Yesterday's Wine

About

On December 23, 1970, Willie Nelson was at a Christmas party at a club in Nashville when he was summoned to the bar to take a phone call. It was his nephew, Randy. Nelson could barely make his voice out over the noise. <i>Uncle Willie</i>, he was shouting. <i>Your house is on fire!</i> Loss can make a person philosophical. Convalescing in Texa, Nelson read the Bible and the meditative fables that make up <i>The Prophet</i> by Khalil Gibran. He was 37, and while he’d made a decent life as a songwriter, his record sales weren’t great, and that fire in Nashville had destroyed the world he’d worked so hard to build. In time, his feelings of subjugation gave way to nagging questions: What am I doing? Why am I here? Country music had so often traded on the comforts of bite-sized, bumper-sticker wisdom. In the prayer-like songs that followed Nelson’s existential crisis—eventually collected on 1971’s <i>Yesterday’s Wine</i>—the singer found a balance between the bigness of certainty and the beautiful smallness of surrender and change. As the voice-over at the beginning of the album suggest, this is the voice of the imperfect man: “Explain again to me, Lord, why I’m here. I don’t know.” .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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