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Willie Nelson - The Border, album review

The Songwriter

Willie Nelson’s latest The Border is like a set of swan songs as it reminisces on a long life and a lifetime ago – this nostalgia so redolent in the continual reference to hearing music (often of his own) on the radio, and more poignantly in the many references to musical legends and friends who are literally in the past,

 

Once upon a yesterday
We were children working hard at play
Tomorrow was a world away
Time was standing still
The magic of the radio
Taught us songs we didn't know
We sang 'em loud and we sang 'em low
Once upon a yesterday

We heard them sing on Saturday night
Kitty and Roy and Hank
And for a lot of what we know of love and truth
We have them to thank

 

(Once Upon a Yesterday)

 

Perhaps rather than swan songs it is about writing such – though also the lifeblood of songwriting in general – and all on this collection reflect and reveal everything in that, especially the intensely emotional.

 

On the title song, Nelson’s vocal in its lower level has that gruff edge of older age, but when rising higher, he sings as purely and sweetly as ever. And he swings too as on What If I’m Out of My Mind, but one of the real beauties in this collection is the simply touching, I Wrote this Song for You,

 

I wrote this song for you
I poured out my soul
I hope you hear it on some lonely
Late-night radio
I hope it makes you smile
When I'm not there to hold on to
That's the reason why
I wrote this song for you

I worked out the melody
On my old guitar
Then I finally found the words
At the bottom of my heart
I know that that's not much
But you know it's what I do
The music speaks for me
So I wrote this song for you

 

I found this remarkably tender in its predictability and, for example, the childlike linking of ‘melody’ with ‘guitar’.

 

One of the most evocative is Hank’s Guitar where Nelson dreams of being Williams’ Martin D-28, and the metaphor/personification plays perfectly in the comfortable cliché of honest belief (the writer’s and ours); the referring to tears and crying tugging at other kinds of strings,

 

Last night I had a dream
That I was Hank's guitar
He held me close against his chest
And he wrote "Your Cheatin' Heart"
He drank a lot of whiskey
As he wrote down all that pain
When he sang it back to me
His tears fell on my strings

He picked me up and tuned me
And he played me all night long
He cried while he was singing
All those lonesome songs
Funny how a dream can be so real
And make you wonder who you are
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamed that I was Hank's guitar

Then he put me in my case
We got into that blue Cadillac
As we pulled out of Montgomery
I had a feeling that he wouldn't be coming back
Next thing I knew
I was given to the Country Music Hall of Fame
That's when I woke up
To the moanin' of a lonesome midnight train

He picked me up and tuned me
And he played me all night long
He cried while he was singing
All those lonesome, lonesome songs
Funny how a dream can be so real
And make you wonder who you are
Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamed that I was Hank's guitar

Last night while I was sleeping
I dreamed that I was Hank's guitar

 

The Texas swing of Made in Texas reminds that Nelson’s signature instrument is of course a real thing too

 

It started in the back of my daddy's ol' car
I was born beneath that old lone star
I hit the ground pickin' this old guitar
I was made in Texas
Like Bob Wills sawing on San Antone Rose
Dance hall rhythm's all in my soul
Tell everybody everywhere I go
That I was made in Texas

 

and the rest of the song evokes those other legendary C&W influences and peers who helped to shape his musical history.

 

Lest it all seems rose-tinted, there is the ruminative actual or imagined in a song like Nobody Knows Me Like You, as here from its second verse,

 

When my heart turned to stone
The lonesomeness you must have known
Wounds I've caused with deep regret
The pain of loss I can't forget
Nobody knows me
Nobody knows me like you

 

There does seem to be an overarching, autobiographical reckoning in the closing song How Much Does it Cost where the ‘songwriter’ both asserts as much as reflects. The title’s question is surely rhetorical when the ‘heartache’ as much as all the other thoughts and feelings of Nelson’s lifetime have been his constant musical fuel and bounty,

 

How much does it cost to be free?
Free from the heartache still living in me
I've given my heart, my soul, and my mind
How can I pay up and quit doing time?
And why am I always trying to make it all rhyme?
'Cause I'm a songwriter and always will be
But how much does it cost to be free?
How much does it cost to be free?