Willie Nelson Announces New Album ‘Dream Chaser’

Willie Nelson simply does not stop. After sharing a new collab with Lawnmower Man actor Jeff Fahey back in January, today the 92-year-old country music icon announced his 156th album, Dream Chaser, and shared its title track. But there’s another song on the tracklist that will be especially of interest.

The past two summers, Nelson has headlined his Outlaw Music Tour alongside fellow living legend Bob Dylan. When the New Yorker published an in-depth profile of Nelson last December, it ended with Dylan’s paragraph-long written tribute to Nelson. Now comes news that Dream Chaser includes “I Can’t Read Your Mind,” a song Nelson and Dylan wrote with Nelson’s regular collaborator Buddy Cannon.

“I Can’t Read Your Mind” was first mentioned in a separate magazine deep-dive on Nelson last year, this one in GQ. Here’s how Nelson explained it:

We’re both writers and both guitar players, so I can give him an idea for a song. He can take it and write it and record it and send it back to me in that way. He’s a great writer himself. Bob Dylan and I were talking a while back about writing a song together. He had an idea of “I can’t read your mind.” We started with, “I can’t read your mind. The letters are too small.” I handed that over to Buddy, and he took it and turned it into a good song. That’s pretty rare with Bob.

The Luck Reunion, the annual one-day music festival held on Nelson’s property outside Austin, will take place Thursday. The lineup includes Nelson, his son and collaborator Lukas Nelson, St. Vincent, Booker T. Jones, Anna Tivel, Trampled By Turtles, James McMurtry, Deloyd Elze, Kaitlin Butts, Joshua Ray Walker, and many more. This spring, Nelson and his family band will play a few shows across the southeast with special guest Drayton Farley.

In the meantime, we get to hear “Dream Chaser,” a tune written by Cannon, Nelson, and Bobby Tomberlin. Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Dream Chaser” (Written by Buddy Cannon, Bobby Tomberlin & Willie Nelson)
02 “Fly Away” (Written by Buddy Cannon & Bobby Whitlock)
03 “We’d Make A Good Movie” (Written by Willie Nelson, Buddy Cannon & Bobby Tomberlin)
04 “I Can’t Read Your Mind” (Written by Willie Nelson, Buddy Cannon & Bob Dylan)
05 “Whiskey Wants Me To” (Written by Buddy Cannon & Bobby Tomberlin)
06 “Wonder What I’m Gonna Do” (Written by Willie Nelson & Buddy Cannon)
07 “After All” (Written by Willie Nelson & Buddy Cannon)
08 “Love Overdue” (Written by Mickey Raphael, Donald W. Poythress & Anna Lisa Graham)
09 “I Don’t Think I’ve Cried Today” (Written by Buddy Cannon, Bobby Tomberlin & Willie Nelson)
10 “Developing My Pictures” (Written by Earl Montgomery)

Dream Chaser is out 5/29 on Legacy Recordings.