Stardust

About

When Willie Nelson approached Columbia Records about making an album of classic American song, they told him he was crazy. He was a writer, they said—why not write? Plu, they added, why would his young, country audience care about old Broadway and Hoagy Carmichael song, anyhow? They wouldn’t, Willie said, but older people would, and the young ones would just figure he had written them in the first place. Ten song, each of them a favorite from Willie’s childhood, a handful of them dating to before his birth in 1933. Recorded in a living room with a mobile studio in the Hollywood Hill. No touch too heavy, no tempo above a resting heartbeat. The arrangements—by Memphis soul legend Booker T. Jone, who also produced—are spaciou, the sound ethereal (“Stardust,” “Georgia on My Mind”). All feeling, however big, are rendered with sweetness and distance, as though being looked back on from a point beyond life (“Unchained Melody”). Willie reaches for melodies the way one might reach to pet the family dog: lovingly, without drama or strain. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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