Willie Nelson’s ‘Oh What a Lovely World’ seeks the American very best : NPR

AUSTIN, TEXAS – JULY 04: Singer-songwriter Willie Nelson performs onstage with Willie Nelson and Household through the forty sixth Annual Willie Nelson 4th of July Picnic at Austin360 Amphitheater on July 04, 2019 in Austin, Texas.

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Rick Kern/WireImage for Shock Ink

On April 17, Willie Nelson and agricultural advocate David Senter printed an open letter to America’s farmers, who stand to be financially impacted by the president’s funds and staffing cuts, tariffs and looming commerce warfare. Nelson and Senter specific solidarity with anxious younger farmers and encourage staff of all ages and political affiliations to face collectively and protest in opposition to the administration’s agricultural funding freeze.

“All farmers — irrespective of their age, background, politics, location, dimension, sort or manufacturing strategies — should name on one another in these difficult instances,” the authors write. “We invite you to name on us, and hope that you’ll reply after we name on you. We’re on this collectively and it is solely collectively that we’ll get via.”

For Nelson, who turned 92 this week, this solidarity with America’s farmers honors a pledge he’d first made 4 a long time in the past, when he co-founded Farm Assist with John Mellencamp and Neil Younger — the advocacy group and profit live performance held yearly since 1985. By utilizing his movie star platform and his standing as a nationwide icon and treasure to talk out in help of struggling household farms, Nelson is merely persevering with to do what he is at all times completed in his almost seven a long time as knowledgeable musician. However although his left-leaning values have lengthy been at odds with historically conservative household farmers and the nation music hoi polloi, Nelson’s ongoing dedication to inclusion and civility is much more crucial in at this time’s extremely polarized and divisive local weather.

Final Friday, Nelson launched his newest file, Oh What a Lovely World — his 77th solo album and, astonishingly, his 154th general studio album. A set of twelve tracks written by veteran songwriter Rodney Crowell, Oh What a Lovely World finds Nelson in acquainted territory: wistful nation ballads of affection misplaced and located, open roads, and dusty plains. However because it arrives at a second of geopolitical nervousness, battle and mistrust —when the world appears something however stunning — an album of straightforward, sentimental ballads dangers coming throughout as anachronistic or tone-deaf. Nelson, nonetheless, has at all times strived to signify the nation’s highest beliefs and to remind his listeners of the wonder and promise of America, even (particularly) throughout instances of nationwide disaster.

Whereas nation singers have lengthy been preoccupied with God, household and nation (with a wholesome dose of exhausting ingesting, exhausting loving and exhausting dwelling), within the years following 9/11 nation music noticed an increase of jingoism, chauvinism and racism, as evinced by the looks of Accomplice flags at live shows and festivals. A musical style that was cast from the collaboration of rural white and Black musicians had come to be related to racial intolerance. Devices and storytelling traditions delivered to the US by immigrants from Eire, Scotland, Britain, West Africa and Mexico have been exploited within the title of nationalism and xenophobia.

Nation music has traditionally mirrored what is occurring within the streets, factories and dwelling rooms of America. From the turbulent protests in opposition to the Vietnam Battle, to the suspension of civil liberties through the so-called “Battle on Terror,” nation singers, from Merle Haggard to Toby Keith, may very well be counted on to talk up for the legendary “actual American,” who honored the flag and belittled supposed dissidents. (That Haggard shared frequent trigger with the dope-smoking hippies he parodied in his well-known track was largely misplaced on his audiences.)

Regardless of just a few, boat-rocking moments — Johnny Money’s Bitter Tears and Loretta Lynn’s “The Capsule,” for instance — nation musicians have largely toed the traditionalist line, appeasing their overwhelmingly White, Southern, and conservative base. Not so Willie Nelson. All through his lengthy life in leisure, Nelson has doggedly challenged nation music’s inflexible obstinacy. He is planted a kiss on the lips of Black nation singer Charley Pleasure onstage in entrance of a crowd of irate Texans within the late-Nineteen Sixties, condemned the warfare in Iraq, and supported Democratic presidential candidates. He is raised consciousness about previously incarcerated Native American activist Leonard Peltier, supported LGBTQ rights and marriage equality, protested the Keystone XL pipeline and warned about the specter of local weather change. Whether or not criticizing the primary Trump administration’s coverage of household separation on the southern border, or selling the decriminalization of hashish, Nelson has been constantly to the left of his friends.

