One by Willie

Matt Berninger, lead singer and lyricist of beloved Brooklyn rock band The National, talks about Willie’s 1978 cover of “All of Me.” It was the third single off his dad’s favorite Willie record, Stardust, an album Matt loves so much that, when he went to record his first solo album, Serpentine Prison, he enlisted Stardust producer Booker T. Jones to produce, and Willie’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, to play harp. We’ll get into all that, plus the pre-Willie history of “All of Me,” the decidedly unorthodox sessions in which Willie and Booker recorded it, and the healing power of music…with brief cameos by Roberta Flack, Billie Holiday, and Lester Young, and a full-on co-star role for Mickey, who sat in on the interview and provided his own detailed memories of creating Stardust.

Kenny Chesney, a Country Music Hall of Famer and longtime Willie friend, fan, and collaborator, talks about Willie’s 1976 cover of “That Lucky Old Sun.” That beautiful, hushed track, which opened the album The Sound in Your Mind, was one of Willie’s first covers from the Great American Songbook, setting the stage for his Stardust triumph two years later...and hearing it now takes Kenny back to an old tour bus, when he was a young artist studying Willie’s singing. From there he gets into the duet the two cut on the song in the mid-2000s—which ended up being a pivotal record for Willie—plus what it was like to produce Willie's 2008 album, Moment of Forever, and the way Willie helped inspire the artistic change that grew Kenny into Billboard’s Top Country Artist of the 21st Century.

With the holiday season in full effect, we’re reaching back to OBW’s earliest days to re-up this Nov 2020 episode with Lumineer Wesley Schultz on Willie’s initial contribution to the holiday canon, “Pretty Paper.” Wes was a little kid growing up in the New Jersey suburbs when he first fell for "Pretty Paper," which his folks played in the car as they drove their neighborhood checking out Xmas lights. We talk about that, the surreal story from Willie’s own childhood that prompted him to write it--and the way only Willie could write a Christmas song you want to hear all year long.

Brilliant indie rock-pop-and-folk singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, of Bright Eyes and Monsters of Folk fame, talks about another of Willie’s famous Pamper Demos, “Undo the Right.” It was one of Willie’s earliest efforts for the Pamper Publishing Company, a co-write with Hank Cochran, the legendary songwriter who first championed him when he moved to Nashville. That gets Conor thinking about the craft of songwriting, about how sneaking contradictory or counterintuitive ideas into songs helps them to better reflect what he calls the "big mess” of real life, and how nobody writes a bridge like Willie does…before we listen to another old Willie song, “The Storm Has Just Begun,” which was the B-side to his first single in 1959—and that Willie wrote when he was just twelve years old.

Larry Gatlin, a card-carrying member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (“All the Gold in California,” “Broken Lady,” etc.), focuses on “She’s Not for You,” off Willie’s game-changing 1973 album, Shotgun Willie. Well-read Willie nerds know that record, cut in New York for Atlantic Records, was the closest Willie had yet come to creative control of a project, and Larry, who played guitar and sang backup in the sessions, describes just how different that was from the Nashville process in which Willie'd been struggling. But he also explains another, lesser-known key to the record’s success…before sharing memories of the legendary picking parties Willie co-hosted with University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal, and the joy of just being around longtime Willie consort Roger Miller.

New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich looks at the other big hit off Willie and Merle Haggard’s classic 1983 Pancho & Lefty album, “Reasons to Quit.” It’s a classic Haggard drinking song, but a little more pensive than most, and Amanda reframes it—and really, all of Pancho & Lefty—as an example of what she calls the Outlaw’s Conundrum, i.e. what’s an old rebel to do when the time comes to settle down? Then we get into the all-star band that backed Willie and Merle on the record and, in a particularly insightful interlude, the specific ways sad songs can help people when life feels like too much to bear.

John Mellencamp, one of Willie’s fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame members and a Farm Aid co-founder, has been a fan since first hearing “Funny How Time Slips Away” as a pre-teen in Seymour, Indiana. That song was one of Willie’s first contributions to the American Songbook, a reliable hit for other artists for nearly 15 years before Willie finally became a star, and it gets Mellencamp musing on parallels between early Willie and Bob Dylan—and how he later followed Willie’s lead in his own bitter battles with record industry overlords. From there we get into the unlikely origin of Farm Aid, the ongoing fight for the American farmer, and why Mellencamp thinks Willie deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

One of the most mind-blowing guitarists on earth, Billy Strings, talks about an all-time great Willie and Trigger workout, “Stay a Little Longer,” off the 1978 double-album Willie and Family Live. The song’s an old Bob Wills standard that Willie updated, made his own, and plays here at a careening, 90-mph pace that Billy says blazes like bluegrass—before adding that he hears in it a hallmark of Willie’s picking: integrity in every note. From there he describes a magical day cutting “California Sober” at Pedernales with Willie, the high price of playing poker with him afterward, and what it was like to carry Jody Payne’s old Martin guitar onstage at Willie’s 90th birthday shows.

Music writer John Spong talks each week to one notable Willie fan about one Willie song they love, then runs down the kinds of rabbit holes that open up when the subject is Willie Nelson. Starting January 22, ten new episodes featuring Miranda Lambert, John Mellencamp, Billy Strings, Black Puma Adrian Quesada, New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich, and so on…each giving a uniquely personal take on the life and art of a genuine American folk hero.

This week, one of America’s greatest living poets, singer-songwriter Lucinda Williams, celebrates the easy beauty of one of Willie’s most cherished songs, “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” From there she’ll get into how inspiring it was to first see Willie do his thing when she moved to Austin in 1974; how weird it was, when she moved back to Austin in the 80s, to live in a run-down apartment complex-cum-artist’s colony that Willie owned on South Congress—sharing it with the old boyfriend, Clyde Woodward, she would immortalize in her song, “Lake Charles”—and what an absolute honor it was, twenty years later, to cut a duet with Willie on another of her songs, “Overtime.”

This week, one of the brightest stars of the Texas Country/Red Dirt scene, singer-songwriter Wade Bowen, examines “Me and Paul,” Willie’s 1971 chronicle of the road-warrior life he was sharing with his erstwhile partner in crime, drummer Paul English. It’s a perfect song for Wade to get into, partly because, as he rightly points out, Willie was a progenitor of the circuit where he makes his living now, but also because of the setting for our visit: Wade zoomed in from his tour bus, which was broken down somewhere in Iowa on his way to a gig.

This week, one of Willie’s longtime tour mates, Grammy-winning blues singer and guitarist Susan Tedeschi, talks about a deep cut off his 1998 album with Daniel Lanois, Teatro, “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces.” It’s a song she and her husband, slide-guitar hero Derek Trucks, play almost nightly with their group, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, and it gets her thinking aloud on a foundational principle of Willie World: The absolute importance of making music with people you love—with meaty cameo appearances by the Allman Brothers Band, Jessica Simpson, The Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, and Emmylou Harris...who Susan calls a “Jedi.”