It's been a lacklustre last few weeks on Music Arcades. I'm sorry that the posts here have been similarly flat. Only the Willie Nelson album has really inspired.
And happily, here's another: this is the one I was looking for when I bought Willie's 20 of the Best as a substitute. As with my first Johnny Cash and Hank Williams, this search was guided by that 1984 or '85 NME country music feature by Hank Wangford.
I found it eventually. In fact, if my memory can be trusted, I got it in the tiny Cheapside record shop that, over just four weeks when I worked nearby, was the source of many records in the summer of '85 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
The search turned out to be an anti-climax. I prefer the songs of mad, bad and sad love on 20 of the Best to the faux-outlaw cowboy persona of Red Headed Stranger. What's always stuck in in my craw is the couplet from the title track, "You can't hang a man for killing a woman / Who's trying to steal your horse". It sounds like someone's taken a Sam Peckinpah film a little too earnestly, and probably misread it to boot.
To be fair, there are still a few good love songs on Red Headed Stranger, and Willie's productions and arrangements are as timelessly — and sparsely — perfect as always. I was going on about silence a few months ago. I think Willie understands all that. His songs are never cluttered; they always sound like they're open to the sky.
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