Album Review: Willie Nelson, My Way

What is it with musicians and Frank Sinatra? Why do they see the reinterpreting of old blue eyes as a mountain that must be climbed? You don’t see painters re-doing Les Tournesois or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or (most) filmmakers reshooting Scorsese or Hitchcock, and with good reason – see Gus Van Sant. Why then do we regularly get the great and the good, and chancers like Westlife and Robbie Williams, raking over Sinatra’s coals?  Rod cleaned up with The Great American Songbook, Dylan recently gave us a patience-testing triple album, and now Willie’s going in.

Mind you, Nelson does have form for this kind of thing, against record company advice he released the standards collection Stardust back in 1978 and it sold by the boot load. The beautiful versions of Hoagy Carmichael's 'Georgia On My Mind' and Kurt Weill's 'September Song' it contained  instantly became red headed stranger signatures.

Now, as the actress has no doubt said to the bishop many, many times, I love a bit of Willie. His voice could croon your own obituary in your ear and you’d be happy to hear it, and the band, most especially harmonica virtuoso Mickey Raphael, are superb here too. The problem is that these songs are so intrinsically linked with Sinatra’s voice, that when others step to the mic, you instinctively compare them, unfavourably, to the originals.

Ignore ‘My Way’ as no one really needs to hear this scourge of a thousand wedding parties and karaoke bars ever again, and the duet with Norah Jones isn’t much cop either. The stately ‘Summer Wind’, the knowing ‘One For My Baby’, the truly lived-in ‘It Was A Very Good Year’, and the swinging take on ‘Night And Day’ -  one of the greatest love songs ever put to paper - are all worth hearing, but let’s hope this isn’t the final word from one of the greatest still extant contributors to the American song canon.

https://open.spotify.com/album/6x4hSL5zCjExduI7LygbhX?si=Ezbil1qoQ_OehHIvsKMjow