Vintage Willie

Nelson and Lanois get nostalgic

by Richard C. Walls

Willie Nelson's new Teatro (Island), release number two hundred and something for the singer, was produced by Daniel Lanois, so right away you know it'll probably be

good -- or probably sound good, or, failing that, sound interesting. Lanois has a great track record, having decluttered arrangements for the likes of the Neville Brothers, Dylan, and Emmylou Harris, filling in the fresh spaces with non-cliché'd instrumental combinations and -- this is the signature part, I think -- adding little more than what needs to be there. The man has integrity. Of course Nelson's last album, Spirit, had integrity too -- being acoustic, the thing fairly reeked of it. But this is different. This is integrity with some imagination.

Not that it always works, but we'll get to that later. First, consider the intriguing fact that for six of the 14 selections here Nelson (that just sounds wrong -- let's call him Willie) has gone back to material he wrote in the early '60s, back to a time when he was just establishing himself as a star songwriter, penning "Crazy" for Patsy Cline and "Hello Walls" for Faron Young, back to when his singing voice had yet to develop its whiskey-etched rivulets and he still looked like a vaguely untrustworthy Bible salesman. This is the strongest material on the disc, bleak and inventive and fused with that kind of pleasurable misery that goes best with alcohol.

There's an apocalyptic aspect to the sadness in some of these vintage songs, a world-shattering prodding of the emotional wounds that might seem maudlin if it weren't for the craggy melodicism of Willie's croon. "The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all," he begins on "I Never Cared for You" (from '62), and it's pretty much downhill from there, though -- with an easy cleverness that marks it as a youthful effort -- the song reveals itself as a plea to a cynical lover, a series of "statements far from true" requiring for her to "pay heed and disbelieve."

A more drastic rearranging of the cosmos occurs on "Darkness on the Face of the Earth" ('61), the left-behind lover lamenting that "The stars fell out of heaven/The moon could not be found/The sun was in a million pieces scattered all around." Again, it takes a certain convincing world-weariness to prevent such lines from sounding a tad overstated. Willie's never been less than mellow despite his trademark pained nasality, so even when this obliterating tendency reaches its zenith on "I've Just Destroyed the World" (written with Ray Price -- '62), it sounds like just another bad day at the heartbreak hotel. And maybe, given lines like "The sun just went behind a cloud/There's darkness all around me now," just a little proto-goth.

Don't scoff -- Willie has his dark side, and he doesn't always swallow his pain. Check this out from "I Just Can't Let You Say Goodbye": "The flesh around your throat is pale/Indented by my fingernails/ Please don't scream please don't cry/I just won't let you say goodbye." Imagine that sung with Willie's customary tenderness, the voice that sounds rueful even in complaint, remorseful but resigned. Pretty creepy.

The new songs' lyrics tend to be banal by comparison, which may be good news as far as Willie's mental health is concerned; but in any event everything is being filtered through Lanois's special sensibility, and so the peaks and valleys aren't necessarily determined by the words. Or even, necessarily, by the singing. This would be a good place to mention (so I will) that Emmylou Harris appears on 11 of the CD's tracks -- and either through some trick of the mix or thanks to her own innate brilliance at performing in a supporting capacity, you barely notice she's there. This seems odd.

But then sometimes Willie gets a little hard to hear too, or at least the ear is directed elsewhere, maybe toward the drums (plural -- there's two drummers on most cuts), which are usually placed in aural close-up, with a sound that manages to be both dirty and clear. This is a nice touch, and given Lanois's penchant for a sparsely eclectic front line, with the focus shifting from guitar to bass harmonica to an unobtrusive Wurlitzer, the Latin-cum-New-Orleans samba-esque combination of shuffles and roiling rhythms imbues the session with a sense of urgency -- not a word we usually associate with this particular singer. So if he tends to get a little swamped now and then, what the hell, it still sounds good.

In fact, sounding good seems to be the main point of the record, that and dusting off some early gems newer fans may not be familiar with. It's a neat trick Willie and Daniel have pulled off here, what with the singer getting to rest on old laurels and yet having the result sound like the freshest thing he's done in years.