 more. So now we’ve got about 75 horses. They get fed twice a day. They’re spoiled rotten. As it developed, the horses became Ride Me Back Home’s prime emblem. “Sonny lives right by Willie’s Luck studio,” says Buddy Cannon. “He said he wrote that song because he was over there and saw Willie’s horses. I don’t even know if Willie knows that or not.”
The ideal of fellow-feeling also informs “Nobody’s Listening,” co-written by Skip Denenberg and Nelson’s late bassist, Dan “Bee” Spears. (Spears died of accidental exposure in December 2011, after a fall outside his Nashville home; he had played with the singer for over 40 years.) “Willie sent me that one awhile back,” says Cannon. “Then when we were in the middle of recording this album, he said ‘Let’s try this one, see what happens.’” What happens is Nelson’s categorical art. The song is a series of plain-spoken accounts about people who lose everything or who try to bear witness to trouble that’s heavy on the heart, but time and again “it was like there was nobody listening.” There’s also a kind of magic in how the song is framed — it feels musically sumptuous, even majestic, in part because it’s heartbreakingly mellifluent and lyrically detailed. In fact, though, it’s structurally bare-boned. That magic works across the album. “I wanted there to be as little music on the record as possible,” says Cannon, “if that makes any sense. I intended Willie’s voice to be the focal point, and I wanted the band to listen to the lyrics while we were cutting the tracks. As a result, there aren’t a lot of tracks of music on any given song. For one thing, there’s hardly any acoustic strumming guitar. Every track, I cut it with two electric guitars instead of an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar. If I put an acoustic guitar on there at all it was after I had the track cut. I didn’t want it to sound typical. That majestic thing you’re talking about is, I think, because of things that aren’t on there. It’s more like they’re implied. That’s what I was going for.”
Harmonica player Mickey Raphael, who has played with Nelson since 1975’s Red Headed Stranger, agrees. “The album focuses more on the lyric than instrumentation,” he says. It’s one of these things that goes back to Willie’s mantra, which is less is more. Take for instance, one of the Guy Clark songs here, ‘My Favorite Picture of You.’ It’s such a wonderful story — well-written lyrically and well-crafted musically that you don’t need four solos, you know? You don’t need any of the musicians — who are all great — showing off. The music has to fit the song, and that’s such a poignant song and story. I think the music on this record, the musicianship complements the lyric and puts the lyric first, and not our musicianship. there’s no gratuitous soloing on here. All the notes we played, all the music we played, is very minimal. It’s what really needs to be there, what needs to be heard.”
“My Favorite Picture of You,” co-written by Guy Clark and Grammy award-winning Canadian singer-songwriter Gordie Sampson, is at the heart of this album, as in some ways so is Clark. Though Nelson’s career was well underway by the time of Clark’s 1975 debut album, Old №1, both men — who were friends — were seen in literary lights as much as musical ones: Both were brilliant lyricists and form-breaking songwriters who eclipsed the outlaw country movement they had been identified with. Clark died in May 2016, after a lengthy struggle with lymphoma, four years after the death of his wife, songwriter and painter Susanna Clark, who is the subject of “My Favorite Picture of You.” Cannon recalls: “I was just getting to know Guy when he became too sick to work,” says Cannon.” Maybe seven or eight years ago he called me up and asked me to come over and hang out a little bit, just the two of us, and he played me some songs. ‘My Favorite Picture of You’ was one of them. It was about a picture of his wife, Susanna. She was really pissed off at him when somebody took the picture. He said he and Townes Van Zandt [the late songwriter — another Texan — was both Clark and Susanna’s best friend] had been up roaring for several days, and his wife was really mad at them.” Susanna, in fact, was angry enough that she packed her bags and was ready to leave. “That was when somebody took the picture of her. Guy said he sat on that idea for a long time, didn’t do anything with it. One day Gordie Sampson called him and set up a writing appointment. They got together and Gordie said, ‘I got this idea for a song. It’s called “My Favorite Picture of You.” And Guy said the lightbulb went off in his head. ‘Man, I already know that song. I know what that song is.’ He just sat down and wrote it real quickly. That was a long time ago. We already had enough tracks for this album when I sent that to Willie. He said, ‘Man, I like this.’ So, we cut it as well. We were up against a deadline. He was in L.A. It was Grammy week and I had to be out there anyway. So, we just booked a studio and did that vocal out there.”
