July 21, 2008
WILLIE NELSON
One Hell Of A Ride
(Legacy, 4-CD box)
(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- Someday, somebody with great taste, and no desire to be all things to all markets, is going to put together a Best Of Willie Nelson box. Because nobody's taste is absolute, fans like me and you will question some of the selections, and complain about what's been left out. But the box will not contain tracks of Willie backed by U2 or Aerosmith (with Steven Tyler sounding like some kind of grotesque "Beverly Hillbillies" reject), and it will not contain "To All The Girls I've Loved Before".
Until then, this will have to do. Released in honor of Willie's 75th birthday, it does include the latter, but spares us the former two (they were on the double-CD celebrating his 70th birthday). All in all, it's probably the strongest of the Willie boxes out there.
Starting with a 1955 voice-and-guitar version of "When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song", his first recording and recorded so badly it's almost unlistenable, and ending with a 2007 Family Band take of the same tune, One Hell Of A Ride gathers 100 selections from throughout his career. There's some obscure small-label takes of stuff such as "Night Life", lush Hollywood orchestrations from Liberty of early gems including "Crazy" and "Funny How Time Slips Away", a huge range of RCA Nashville Sound material from "Mr. Record Man" and "The Party's Over" through the macabre "I Just Can't Let You Say Goodbye", and the Outlaw breakthroughs on Atlantic and Columbia.
And then, for more than two discs, a casual stroll through WillieWorld, a place entirely of his own creation, where revivals of Tin Pan Alley standards, duets, tributes, rock and pop and folk and gospel and reggae and jazz and hard country, and even the occasional Willie Nelson original, all hang out.
Sometimes you have to struggle to get past the arrangements and instrumentation so you can hear the actual songs, and that monochromatic, behind-the-beat voice singing them. But the songs and voice -- oh, and the personality -- are what hold the whole thing together. Even the fourth and final disc, which kicks off with the delightfully scabrous "Write Your Own Songs" and covers nearly 25 years of often maddeningly patchy albums that Willie has thrown out one after the other as quick as he could, hangs together. It's not necessarily the best of Willie, but it's more of the best than you'll find anywhere else. The title's no lie, either.
-- JOHN MORTHLAND
Copyright c 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or John Morthland
Posted by Grant at 8:07 AM | Permalink
July 8, 2008
GEORGE JONES
She Thinks I Still Care:
The Complete United Artists Recordings, 1962-1964
(Bear Family, 5-CD box)
(NO DEPRESSION.NET) -- George Jones' brief stint at United Artists is sometimes cited as a kind of personal golden age for the singer, and it's easy to see why. He recorded some of his signature hits for the label -- "The Race Is On", "She Thinks I Still Care" -- and it was at United Artists, too, that Jones began to be mentioned as one of the genre's finest-ever balladeers, a singer the equal of Marty Robbins, Lefty Frizzell and Hank Williams.
Listen to "Just A Girl I Used To Know", a #3 hit for Jones in late 1962. Written by Jack Clement, the song expresses a typical country irony and a Jones specialty: The girl he's singing about is not "just" an old acquaintance. She's his world -- that's why her photo is in his wallet -- and she's gone. It's a swell conceit for a song, but Jones' choices as a singer pack Clements' lyric with so much more than what was on the page: the way his intensity and volume build to the choruses where he almost loses it, only to quiet down again as he gets it together for the next verse; the way he stretches out "just" so far that it's bound to snap back in his face; the way his voice trembles with, of all the crazy things, tenderness for this woman who's broken his heart.
She Thinks I Still Care, a new five-disc set, includes the 151 sides Jones cut at U.A., and (hyperbole be damned!) all 151 of them are in their different ways just as amazing. That means not only classic hits such as Jones and Melba Montgomery's emotionally complex ode to second chances "We Must Have Been Out Of Our Minds", but also Jones' many tribute albums from these years (to Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and his friend Jimmy Dickens), as well as more obscure but still essential sides such the exquisitely tender ("tender" is the most unheralded element in the Jones catalogue) "Book Of Memories" and the terrifying murder ballad "In The Shadow Of A Lie".
That's quite a range of emotion expressed in those last two tracks, but it is country music's range. She Thinks I Still Care argues, once again, that no one managed the many spots on that divide better than George Jones.
-- DAVID CANTWELL
Copyright c. 2008 No Depression Inc. and/or David Cantwell
Posted by Grant at 7:30 AM | Permalink