Willie Nelson: The Greatest Chronicler of the Human Condition

3 Min Read

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

Last Friday, for something like the 155^th time since 1962, Willie Nelson released a new album. Of course, only a little more than half of those are solo albums—79, or 51%--but the math of it remains: 64 years of uninterrupted output, with only nine and a half months between each Willie studio album. It’s a feat that will never be touched, an output that has no precedent, and no similar rates in any other cultural form. Willie Nelson has written more albums than any half dozen of his contemporaries, any half dozen of the most prolific artists in any other genre.

But the math is also catching up to Willie: He’s 93 years old. I doubt that Dream Chaser—his album from last week—will be his last (I’d wager there are 3-4 in the can waiting to be released), but we’re collectively nearer the end of his career than the beginning. And I for one do not look forward to a time when Willie Nelson isn’t out here, writing about each new stage of life, the great chronicler of what it means to be human, to be fallible, to be just a guy who puts his pants on one leg at a time, and who tries to be better today than he was yesterday.

Since at least 1961, when he sold some of his first songs—apocryphally, he sold “Crazy” to Patsy Cline’s husband to settle a bar tab, if you believe the legend—Willie Nelson’s main subject has been time, and how it affects us, and what to do with it, when staring down the big vista that is human existence. “Hello Walls,” an early hit for the underrated Faron Young, was a breakup song that was really about those moments after a breakup when you’re left with your own thoughts, and thinking that life could never, ever go on. “Funny How Time Slips Away” is from that same post-breakup haze, but is fundamentally how life goes on, despite whatever else is happening to you.

Willie’s last few albums have tackled time as their main subject matter in the same way his early songs did. He can be mordant and morose, funny about “being on the right side of the dirt,” and not recognizing the old man in the mirror, tackling the last few pieces of sand in the hourglass with the same vigor he had for the first. Dream Chaser opens with its title track, a song about how “time just seemed to vanish,” as he went from a kid moving to Tennessee to make it big, to being the old man he is now. “Wonder What I’m Gonna Do” is a breakup song wondering what happens if that long lost love actually does come back, “I Don’t Think I’ve Cried Today” is trying to see your way out of heartbreak by measuring how long it’s been since you last cried. The album’s most headline-worthy song—“I Can’t Read Your Mind”—is a cowrite with the only other guy who’s been making albums since 1962, Bob Dylan (for comparison, he’s released 40, or 50% of the studio albums Willie has). The inability to read a partner’s mind is written off because of age—the words are too small—and due to ennui. It’s funny, heartbreaking, and beautiful, like the best of Willie—and Bob’s!—songs.

Every new Willie Nelson album is a gift, a talisman, a dispatch from the forefront of being human. If we’re all half as lucky to live as full a life as he has, we’ll all have been fortunate. And hopefully, we’ll never have to live in a world without him.