The Current - Why this journalist ranked all 153 of Willie Nelson's albums

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

The great Willie Nelson released his 153rd album this year — and shows no signs of slowing down, even at 91 years of age. Music journalist John Spong has ranked all of Nelson’s  records and explores the artist’s story in the podcast, One By Willie.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. If silence is golden, what color is sound? That is the unmistakable voice of legend Willie Nelson singing Color of Sound. Breathe the color of sound. If silence is gold

This is from his latest album, Last Leaf on the Tree, Willie Nelson's 153rd album. He's 91 and still one of the most prolific musicians out there, simultaneously a pillar of American culture and an icon in the counterculture. Newsweek has called him the king of country music in 1978. But Willie Nelson has done it all. Country, blues, jazz, gospel, rock, pop, even reggae.

And music journalist John Spong has probably listened to more of Willie Nelson's music than anyone else. He spearheaded the creation of a definitive ranking of all those 153 albums for the magazine Texas Monthly. He's the host of a podcast from PRX and Texas Monthly called One by Willie. John Spong spoke with Matt Galloway in November. Here's their conversation. Willie Nelson, as I said, we probably have an idea of who he is in our minds. He's a legend. People might think of him in one way or the other.

For you, who is Willie Nelson? He is so much more than that legend. There is a conventional wisdom that he is this artist who struggled for 10 years in the 60s and then was tried to—made to look conservative and sing in a traditional conventional commercial way and then made it to Austin and grew his hair out and turned into this artist we love and and so was off the real story is so much deeper than that and and what what I love about it when you look at all his records they're all about relationships they're all about real friendships and real feelings.

And there's just an authentic quality there that is impossible not to fall for. We'll hear a bit more from him a little bit later on. But Daniel Lanlois, the great Canadian producer in the podcast, compares him to Bob Marley. Says that bikers and grandmothers and everybody in between kind of loves Willie Nelson. I love that. I love that. And to go a step further with the Marley analogy, if you ever start nerding out on YouTube dives and you look at old Marley live footage from show to show, his band is different every night and they're getting completely lost in the music and they create something special and singular each night

with the same songs each night. And that's Willie and the family band. They do the same thing. And there's just this wonderful spiritual quality to both. How did you fall in love with his music? Well, I'll tell you, you know, I grew up in Austin in the 70s and it was everywhere. And as I started to get older and start paying attention

to what I'm hearing in the 80s when I'm in high school and college, the songs that I'd always enjoyed listening to started to mean more as I understood life more and understood the messages in the songs, but also as I came to appreciate the artistry in a different level. Was there a gateway song for you? Oh, wow. A bunch of them because there's so many tunnels to go down. But like Blue Eyes

Crying in the Rain, if you're in Austin in the mid-70s, that's when you go, oh, this is what we've been trying to tell the world about this artist, Willie. And through the ages

I'll remember Blue eyes crying in the rain But then, I don't know, Poncho and Lefty in the 80s with Merle Haggard, and it's such an incredible, incredible cinematic dramatic story that they tell together but about that time there's always on my mind quite as good as I should have that was a big one for me as a kid because that was an Elvis song you don't take songs from Elvis right but Willie did that became his song and then I remember seeing him sing it on Letterman and on Johnny Carson and all these wide appeal shows.

And it's like, oh, man, the whole world's getting it, aren't they? You were always on my mind. Tell me about the ranking that you did. I mean, that's tied to this podcast as well. Why would you want to do this? Why would you want to sift through everything that he has done and try and put it in some sort of order? Well, it's funny because those kind of lists are everywhere. Like, I remember one of the first ones I saw that I really enjoyed reading was all of the Beatles songs, you know, in ranked. all of the Beatles songs in ranked. And one of the things I noticed about those kinds of stories is when you were at the bottom of the list, the bottom of the rankings, it's often like a pithy

one or two lines, maybe just five words about that song. When we were talking about putting this list together and realizing just how many albums there were going to be, one of the editors said in a preliminary meeting, the guy who was going to head up the effort, he said, let's be honest with ourselves. The difference between album number 89 and number 90 is not going to be significant. It's not going to be meaningful. Let's just state that up front. And I kind of got my back up and I said, the only way that this effort, this project is worth doing is if we treat the difference between 89 and 90 like it's life or death. Why would we spend the time to do this? The artistry deserves better. Willie deserves better. And why wouldn't we try? Let's go back to 1962. This is album number

four in your rankings. And then I wrote, which is Willie Nelson's first full-length album. How did this record set the tone for what he would do and the impact that he would have decades down the line? It's interesting because it's very much an evolution. What that album, I would have to say, does, because it's in retrospect. At the time it had these amazing songs on it. It's probably the most incredible debut by a singer-songwriter ever. I want to say crazy and funny how time slips away and Hello Walls are back to back to back on that record. That is unimaginable.