Nelson imbues “My Favorite Picture of You” with his respect for Clark’s art — the songwriter’s gift for grace and remembrance, for making complex poetic images and associations seem colloquial. “My favorite picture of you/Is the one where you’re staring/Straight into the lens/It’s just a Polaroid shot/Someone took on the spot/No beginning, no end/Just a moment in time/That you can’t have back/You never left but your bags were packed/Just in case…./Oh and you were so angry/It’s hard to believe/That we were lovers at all/There’s a fire in your eyes/Your heart’s on your sleeve/A curse on your lips, but all I can see/Is beautiful.” Willie Nelson is Guy Clark’s conduit here — he brings him back for one of the best moments in either man’s life.
Clark’s other entry on Ride Me Back Home, ”Immigrant Eyes,” co-written with Nashville songwriter Roger Murrah,” is perhaps the album’s best example of Cannon’s magic-making: It’s grandly rhapsodic and dignified (it was also sung by Irish tenor Ronan Tynan in 2004, in an orchestrated, partly abstract and near-operatic version), yet it’s utterly spare; you can count the instruments here on one hand, but it is Nelson’s voice that is the heart of the matter. The song was written more than 30 years ago, yet it’s by far the album’s timeliest track and its most haunting exemplar of empathy. “About a year ago,” says Cannon, “way before we started recording, Roger Murrah came by my office one day and asked me if he could play me a song for Willie. We had no recording plans at the time, but I said sure. He played me ‘Immigrant Eyes’ ‘I just know this thing would be great for Willie, especially with all the stuff going on at the borders now.’ I said, ‘I’ll hang on to it.’ I did, I hung on to it six or eight months. Then when we started talking about doing this record, I sent it to Willie and he loved it immediately. He said, ‘Yes.’”
“Immigrant Eyes” is the story of somebody’s grandfather and his remembrance of coming through Ellis Island in the early twentieth-century, afraid yet hopeful: “There my father’s own father stood huddled/With the tired and the hungry and scared/Turn of the century pilgrims/Bound by the dream that they shared/They were standing in line just like cattle/Poked and sorted and shoved/Some were one desk away from freedom/Some were torn from someone they love.” The song trembles with memory and authenticity, yet in truth it wasn’t about either songwriter’s grandfather. Rather, says Murrah, it was inspired by the love and recollections of another Nashville writer and singer, Rich Alves. “Guy had had it on his mind to write this as a tribute to our friend’s family. That meant a lot to him. He introduced the idea to me, and I loved what we could do with it. I thought it could be empathetic work that could hopefully be good for a lot of people. I told Buddy, the day I played it for him, ‘If Willie were to sing these lyrics I believe it would be like an ointment poured over this nation.’ I think a lot of people are not happy with how things are going for immigrants, because this country was built on immigrants. Buddy later told me that Willie had liked it. I remained more patient than I usually am, just to not bother them. But as time went on, I asked Buddy, ‘Have you heard any more from Willie on the song?’ He said, ‘Well, when Willie likes them he usually records them.’” Already it was in the bag. I was thrilled.”
Willie’s reading of “Immigrant Eyes” fulfills Ride Me Back Home’s pass-it-forward promise of affinity. It’s like a chain of conduct. A man comes to this land, longing for its promises. As the song says, he’s alone and confused, as are others (“Some were one desk away from freedom/Some were torn from someone they love”). He shares the remembrance with his grandson, who share it with Guy Clark, who shares it with Roger Murrah, who shares it with Buddy Cannon, who shares it with Willie Nelson, who shares it with the rest of us. This is a chain of conduct of the American dream at a crucial point, when other powers are doing their best (and worst) to break down and violate that dream. Nelson, in his own way, breathes life back into, and in turn that might others to work to sustain that legacy — to make it a renewable future, not a shattered or denied bequest.
