The headline at the top of this blog post probably isn’t fair. Willie Nelson did not actually record a duet with Jobe Smith, a gardener with intellectual disabilities who gets plugged into a virtual reality supercomputer and becomes a godlike digital super-being. But when you have the opportunity to make a graphic that puts a beloved 92-year-old music legend next to a 1992 CGI nightmare, you have to do it.
Let’s back up. Jeff Fahey is grizzled character actor with more than 40 years of experience. He has literally hundreds of film and TV credits — Lost, Wyatt Earp, a bunch of Robert Rodriguez movies, Darkman III: Die Darkman Die, etc. He is exactly the kind of actor who might end up co-writing a Willie Nelson song; it’s really not that weird. But when you play the titular role in Brett Leonard’s 1992 Stephen King adaptation Lawnmower Man, you will always be the Lawnmower Man to some of us.
Fahey has played many roles in independent films over the years, and he sometimes offers to write music for those films. In a recent podcast interview, Fahey says that he and his songwriting partners have four songs on the soundtrack of The Gray House, a new limited series from Amazon Prime, and that he’s “riding this wonderful wave.”
Fahey has no songwriting history listed on Wikipedia and only a little bit on IMDB, so it seems safe to say that one of the first songs that he’s actually placed was recorded by Willie Nelson, which is pretty cool. Along with Erin Enderlin and Jim “Moose” Brown, Fahey co-wrote Nelson’s new single “Heart Of America.” It’s on the soundtrack of The Gray House. A while back, Enderlin gave some context on Instagram.
The Civil War-set The Gray House is coming to Amazon next month. Roland Joffé, the auteur behind The Killing Fields and The Mission, directed all the episodes, and the cast includes people like Mary-Louise Parker, Ben Vereen, and Keith David. Jeff Fahey, you may notice, does not appear to be in the cast of The Gray House. But the series is produced by two of Fahey’s longtime colleagues, Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman. Fahey and Costner both had their first big film roles in the 1985 Western Silverado, and Fahey’s most recent film role was in the Costner-directed passion project Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1.
Anyway, good job Jeff Fahey, keep writing them songs. Willie Nelson’s tender version of “Heart Of America” is out now, and you can see his video for the song below.
The Gray House arrives on Prime Video 2/26. The show’s soundtrack album is out the same day on MCA, and it includes songs from Killer Mike, Scott Stapp, and Lainey Wilson, among others. Jeff Fahey, Erin Enderlin, and Jim “Moose” Brown also wrote the selections from the War And Treaty, Larkin Poe, and Shania Twain and Drake Milligan.
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