Hello Walls. Hello. Hello. It didn't do that much for him in the moment because it didn't sell. It didn't do that much for him in the moment because it didn't sell. It didn't make him the star that Nashville thought he rightly should be. But when you go back and look at it now, it's like, holy smokes. He was this fully formed as a songwriter

when he showed up. That's amazing. Another lonely night with me But lonely walls, I'll keep you company There is Willie Nelson, and often in saying that, you'll say Willie Nelson and Trigger. Who is Trigger? Trigger is the most famous guitar in America

with the sole exception maybe of Lucille with B.B. King. I will say, though, there were multiple Lucilles through B.B.'s life. There ain't but one Trigger. And you can tell when you look at Trigger because Trigger has been played six ways from Sunday. It's got that big hole in it. Yeah.

And everybody likes to talk about how that must be why it has such a distinct sound. It's got the distinct sound in part because it's a classical guitar, and no one ever played classical guitars in country music, probably will it. ever played classical guitars in country music prior to Willie. It's an acoustic that has this weird hookup for the tech nerds out there who would actually be able to explain it better than I can that doesn't quite fit with what the guitar was designed to do. So it gives it this slight element of fuzz whenever Willie

plays it. And then you fuzz whenever Willie plays it. And then you add in that Willie plays the guitar like no one else ever has. There's just, people talk about the phrasing of his singing and how he's like a jazz singer like Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra moving around the beat. He does the same thing with that guitar, and so it makes for this really subtle interplay between guitar and vocals. For me, it builds a curiosity. I wonder what's coming next, and it makes me lean in. He's had nicknames over the course of his career. The Mayor of Weedsville, that's kind of self-explanatory. He's also known as Shotgun Willie and the Redheaded Stranger.

And those are both titles of albums that are in your top five. Talk about Shotgun Willie. Shotgun Willie is really this turning point record for Willie. Shotgun Willie sits around in his underwear. One of the things we tried to do was not just to review the record and tell you how it sounded and what was interesting about it musically, but to tell you where he was in his life. And with Shotgun Willie, he had finally gotten out of the Nashville system. He recorded it with Atlantic Records.

Everybody likes to talk about how what happened there was that Willie finally got some creative control, and that's why he made this record that didn't sound like any other country record ever had before. It's funky in a way country music hadn't been. All those things are true, but the real key to that record is it's the first time he ever recorded with his older sister Bobby.

When they recorded that record in New York, I mean these are country people and they grew up playing songs together and that was their life, that was how they felt safe and kind of free during the depression when they grew up so impoverished. When Bobby was going to record on that record with Willie, she flew to New York, and it was her first time ever in an airplane. One other little thing, if I can, to add in there, it's really cool. Willie had some writer's block, as I understand it, when they got set to record that album. And so they've got a week in the Atlantic studio in New York, and he is kind of at a loss. What does he do? Instead of working on the record he's not ready to do, he just records a bunch of gospel songs with Bobby and the band. Because those are the songs he and Bobby played when they were kids that brought them

together, that taught them music, that taught them that the world could be a safe place if they were just within this music. So he spent the first couple days making a gospel record. It was released about five years later. It's called The Troublemaker. It is beautiful. He had to do that in order to get to a place where he could make Shotgun Willie. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs.

And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things that people may know about his life and the career that he has had is that he's had run-ins

over the course of success and stuff like that with the tax collector. There's a story of how he owed what, $17 million in unpaid taxes. And he released, as you do, you turn that into something. He released the IRS tapes in 1991. This is the first track on that record,

Who'll Buy My Memories. A past that sprinkled with the blues A few old dreams that I can't use Who'll buy my memories of things that used to be. What do you hear when you listen to that? Man, that record kills me. That is one of my favorites. Do you love that record, too?