It’s a sizable tribute to Clark and his writing, and to that of Sony Throckmorton and Buzz Rabin, who wrote Ride Me Back Home’s elegiac final entry, “Maybe I Should’ve Been Listening” (“I can’t believe how you keep hanging on to my mind/Now I know leaving means one goes and one stays behind”), that Nelson affords these songs such prominence on the album. Nelson’s own songs here are co-written with Buddy Cannon, with the exception of “Stay Away from Lonely Places,” from his final RCA album, 1972’s The Words Don’t Fit the Picture, just prior to his artistic and popular breakthroughs on Atlantic (Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages) and Columbia (Red Headed Stranger). It’s a song about depression — mortality’s most gnawing companion, and though it’s seemingly addressed to somebody else, it’s likelier Nelson was singing it to himself: “Stay away from lonely places/Till you learn to live alone/And someone’s outstretched arms are waiting/To stay with you at least till dawn.” Re-recording it was Cannon’s idea — and a good one. “I just came across it one day,” he says. “Maybe it was on Spotify. I’m the biggest Willie Nelson fan there is, and I thought I knew every song that he ever did. But I had never heard that song. It sounded totally new to me. I thought, man this feels like one of those old saloon ballads, a Sinatra-kind of a take on it. I suggested adding it here and Willie said, ‘Let’s go.’ I went after that atmosphere: It feels like you’re sitting in a cocktail lounge somewhere. It fits what the song is to me. It’s my favorite track on this album. That one and ‘My Favorite Picture of You’ are my favorite cuts on the record.”
Two of the other songs Nelson co-wrote here with Cannon — “Come On Time” and “One More Song to Write” — are of a piece with God’s Problem Child and Last Man Standing’s subject matter: They’re about living with impermanence. “Come On Time,” says Cannon, “is about a guy who realizes time is moving by. You can tell yourself you’re not a party to that, but you are, whether you like it or not.” Indeed, the song is an amusing yet dead-serious quarrel with the one thing we all contend with every day, and can’t prevail over: “I say come on time, I’ve beat you before…/Come on time, what have you got for me this time?/I’ll take your words of wisdom and I’ll try to make them rhyme…/Time, you’re not fooling me/Time, as you’ve passed me by/Why did you leave these lines on my face/You sure have put me in my place.” Nelson, of course, wears those lines well. “One More Song to Write” is about his never-ending commitment, to both himself and his listeners: “I’ve got one more song to write/I’ve got one more bridge to burn/I’ve got one more endless night/One more lesson to be learned/One more hill to climb/And it’s somewhere in my mind/I’ll know it when it’s right/I’ve got one more song to write.” At the end he adds: “There ain’t no secrets left to hide/My life’s an open book/Turn the page and have a look.”
Willie Nelson is still far away from that “one more song.” As he noted two years ago in God’s Problem Child’s “Still Not Dead”: “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.” Mickey Raphael says that he and those around the singer see no pulling back or end in sight. “We did almost a hundred dates last year. We take a couple weeks off, but he’s always ready to get back to work. He gets very antsy. When he’s at home he wants to get back. Look, Willie’s in great health. He’s playing great and he’s in a great mood. He’s just smokin’. No slowing down, no weaknesses.” I tell Raphael that it seems Nelson’s age — he turns 86 this year — is no deterrent. “I don’t know if he thinks that type of clock is ticking,” said Mickey. “He’s always put out a large amount of work. As long as I’ve known him, when one record’s done then he’s got the songs. He’s just constantly creating, putting out a lot of material. I don’t think that it’s because of his age — that feels some urgency to get this music done. It’s how he’s always been. It keeps him young and alive. The momentum, the forward movement, is what Willie thrives on. I don’t think that he wants to slow down. He has that fire.”
Buddy Cannon sees Willie as indefatigable, outrunning everyone around him. “We work so fast doing his part of these records,” he says. “He can sing a whole album in three hours. And there’s no coaching Willie. It would takes someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, at least where he’s concerned, to go out there and try to tell him how to sing.” He and Willie are already writing new material, and there are albums that are more or less finished, just waiting their day. A couple of years ago Cannon shared a reflection about Nelson, and it’s befitting with Ride Me Back Home’s accomplishments as well: “He’s a born troubadour. 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.”
