Willie Nelson Never in his long life has he stopped wanting to make music. After celebrating his 90th birthday in 2023 with an epic two-night concert at the Hollywood Bowl, being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and releasing two studio albums, in addition to the usual constant touring, in 2024 he finds himself as little retired as ever, with the launch of The Border.
It is his 152nd album, counting live recordings and collaborations, according to the magazine Texas Monthlywhich has recently taken on the titanic task of classifying them (The Border It is number 55 of his solo production). While her latest studio album, Bluegrassexplored the music of Kentucky, the new -produced by his old collaborator Buddy Cannon and released on streaming, CD and vinyl – is firmly rooted in his native Texas and its raw southern borderlands.
Influences from Mexican music have run through almost all of Nelson’s work, but he occasionally leans toward it, as he did with the 1998 masterpiece Theater. He does the same thing – more or less – with The Border, whose best songs contain strong doses of the sounds of Mexico. That includes the dark, gritty title track, written by Nelson’s favorite, Rodney Crowellwith Allen Shamblin and sung from the perspective of a Border Patrol agent. It begins like a Western movie, with a confrontation between the law and the cartels. “There’s a price on the head of every Border Patrol,” Nelson sings.
But then a change occurs, when the agent despairs for his life and his family and empathizes with the people he arrests. “From the shacks and the neighborhoods come the hungry and the poor,” he sings, “some drown at the crossing, others suffer no more.” Nelson pronounces these verses with a dark and direct rudeness that recalls the last recordings of his traveling companion. Johnny Cash.
Elsewhere he employs a jazz-inspired voice, developed decades ago, that has served him so well in his older years, like a pitcher who has lost his fastball but can still get people out with changeups and curveballs. He spits jazzy spit through “What If I’m Out of My Mind,” a Tejano-style Western swing number. Bob Wills, written by Nelson and Cannon. The duo wrote almost half of the songs on the album, and overall they are the strongest.
One of the standouts is “Kiss Me When You’re Through,” a sunset-driving number marked by Nelson’s Latin-influenced guitar and harmonica from Mickey Raphaelthe only surviving member of the Family Band who supported Nelson for decades. There isn’t a single bad song. If there is something to reproach The Border is that the desert and austere tone of the beginning is not maintained, and sometimes it goes from a rocking blues to a frankly carefree country shuffle.
In one of his most esoteric songs, “Hank’s Guitar,” written by Cannon and Bobby TomberlinNelson sings from the first-person perspective of the instrument Hank Williams Sr.. “He hugged Me to his chest and wrote Your Cheatin’ Heart”Nelson sings. In the end, the guitar is put in the blue Cadillac in which Williams died at age 27. It’s a reminder of how fortunate we have been to have had Nelson – arguably country music’s second-greatest to Williams – for so long.
Source: AP
[Fotos: Sony Music via AP; REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz]