It's really, because it comes out of a wild circumstance, too, and he manages to make something beautiful out of it. It's one of these great things that, again, with the list, when we dug a little deeper, so Willie has this trouble with the IRS and about that time,

you know, his oldest son dies. And his sister Bobby had two sons die in the sixth month, right around in there. Those are the hardest things anyone could ever deal with, right? And then with it, he has become a joke on late-night television. You know, Willie takes himself very seriously. He's always got that smile and that charm, and it's fun,

but he's really serious and intentional with what he does. And being a joke was painful for him. The IRS tapes really were the, this is how Willie deals with stuff. For one, music is always the answer. Music always will make things better. So start there. He had been working on those songs. It's an album.

It's a double record, at least it was initially, of him playing just songs that he wrote, just him and his guitar. So already it's going to be lower cost to make it, right? It's going to have a higher profit. My favorite part about this, do you remember who Bob Johnson was? Remind me. Bob Dylan's producer, Leonard Cohen's producer, mortal figure. He had moved to Austin.

He was having his own tax troubles or had had his own tax troubles. And Willie gave him some work because Willie's a good dude and he's helping out a buddy, right? So Bob Johnston is in the studio. His chore that Willie gave him was to clean up those recordings. The FBI kicks down the door at Willie's studio while Johnson's in there. They say, we're taking everything. Don't touch anything. Everything you see is ours now.

We're the IRS. And Johnson knows how the IRS works because he had his own trouble. And he says, everything but these tapes right here, these tapes are mine. And he packs them all up and leaves with them. So now the IRS has everything that Willie owns, except for Trigger, who had also been hidden away. And Willie says, well, here's what we'll do with those records, Bob. Thanks for saving them. We're going to release those.

We're going to sell them at night through a 1-800 number. If I sell two million of them, that's 20 million bucks. I'll be able to pay the IRS off with that. Oh, but also, Bob, since you've done me this great turn, you're going to be the producer on the record and you're going to get a few points. Profit yourself. To me, that is such a great Willie story.

He was convinced he could get out of it that way. His getting out of it was a lot more complicated. But that was the first step. And then with it, you get this incredibly beautiful record. It is like listening to that is like having Willie sitting at the edge of your bed, playing the songs just for you. And not many people even remember that that record was ever released. These are the kind of stories that are associated with him.

And I mean, you have this list, but the other part of the work that you've done on Willie's catalog is putting together this podcast, talking to people about their relationship with Willie Nelson and his music. And you talk to, I mean, the list goes on and on, members of his family, Whoopi Goldberg, Casey Musgraves, and Brene Brown, who is an author and a professor. This is her speaking about the impact that hearing Willie's version of Amazing Grace. Up until that moment, I thought the lyric was, "'Twas grace that taught my heart to feel." But when Willie sang it, he sang, "'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, not feel."

And grace my fears relieved. And I'm walking through my neighborhood and I just stop and I'm like, what the hell? through my neighborhood and I just stop and I'm like, what the hell? And I played it back. And again, grace that taught my heart to fear, grace that taught my heart to fear, grace that taught my heart to fear. And then all of a sudden it dawned on me that I didn't know how to be afraid. I don't know how to be afraid. And that's the grace part. People speak with such love and reverence for Willie Nelson in this podcast. That's one of the things I love,

is the people that you talk to, from artists and people who have nothing to do with music to musicians like Sheryl Crow. Talk about him with this sense of reverence and love. Were you surprised when you sit down with people and you hear that kind of impact that his music has had on them? I'm never surprised, but I'm always floored if I can split that hair.

Because I know how much the music means to people, but when you get into the specifics of it and how personal it is, is the main thing. Brene Brown is a global figure. And one of the things that I loved about learning that from her is that she, and I'll probably even choke up because it was really an emotional conversation with her. And she was just such a generous person to talk about all that. She has changed so many people's lives by helping them deal with fear and explaining to them what fear is and where it's rational and where it's not and where it holds it back and where it doesn't and where it leads us to maybe hurt people and all that stuff. She has changed millions of people's lives with that message. She got that understanding on a walk in her neighborhood, listening to Willie Nelson sing one song on her iPod. That is so powerful.

That's global. I have to ask you quickly just about one of my favorite records, which is produced by our friend Daniel Lanois. You call this a landmark record, Teatro. What do you make of that record? That's a great one to bring up because a lot of people, there are so many records that everybody's got blind spots, right? And for me, growing up in Austin, Teatro was a blind spot. I loved Lanois. I liked the U2 records fine. I really loved the stuff he did with Robbie Robertson. Those records were really significant for me. But then when he does Emmylou Harris's record, I was like, well, I like Emmylou Harris the way she is. And so I was not nuts about that as a 23-year-old, whoever I was. And then he did Teatro.

