Album Review: Willie Nelson, Oh What A Beautiful World

Released on the eve of his 92nd birthday, Oh What A Beautiful World is Willie Nelson’s 77th solo studio album and his 154th record overall. Those outlandish numbers, shouldn’t distract from the fact that this is simply a splendid record.

Harlan Howard, Lefty Frizzell and Kris Kristofferson have all had an album of their songs recorded by Nelson, which is quite the benediction. This latest is a paean to Nelson’s fellow Texan songwriter Rodney Crowell, who handpicked a dozen songs from his half-century oeuvre, including the title-track, here recorded as a duet between the pair of Lone Star State muckers.

Clearly, it’s a mutual appreciation society – Crowell first heard Nelson’s earliest songs on the radio and saw his shows in Houston in the mid-’60s, while Willie first recorded a Rodney song in 1983 and did again on last year’s The Border.

Indeed, Crowell’s canon mines classic Nelson territory. ‘Banks Of The Old Bandera’, originally cut by Jerry Jeff Walker in 1976, is simply mighty, a valedictory ode to long dissipated childhood innocence. ‘Forty Miles From Nowhere’ is a moving gaze at the path of life, from the other end of the prism.

Elsewhere, ‘Shame On The Moon’, a hit for Bob Seger in 1981, is a don’t-judge-a-man-until-you’ve-walked-in-his-shoes ballad, a beloved Nelson trope. So too is lead single ‘Oh What A Beautiful World’, popping as it is with the enlightenment garnered by this monumental artist. Long may he run...

8/10

Out now