Yesterday's Wine

About

On December 23, 1970, Willie Nelson was at a Christmas party at a club in Nashville when he was summoned to the bar to take a phone call. It was his nephew, Randy. Nelson could barely make his voice out over the noise. <i>Uncle Willie</i>, he was shouting. <i>Your house is on fire!</i> Loss can make a person philosophical. Convalescing in Texas, Nelson read the Bible and the meditative fables that make up <i>The Prophet</i> by Khalil Gibran. He was 37, and while he’d made a decent life as a songwriter, his record sales weren’t great, and that fire in Nashville had destroyed the world he’d worked so hard to build. In time, his feelings of subjugation gave way to nagging questions: What am I doing? Why am I here? Country music had so often traded on the comforts of bite-sized, bumper-sticker wisdom. In the prayer-like songs that followed Nelson’s existential crisis—eventually collected on 1971’s <i>Yesterday’s Wine</i>—the singer found a balance between the bigness of certainty and the beautiful smallness of surrender and change. As the voice-over at the beginning of the album suggests, this is the voice of the imperfect man: “Explain again to me, Lord, why I’m here. I don’t know.” This is the birth of the breezy-but-sure-footed Willie Nelson that most of us know—a figure evincing the tenderness of the hippie and the self-reliance of the outlaw, the sentimentality of the country boy and the ambivalence of the monk: Cosmic Country. Musically, he had never sounded mellower, but had also never sounded more stable. With all due respect to Bob Dylan and Lou Reed, no singer has ever accomplished so much with so little actual singing. In “It’s Not For Me to Understand,” Nelson lets go of the cultural baggage of American Christianity, but keeps its radiant god. And in “Me and Paul,” he captures a hero’s journey in which the heroes aren’t sure they learned all that much. (They did.) On the phone from the Christmas party while the fire raged at home, Nelson told nephew Randy to take his car and park it in the garage: If insurance was gonna pay for everything anyway, he might as well trade up.

via Apple Music

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