Nelson has weathered close to chapter, endured an embarrassing public feud with the IRS and outlived all of his fellow Outlaws and Highwaymen, together with (remarkably) Waylon Jennings. He has not grow to be any much less of a liberal raconteur in his superior age, nor has he shied away from associations which might be nonetheless thought of controversial to the nation music gatekeepers: endorsing progressive Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke’s 2018 problem in opposition to Republican Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate, lending his voice to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, and duetting with Orville Peck in 2024 on the “homosexual cowboy anthem,” “Cowboys are Continuously Secretly Keen on Every Different.”

Regardless of his lengthy dedication to social justice and political engagement, nonetheless, Nelson’s music is itself not often political. 2018’s “Vote ‘Em Out” is maybe his solely baldly political track, and he is written solely two songs in his profession that he considers to be “protest songs”: the anti-war missives “Jimmy’s Highway,” and “No matter Occurred to Peace on Earth?”

Oh What a Lovely World doesn’t depart from conference. It’s not a political album; it doesn’t try to “converse to the second.” The twelve compositions — most of them recorded by Crowell or different artists over a number of a long time — discover Nelson singing about amorous affairs and regrets (“I Would not Be Me With out You”), youth and misplaced innocence (“Banks of the Previous Bandera”), and life’s easy, sturdy pleasures (“Stuff that Holds Up,” co-written with Man Clark). The only real lyric on the album that may very well be thought of in any respect “political” comes on the “Without end Younger”-indebted “The Flyboy & the Child,” with its line: “Might you at all times keep in contact with the issues that maintain you younger / Whenever you’re gazing injustice, could you by no means chunk your tongue.”

Musically, Oh What a Lovely World adheres to the model of grownup modern nation/country-lite that has lengthy been Crowell’s mainstay, with slick manufacturing by celebrated Nashville producer Buddy Cannon and a group of Nashville studio musicians. The center of those songs is in Nelson’s deft, jazz-inflected guitar selecting, and his distinctive, mellifluous voice — which has misplaced none of its heat or sincerity regardless of getting a little bit raspier with age. Whereas on his earlier studio album, Final Leaf on the Tree, Nelson sounded as if he have been sitting nose to nose with demise, Oh What a Lovely World gives the look that Nelson could very properly have a dozen or so extra albums below his belt.

However what does it imply, on this second of pervasive dread and apprehension, to file an album of contemplative songs about love and longing? To sing the phrases, “I am gonna be right here for you, child / I will be a person of my phrase,” as Nelson does on “Making Recollections of Us”? To declare the world to be “stunning”? By providing, right now, an unabashedly saccharine assortment of songs, Nelson hopes to remind listeners that, regardless of all of it, the world stays wondrous and perpetually able to therapeutic, that the nation is best than its worst moments, and, as he writes in his current letter, “we’re on this collectively and it is solely collectively that we’ll get via.”

Nelson’s substantial oeuvre, from “Loopy” to Oh What a Lovely World, has at all times been inextricable from his private values and beliefs. His songs are timeless exactly as a result of they don’t converse to a selected “second”; they converse to the frequent hopes, fears and aspirations of all People. His music represents the ethical very best that many People attempt towards however normally fall wanting. Although it sometimes avoids the overtly political, Nelson has nonetheless at all times requested People to recollect their collective duties to one another, to problem the established order and to confront injustice.

This summer season, Nelson will embark on his long-running Outlaw Music Pageant Tour, with Bob Dylan and others, visiting thirty-five American cities, from Los Angeles to Bangor, Maine. As together with his annual Farm Assist and 4th of July Picnic live shows, Nelson will discover himself dealing with a combined viewers of followers who’ve both found him solely just lately or adopted him since his “Shotgun Willie” period. He’ll see farmers, freaks, cowboys and environmentalists. What he’ll see, above all, is a modified nation music panorama, one that’s extra numerous and accepting — thanks, partly, to his years-long efforts.

Nation music, just like the nation itself, has and can proceed to endure myriad disputes, upheavals and adversities. There’ll at all times be those that declare to talk for “actual nation music,” simply as there can be those that declare to signify the “actual America.” Willie Nelson, conversely, represents a great of nation music and America that’s much less exclusionary or obstinate, and extra welcoming, curious and compassionate, the place typically probably the most radical act of resistance is to sing some unhappy love songs, to look out for one another, and to take a second to understand the wonder we take with no consideration.