On every Willie record of late—he’s made ten in the last five years, the most recent being Workin’ Man: Willie Sings Merle, out last November—we search for signs. We look for clues of how he’s doing at 88, or 90, or, now, an extraordinary 93. How’s he feeling? What’s he going through day-to-day? We listen, after all these years, to discover: Can he still sing and play? Does he still have things to tell us about life, love, death—and whiskey?
On his newer releases—say, the last fifty albums—Willie doesn’t reveal a whole lot about himself. And for the most part, his latest album, Dream Chaser, is no different. But still we search, because even at this late stage of his career, his music gives us something worth listening for.
In Dream Chaser, it’s the songwriting. While Willie has spent most of the past decade doing albums full of songs written by other artists (Merle Haggard, Rodney Crowell, George Gershwin, Cole Porter), he’s back to writing and co-writing; this is the first album in eight years where Willie had a hand in writing the majority of the songs. Mostly he does this with his frequent collaborator from Nashville, the producer and writer Buddy Cannon, but he’s also brought in Music City pro Bobby Tomberlin.
Another writing partner? Bob Dylan. The two have toured together, sung together, and admired each other for decades. Last year in The New Yorker, Dylan elaborated at length about Willie: “Cowboy apparition,” he said of his old friend, “writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something.” Dylan’s written a few such songs of his own. The two Great American Songwriters of the Past One Hundred Years have only collaborated once before, in 1993, on “Heartland.” A third of a century later, “I Can’t Read Your Mind” is as inscrutable as you would imagine, beginning, “I don’t know how to read your mind / The letters are too small.” The music is a mournful mix of pedal steel and piano battling the scrappy, thumping notes of Willie’s guitar, until he sings, in his best Zen voice: “Why don’t you just go away / And why don’t you just stay?”
The best tune on the album is the title track, a song that sounds more pop than country, with Willie leaning into the yearning vocal melody. Again, he doesn’t write a whole lot about his own life, but “Dream Chaser” takes us back: “Wasn’t I just a kid / Moving to Tennessee / With an old guitar and eyes full of stars / Chasing a crazy dream.” Then he moves on, laying bare one of the reasons we love Willie so damn much. “Last night a new song came to me / Faster than I could write it down / Sometimes I wonder if there’ll be another / Then another comes around.”
Even in the eighth decade of his career, Willie refuses to quit doing what he loves to do. It sustains him. It sustains us too.
He’s been working with a familiar supporting cast, led by Cannon, with whom he’s done almost twenty albums since 2012. And much of Dream Chaser is sprinkled with sentimental, mid-tempo, three-minute songs that sound like products of a Music City song factory. But Trigger is here, Mickey (Raphael) is here, and most importantly, Willie’s here. You can hear occasional catches in his voice, like ruts worn into a dirt road, but all things considered (decades of singing, too many doobies, emphysema), he sounds pretty good on most songs. On the rollicking “After All,” Willie invokes his 1970’s prime.
If you’re still searching for a sign on how Willie is doing, whether he can still sing and play, he’s got a tour planned this summer. And then there will be more albums full of more songs. As he’s told us—and shown us time and again—they come to him faster than he can write them down.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.texasmonthly.com ’
