It was high time for Willie Nelson to launch a new album, the previous one dating back more than… nine months! Just weeks shy of his 90e anniversary, the most good-natured of Texans pays tribute to a hero from the shadows of country song, Harlan Howard.
What is the essence of country music? To “three chords and the truth,” once said Harlan Howard, the late songwriter who provided many hits to Buck Owens, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. Numbers ? More than 4000 songs would bear his signature, and 100 of them would have risen in the top 10 country.
A shadow hero, therefore, to whom Willie Nelson owed one: it was during a jam organized by Howard in 1972 that the songwriter met Jerry Wexler, co-founder of the Atlantic record company, the one thanks to whom he would manage to get rid of the yoke of RCA, which prevented him from exercising his full creative freedom.
Fifth release of the nice outlaw since 2020, I Don’t Know a Thing About Love succeeds the very successful A Beautiful Time, for which he won the Grammy for Country Album of the Year last month. In an intimate tone, full of pretty sadness and dark humour, the almost nonagenarian performs some new songs co-written with his producer Buddy Cannon as well as finely chosen re-readings, including a surprisingly becoming version of Tower of Songby Leonard Cohen.
Still directed by Buddy Cannon, I Don’t Know a Thing About Love assumes by the very nature of its project something less essential. His discreet charm, these ten covers deploy it with a good taste similar to that of several of these discs on which Willie draws from the catalog of a comrade he admires (in the genre, his Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson of 1979 remains a peak).
Surrounded by irreproachable musicians, the redhead sings sentimental failures (Streets of Baltimore), money problems (Busted) and compassion for others (Life Turned Her That Way) with his usual phlegm, to which Trigger (his guitar!) adds some smiling solos. He may not know anything about love, but the gentleman is, in matters of music, the repository of a rare wisdom.
Country
I Don’t Know a Thing About Love: the Songs of Harlan Howard
willie nelson
Legacy