Red Headed Stranger

About

In terms of number, 1975’s <i>Red Headed Stranger</i> is one of the most successful albums Willie Nelson ever made. It was his first chart-topper, his first to be added to the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congre, and—thanks to the hit “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”—his first work to yield him a solo Grammy. And even now, decades after its release, <i>Red Headed Stranger</i> is still considered one of the greatest country music albums of all time. It’s also one of Nelson’s strangest, most unassuming effort. Framed loosely as a concept album—one that follows a preacher who murders his wife in the wake of discovering her affair—it contains only a handful of Nelson’s own composition. Instead, <i>Red Headed Stranger</i> leans on a hodgepodge of early country and American popular music, all of it minimally arranged and performed—as though the songs are being remembered in real time, or rescued from a dream. There are tunes here you’ll likely recognize without ever having wondered when or where they were written, like the Mexican waltz “O’er the Wave.” And there are long and meandering instrumental passage, featuring touches of harmonica and piano that daub the arrangements like the glow of headlights on a distant road (“Can I Sleep In Your Arms”). One executive at Nelson’s label, Columbia, told the singer <i>Red Headed Stranger</i> sounded like it had been recorded in someone’s living room—a comment that reportedly prompted Nelson’s hotheaded friend, Waylon Jenning, to jump out of his seat and declare, <i>That’s just who Willie is</i>. And indeed, the overall feeling on <i>Red Headed Stranger</i> is something like a montage, one that contrasts the grittiness of its source material—with its stiff saddle, coarse burlap, and hard cans of beans—with the ethereality of a fable or myth. As Nelson drifts from one tune to another, the past we thought we knew so well—or at least the past whose infinite retellings make it seem immune to strangeness—becomes distant and unresolved. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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