Track Listing

1. Crazy
2. Touch Me
3. Good Times
4. Yesterday's Wine
5. Whiskey River
6. Stay All Night (Stay A Little Longer)
7. It's Not Supposed To Be That Way
8. Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain
9. Good Hearted Woman
10. Always On My Mind
11. Just To Satisfy You
12. Pancho & Lefty
13. She Is Gone
14. My Own Peculiar Way
15. Funny (How Time Slips Away)
16. Night Life
17. The Rainbow Connection
18. Don't Fade Away
19. Mendocino County Line
20. On The Road Again

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #118402 in Music
• Brand: Nelson
• Released on: 2005-02-15
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .19 pounds

Amazon.com
There are plenty of other Willie Nelson compilations, but this one's different. It taps Nelson's prowess both as a singing songwriter and an interpreter of others' tunes. And while these 20 selections span his entire career--beginning with his smoky demo of "Crazy" that was the blueprint for Patsy Cline's historic performance--the accent's on his contemporary material. Die-hard Nelson fans need not fear. His recent duets with R&B singer Francine Reed ("Funny How Time Slips Away"), B.B. King ("Night Life"), Lee Ann Womack ("Mendocino Country Line"), and even pop star Brian McKnight ("Don't Fade Away") possess the dusty mix of fragility and wisdom that has become his late-career vocal signature. On Nelson's tongue, even the lyrics to the Muppets' "Rainbow Connection" are a wistful contemplation of life, made all the more poignant by his spare acoustic guitar accompaniment. Nelson's earlier touchstones are here, too. There's his first solo hit--1962's "Touch Me"--plus "Whiskey River," "Good Times," "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," his "Pancho and Lefty" duet with Merle Haggard and, of course, "Funny How Time Slips Away." It's all proof that rather than let his own time slip away, the 71-year-old Texan has etched his art all over it. --Ted Drozdowski

Customer Reviews

Country soul . . .
I spent some time in the California desert in early August and had this CD in my car stereo most of the time. It was a perfect match. A compilation of 20 Willie Nelson recordings from over 40 years, from "Crazy" (1961) to "On the Road Again" (2002), these songs are now firmly rooted for me in images of that sun-baked time and place. His voice and the way he delivers a line of lyrics capture the desolation and stark beauty of that landscape and the realities of hard lives lived far from easy comforts and consolations.

In these songs, the human heart is almost an open wound. Its pain is undisguised in some songs ("Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain") and lurks under the surface of others ("Funny How Time Slips Away"). Even a simple children's song, "The Rainbow Connection," is a hymn in Willie's hands to yearning for deliverance from life's disappointments. The great Townes Van Zandt composition "Pancho and Lefty" is a lament of loss and irony; so is "Night Life." With a swelling chorus of backup singers, "Whisky River" becomes an anthem to the salutary effect of alcohol for a busted heart.

There's a few rollicking good-time numbers, my favorite being Bob Wills' classic "Stay All Night" and a terrific outlaw duet with Waylon Jennings, "Good Hearted Woman," sung to a wildly appreciative live audience. And, of course, "On the Road Again," which closes the set. Those sparks of high spirits, though, hardly dispel the rich, dark shadows that permeate the rest and portray the haunting, touching sensibility of the man who went his own way and gave us his own instead of the manufactured sentiments that flow from Nashville. You may not like everything on this CD (Willie's eclectic taste has been all over the map), but at its best, it just can't be beat for country soul.

Lovely!
If you like Willie Nelson at all, you'll love this album. It's liberally sprinkled with the songs that made him a country icon - duets with Waylon Jennings and Merle Haggard, as well as solo, that make you nod and smile and say, "OH yeah!"

And then there are the little pearls that cross genre lines; inspired duets with BB King and Francine Reed, and his incredibly touching version of "Rainbow Connection" that redeems its schlocky origins and makes it glow. This feels like such a lovingly crafted album, such a jewel, that it makes me worry that is the aging songster's goodbye.

Buy it and love it.

My first Willie
This is the first album that I have ever bought by Country icon Willie Nelson. I can tell that it will certainly not be the last. I think that Willie's music stands on the same level of cultural impact that Johnny Cash and Ray Charles, to name two giants who have just been cannonized in their passing.

Though I don't think that every song included here is a classic, there is enough jaw dropping material to make me dig deeper into his catalog. My favorites include the spare touching CRAZY, his first hit TOUCH ME, the bluesy duet with Francine Reed on FUNNY HOW TIME SLIPS AWAY and the utterly sublime BLUE EYES CRYING IN THE RAIN. Though Willie would be classfied as a country artist, he takes a host of other influences such as jazz, blues, Tin Pan Alley pop and latin elements and weaves them into the fabric of great American folk music.

SONGS has provided a good sampler of Nelson's wide ranging work to start investigating. If it weren't for two lesser duets with Lee Ann Womack and Brian McNight that seem to be a tad too polished for the other material included, I would call this an almost perfect introduction