04.09.09

Gleeful Willie love!

Posted in cricket spazzes, some albums we done liked others we ain't - April 9th, 2009 at 11:04 am by Cricket

On every blog like this one, my fellow twang geeks are all a-chatter about Naked Willie. I’ve been beating myself up all week, worrying about reviewing it, about what clever things I might say that would make you go buy the album. I mean who am I to judge these songs and review their quality? It’s Willie Nelson for Pete’s sake!

And then I realized…

Duh. You ‘re already either going to buy this album or you aren’t, whether I like it or not is irrelevant (although I do like it). I mean, it’s possible, but it seems unlikely that someone reading this has been thinking, “Gosh, I’ve sure heard a lot about this Willie Nelson fellow. I should get one of his albums. I wonder which one, oh, sure Naked Willie seems like a good place to start.” No. Just not happening.

You are a Willie fan or you aren’t (and if you don’t like Willie Nelson, well, I just don’t want to know, okay, because I want to keep liking you). If you are a fan, you might feel like you have enough Willie and will save your money by simply wallowing in whatever records you already have. Or, maybe, you’re like me and you just want more more more more. And let me tell you, Naked Willie is so much more than more. So if you are the second kind of fan, go buy it already. And if you are the first kind of fan you should go buy it too. Yes, even if you already own all the songs .

Naked Willie is comprised of songs Willie originally recorded between 1965 to 1974 (I think. I do have the power to look this up but I’m just not going to). You’ve probably heard them before. You love them but cringe at the peculiar and particular sound of that era in Nashville recording. You know the one – the strange, spangly orchestration that almost sounds like polyester pants would, if they could make a noise. It occasionally makes you a little uncomfortable to hear it. And yet the songs are so damn good that you bear it. (This isn’t just a Willie problem, obviously; you find it with Dolly Parton, Waylon Jennings, David Allen Coe and many others.) Well, guess what? Here comes Naked Willie to the rescue! The songs are stripped entirely of those awkward arrangements, and listening to them feels as good as tossing those polyester pants away and putting on your best, well worn jeans –or maybe going butt naked, like Willie’s album title suggests. Mmmm, comfortable, natural, country-naked goodness.

I listened to this album without having read more about it than the three bullet points on the CD cover sticker. So I knew they were “un-produced” and re-mixed from the original tapes (and, oh, HA, I just got the ‘pull some strings’ joke). What I wasn’t prepared for is how different some of the songs sound. There’s a deep sadness verging on tragedy that lends a sense of creepiness to the stripped down songs.  The end result was that my emotional response was completely spun, more raw and open than I’d previously experienced. Because the integrity of the songs is maintained, each is still representative of the era in which is was recorded.  There’s sense memory attached to these songs, not only do the songs sound like my childhood, but even if I had never heard them before they would surely still sound like the 70s (without the cringe inducing polyester parts, of course).  For instance, the use of piano in country music is largely lost, and so here, even with the strings scrubbed out of the songs, you hear a sound that is amazing, but very much not from the present day.  These reworkings stand out as somehow nearly timeless and yet completely bound to the time they were made, which makes for music that has a secondary emotional core, that goes beyond the songs themselves.

Of course now, as I write this, I’ve read the liner notes, and everyone and their brother’s response to the album, and they all have done an excellent job of summing up and rehashing how the album came to be made naked. Many also do an excellent job of pointing out that this album brings Willie back to our attention as in incredible song writer. So I don’t have to say all that again (um, not more than I already have anyway), you can check out reviews at: Popmatters.com, Southernbrand.com, Twangnation.com and Stillisstillmoving.com.  Song BMG has a nice little video in which Naked Willie co-producer Mickey Raphael talks about the making of the album. You can also hear a bit of the songs there, in case my words (and other people’s) are not enough to convince you that you want this album.

That all said, I should say something about the songs and so I present (mostly) one sentence about each song:

1. “Bring Me Sunshine” – This could only be improved if the Muppets joined in and sang a round with Willie at the end.

2. “Following Me Around” – The subtly Spanish guitar here spins the melancholy in to something delicious, something to be savored while drinking alone in a plaza cafe in Mexico in the 60s.

3. “The Ghost” – The gorgeousness of this song makes my dim, late night loneliness seem to be eradicated by noontime sunlight.

4. “Happiness Lives Next Door” – The only remedy to this sad song is Dolly Parton’s “Two Doors Down,” which clearly must always be played right after “Happiness” to cure your broken heart.

5. “I Just Dropped By” – The instrumentation/arrangement here is so vastly improved that I almost forget to listen to the lyrics.

6. “Jimmy’s Road” – If you can listen to this without some part of your heart breaking for every soldier who ever fought for you, then you are clearly a soulless monster.

7. “I Let My Mind Wander” – There’s a happiness here that pulls from the debilitating sadness of the song that somehow makes the whole thing work really well.

8. “If You Could See What’s Going Through My Mind” – I might actually be dancing a 70s-ish boogie around the room instead of thinking of a sentence for this song.

9. “Johnny One Time” – Willie singing this is kind of gay, in a good way, and the guitar at the beginning thrills me in an odd sort of way (also it makes me want to lay aside the Brenda Lee version and hope wistfully for a Patsy Cline version to surface).

10. “The Local Memory” – There’s a starkness, just Willie and his guitar in the intro to this that makes me long for all of these songs to be done yet again, this time with just Willie and his guitar.

11. “The Party’s Over” – That’s some Cricket-swoon inducing steel guitar right there.

12. “Where Do You Stand” – Love love love this, would like to send it out as an elementary school type love note– do you like me: check yes or no–to all my future romantic interests: where do you stand?

13. “When We Live Again” – So deliciously romantic, like reading Pride & Prejudice by candle light in a big fluffy bed.

14. “What Can You Do To Me Now” – The simple clarity of the music here pushes this song over the edge into something that can perhaps only be listened to after a really bad break up. Beautiful but too sharply painful.

15. “I’m A Memory” – Again the syrupy sweetness of the old version is gone and yet some cheerfulness lingers and keeps the song from utterly destroying me emotionally.

16. “Sunday Morning Coming Down” – Holy crap!! I didn’t know it was possible to love this song even more than I already did.

17. “Laying My Burdens Down” – If I started every single day by listening to this version of this song, my life might in fact be filled with much more joy and optimism.

It’s all fantastic Willie greatness. If you really can’t go buy the album (like you are bedridden and don’t know how to use Amazon.com), today is your lucky day! I have two copies to give away. All you have to do to enter the contest is leave us a little comment, just a sentence or two, telling me what you would say to Willie Nelson if you ever met him. Two winners will be picked at random on April 15. (And hey, double your chances, Twangnation.com is also having a contest!)   Winners will be contacted via email for a snail mail address.  Whether you win it, or buy it, you gotta have it, then we can all have gleeful Willie love together again.

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