And I was like, this doesn't sound like a Willie record to me. It sounds like a Lanois record. And that's not what I wanted from Willie. Your heart has been forewarned. All men will lie to you. To me, it sounds like a Lanois record, and that's not what I wanted from Willie. Man, when I started working on this stuff and started to pay attention to that record, it just blew my mind. There's a lot of Willie, just old Willie songs on there that I'm used to this other way. What's so great about this is that when Lanois put them into this other framework, it allowed other parts of Willie to come to the fore. And

the main thing I think about is Lanois, he recorded it in this really cool old studio. There was no separation between any of the instruments. They were all doing it live, like sitting knee toknee and they're using all these Latin poly rhythms and all this weird stuff that has not been in a Willie record before but what it did especially if you listen close it prompted Willie to play triggered differently and you hear the flamenco influence and the Django Reinhardt influence in Willie's playing in a way that you don't on the other records.

And so that combined with just kind of the ethereal quality of the soundscape makes it a very, very special, yeah, landmark masterpiece. He's 91 now and continues to put out records. And how do you think, people often talk about the need to try to stay relevant as they get older. How do you think he thinks about that? I don't think he does. You don't think he does at all? No, he does what he does.

A long time ago, I did a story about Larry McMurtry, and I was talking to the art critic Dave Hickey about him. And he said about McMurtry, he said, McMurtry is a writer. And what that means for McMurtry is it's kind of like being a critter. You put a cow out in a field, and he's going to eat grass. You put McMurtry in front of a typewriter, and he's going to write. Willie is like that. Willie is going to create music.

It's just what he does. What do you hope we learn from the podcast about him? For me, there's some, I guess, obvious answers like, you know, finding what's in yourself and being true to yourself. That's how the success finally came for Willie. An equally important message, everything Willie has done, and I believe this, is about a real relationship. Shotgun Willie is the special record that it is because he's with Bobby, finally. So many of those duet records that he did,

there was a spade of them in the 80s with Roger Miller and Hank Snow, and I'm gonna forget the other two, forgive me, Webb Pearson. People said at the time, well, these are guys that did him favors when he was coming up and didn't have any money, and he's repaying the favor.

He wasn't repaying the favor even. That would be a fine thing to have done. No, those were his best friends. What he liked doing was playing music with those people. He built his life, he structured his life so that all of it could be real relationships. He's got that wonderful CCR cover, Have You Ever Seen the Rain?

That's with his daughter, Paula. Just Breathe with Lucas. The new album with Micah. Those are all wonderful listens. He made those with his kids because that's his life. He listens to the podcast, right? I know he listens to some of them, yeah. I know Paula, when she did the episode about Shotgun Willie and explained the gunfight that gave him the nickname Shotgun Willie, she said, yeah, I went on the bus and listened with dad and we had a really good time. So how close are you to getting him on the podcast? I don't know. I don't know. We've been talking a little bit about doing one with Annie.

And if I get to Zoom with his wife, Annie, yeah, I love the idea that he might stick his head in out of the side of the screen when I least expect it. One of the things that I've kind of always known about Willie from writing about him is that he doesn't look back. It's all about the next thing. It's like when you said something about relevance, he's not thinking about staying relevant. He's, like I say, doing what he does. I interviewed him about 10 years ago out in luck, and he was so bored when I was trying to get him to talk about Austin in the 70s. And then when we were finally done, he said, hey, man, I just cut a new song with Snoop. You want to hear it?

What in God's name do you mean you just cut a song with Snoop? And it was rolling me up and smoking me when I die. He could not wait to play his new song for somebody, and he looked at me when it was over and he said, you think it'll be a hit? I don't know a thing about anything. But I love that what you're wound up about is what you just did as opposed to something that happened 40 years ago. There's no one like him. And I love what you have done with his catalog through the list,

but the podcast is really something special. John, thank you very much for this. Thanks for the opportunity. You guys are great. John Spong is the host of One by Willie, a podcast produced by PRX and Texas Monthly. He also worked on a feature ranking all 153 of Willie Nelson's albums. Matt Galloway spoke with him in November. We were curious about what the number one album on the list was, and it is Phases and Stages from his 1974 album about the end of a marriage, told from both the wife and husband's point of view. Texas Monthly called it Willie at his most universal and absolutely singular best.