|
It's no secret that Willie Nelson was - and still may be -
one of country music's most prolific and greatest writers, especially
during the years he resided in Nashville and penned so many great
tunes. At the time he was living on music row he was recording and
releasing records that contained all the various attachments that
Chet Atkins' country-politan movement had made a necessity
in music city… the accoutrements of the day included lush string
parts and large arrangements that did very little in the way of allowing
the song to speak with its own voice. Willie was never a fan of those
big sounds, and soon took his writing back to Texas, where he and
a close band of friends gave birth to the outlaw country movement.
With Naked Willie, Nelson has gone back to the original tapes
of many of those great early 60's songs and stripped away the trappings
of the day, revealing clean, well-written songs with his trademark
Western flair. Without the strings and large sounds, songs like "Happiness
Lives Next Door" are so immediate and intimate that they're almost
like brand new songs. Willie's guitar is clean and round, accompanied
by bass, drums and piano, all beautifully underpinning his wonderful,
tremulous baritone. Jazzy tones and swinging rhythms abound, as on
the cool, laid back "Bring Me Sunshine", while syncopated
rhythms and grooving basslines fill out such cool tracks as "I'm
A Memory". Perhaps where the songs benefit the most from the
stripping away of over-production is on such greats as the classic
"The Party's Over" and "I Just Dropped By", which
attains a soft reflective quality that wasn't apparent on the original
version. "Following Me Around" benefits from the simplification
more than most, shifting the focus to Nelson's fantastic guitar playing
instead of a chorus of non-essential background singers that covered
up the simple beauty of the song. It is much easier to see how
Johnny Cash found such greatness in "Sunday Morning Coming
Down" when hearing Willie play it without all the strings that
over-saturated the original mix; this new mix reveals what is so remarkably
easy to tell in Cash's version; that this is possibly one of the finest
songs ever to come out of the country music camp. "The Local
Memory" is another song that demonstrates the keen similarities
between Nelson and Cash, as the song progresses from simple acoustic
guitar to a nice shuffling band arrangement.
Willie Nelson and Mickey Raphael (Nelson's long-time harmonica
player) truly struck gold with the idea to take these songs back their
basics. Not one track suffers from the loss of the 1960's Nashville
production ethos. Rather, the songs here shine more brightly than
ever, revealing brilliance that was more difficult to discern underneath
all the glitz and glamour of the age. Willie Nelson should be taken
at face value, that is where his soul truly communicates, and Naked
Willie brings the soul to the forefront of these fantastic recordings.
-Embo Blake
Check out more
reviews
 Talk
Back
e-mail the chief
Like this article?
e-mail
it to a friend!
|
Willie
Nelson 
