Traditional Album Evaluate: Willie Nelson Turns Outlaw on the Seminal Crimson Headed Stranger

Subsequent 12 months marks the 45th anniversary of Willie Nelson’s breakthrough nation outlaw album, Crimson Headed Stranger. To rejoice, you’ll be able to preview or stream music from Willie Nelson right here. Bonus: We’re freely giving a 14-LP Willie Nelson vinyl prize pack!

Stream by way of Apple Music | Spotify | Amazon

Crimson Headed Stranger is a haze. A half-awake dream, fueled by weed and Lone Star, the place the previous and current turn into a natant blur, coming intermittently into crystal-clear focus. A dreamily edited collectively montage of nation music reminiscences the place the roll of a barrelhouse piano fades into fireplace balladry into waltzing in a smoke-filled honky-tonk right into a gypsy- jazz jam session right into a crackly radio broadcasting people songs from simply south of the Texas border. A tribute to the songwriters — Hank Cochran, Eddy Arnold, Juventino Rosas, and Fred Rose, amongst them — whose very important components mixed boiled in Willie Nelson’s guts as he tried his damnedest to play the Nashville recreation. Nelson waited as patiently as he might for the precise opening to faucet into this stew, high it off with some authentic materials, and serve it up as a heat, inviting idea album about revenge, remorse, and redemption.

Crimson Headed Stranger was additionally the album the place Nelson and the remainder of the music world (the fits at Columbia, nation radio, and the parents who purchased information in 1975) lastly got here to an understanding. “I’ve been informed that my songs and me have been forward of my time for thus a few years,” he informed Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in 1978, “but when the occasions are catchin’ as much as me — and it looks as if they’re — and if I don’t progress, they may very effectively go me, too.”

Nelson was three years and 5 albums faraway from Stranger by that time, taking even larger dangers with Stardust, his Booker T. Jones-produced assortment of pop requirements. He might have mentioned it years earlier, although, proper after he had lastly wrenched himself from his RCA contract and its bruising efforts to have him hew to Nashville sound. He left Texas, his sails blown by the metaphorical smoke of a fireplace that destroyed his residence in Tennessee and the literal smoke he was releasing from his lungs on the common. He grew his beard out. He grew his hair out. He wore an earring. He raised hogs. He settled in, ready for some label to reward him with that lofty contractual phrase: full creative management.

That lastly arrived by way of the parents at Columbia Information who needed to grit their enamel as Nelson and his longtime band settled right into a studio in Garland, Texas, to spend 5 days recording a rustic idea album, constructed across the title observe, a tune initially written for Perry Como that discovered industrial power in a model recorded by Arthur Smith and his Cracker-Jacks within the early ‘50s.

Nelson wished to progress, however did so by going via a form of musical regression. The small print of the musical story he wished to inform have been fleshed out by authentic materials, however the connective threads have been songs from the previous, favorites that he used to play throughout his time as a DJ and written by pals. Then he stripped the preparations of this materials right down to the studs. The one option to promote this story, it appeared, was to hitch it with music that was uncooked and quick, (largely) acoustic and rough-hewn. A lot in order that, in response to legend, when Columbia president Bruce Lundvall heard it, he balked, fuming that Nelson had turned in a demo as a substitute of a completed album. Sadly for him, the ink had already dried on the contract, and the label had no alternative however to launch it. The outcome: Nelson’s first No. 1 album on the Nation chart, his first crack on the Billboard High 50, and thousands and thousands offered.

What Lundvall didn’t see was that it was Stranger’s simplicity that gave the album its enduring power. Not a simple factor to foretell if you’re anticipating one thing with a little bit muscle and a little bit of ribald, good-natured enjoyable. For all its romantic quietude that closes the album on a young, peaceable word, the previous tracks carry Biblical ranges of anguish on their slender shoulders. For all that Nelson did to show the title observe right into a lullaby for his children, its story of a person gunning down a younger girl for stealing his horse is fodder for noir-ish Westerns. And what led this weary character to that pivotal second, within the story of this beautiful album, is simply as bloody and wrenching.

You should definitely hear into The Opus: Crimson Headed Stranger when it launches September 19th with new host Andy Bothwell, aka Astronautalis. By no means miss an episode by subscribing now. You may as well revisit a collection of Willie Nelson’s greatest tracks by way of all main streaming providers.

Spotify | Google Play | Stitcher | Radio Public | RSS
Comply with on Fb | Podchaser

As informed within the opening trio of quick songs, every one snapped in opposition to the opposite like magnets, the unnamed man seals his destiny by killing his spouse and her lover. Customary narrative fare for the style, however rendered within the language of the homicide ballads carried over to the US from English people music that have been foundational to the nation music vernacular. It’s the center track of this triad that extra fully units the album’s tone. Initially written by nation singer Eddy Arnold and future Oak Ridge Boys founder Wally Fowler, “I Couldn’t Consider It Was True” is simple: the narrator sings of going to go to his woman and discovering her in mattress with one other man. In Arnold’s authentic recording, he shies away from embodying the disbelief and the sensation of growing old a decade in a single second. Nelson will get us nearer to that anguish. The instrumentation is simply two guitars, electrical and acoustic, maintaining a light-weight nation swing. Nelson’s voice, although, quavers all through, lowered at occasions to a small hush. It’s a late-night confession, justifying what he does subsequent: wailing “like a panther” and unable to forgive his spouse, even after he’s taken her life.

Its companion is one other cowl, and one of many songs that has turn into synonymous with Willie’s lengthy profession. “Blue Eyes Crying within the Rain” had a protracted historical past earlier than Nelson and his guitarist Jody Payne’s swaying rendition. Written by Fred Rose for his compatriot Roy Acuff within the late ‘40s, it had been tackled by Hank Williams, Ferlin Husky, and Conway Twitty. Once more, for a heartbroken track, there was far an excessive amount of lightness inside these earlier takes — a fond farewell with the promise of eventual reunion. Not so via Willie’s narrative. This breakup, violent because it was, was gutting, that dying ember leaving our protagonist chilly and shivering, with Mickey Raphael’s harmonica blowing via all of it like a stinging wind.

What these two songs and nearly all of the second facet of Stranger helped to solidify in the midst of Nelson’s profession was his capability to embody the songs of others. He’s a musical empath, connecting on a bone-deep degree with the lyrics in the whole lot he sings. Maybe that’s why he’s caught to a gentle consumption of pot all through his days. All the higher to assist regular the feelings operating via his system each time he picks up a guitar.

It’s that compassion that comes throughout in Stranger’s again half. The peace that his protagonist finds is coloured by a blunt exhaustion and quivering mistrust. Not even Bobbie Nelson’s jaunty rendition of Tin Pan Alley traditional “Down Yonder” can nonetheless these emotions. Hank Cochran’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms” and the smolder of “Fingers on the Wheel” (written by Willie’s pal Invoice Callery) are a primary dance by a pair on their third marriage, tender however cautious. Romantic but pragmatic concerning the actuality that it might all disintegrate at any second. They know each other’s pasts however are taking the plunge anyway, hoping that it’ll all go in a different way this time. Lovely as that closing instrumental ballad “Bandera” is, it provides no solace or assurance. Simply extra wrinkles and shading and questions. These could also be storm clouds forward, or they may burn off by morning. The one option to know for positive is to maintain transferring towards the horizon.