ALBUM OF THE WEEK
WILLIE NELSON: THAT’S LIFE (LEGACY)
★★★★★
The country veteran’s 95th studio album is a loving tribute to Sinatra, says Neil Mccormick
The old outlaw is back. At 87, Willie Nelson has released more albums than he has spent years on the planet. That’s Life is his 95th studio album (including collaborations). In the time it would take many young artists to tell you what a torturous process it was to create their latest magnum opus, Nelson could probably slip in and out of the studio and deliver an entire set.
There is nothing slapdash about this process either. Nelson’s recordings are invariably lovingly curated, beautifully played and sung with elegance. That’s Life is his second tribute to Frank Sinatra,
following My Way in 2018; you may think the American songbook is an overdone oeuvre, but there are good reasons as to why this material, which spans witty, upbeat love songs and gentle philosophical ruminations, has kept being reworked. Given their lyrical and melodic sophistication and tightly honed emotional focus, they are songs that cry out to be sung – and they pay huge dividends whenever they are. Nelson’s bravura title track had a defiant vigour when Sinatra delivered it as a midlife crisis anthem in 1966, but it takes on a different pathos when gently sung in the weathered tones of an octogenarian. There’s a note of careless surrender you won’t hear in the original. “If nothing’s shaking around here come July/ I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball and die,” Nelson croons, with none of Sinatra’s showstopping bravado. (Right now, I think we all know how Willie feels.)
Nelson is a great songwriter, who – legend has it – knocked out both Crazy and Funny How Time Slips Away in one session in 1961. But his gorgeous 1978 album of pop standards, Stardust, demonstrated what a striking interpreter he can be. He was a personal friend of Sinatra’s back in the day, and the latter’s talkative way with lyrics rubbed off on Nelson’s country style. He has always sung as if talking to a listener, rather than blasting emotion in their ear. His take here on the lovelorn In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning is quietly devastating, while his perky duet with Diana Krall on I Won’t Dance offers a wondrous push-and-pull between vocal partners teasing one another with humour and grace.
In recent years, Bob Dylan has investigated the Sinatra songbook, too, with five albums’ worth of cover versions. But Dylan’s approach involved stripping away the big-band context and probing the material’s roots. Nelson’s jazzy combo and luscious string arrangements are more faithful to the old swing style. These versions are not intended to replace, reinvent or even rival the originals, simply to bring them back into the light.
To reach Nelson’s venerable age is, inevitably, to experience a great vanishing of the hinterland of the past, as the world you grew up in is slowly lost to time. An album like this is part of a chain that keeps the old songs alive. Tenderly delivered by an 87-yearold, You Make Me Feel So Young may not have the zest of Sinatra’s 1956 original, but it might just make you swoon even as you wipe a tear from the corner of your eye.
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Nelson has released more albums than he has spent years on the planet
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