Willie Nelson covers "Robbed Blind" - Release: November 1st 2024

...does anyone know if keith is on board?

[www.crashrecords.co.uk]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2024-11-15 16:37 by bv.

A perfect song for Willie!

Willie Nelson Releasing ‘Last Leaf on the Tree’ Covers LP With Tracks Written By Beck, Tom Waits, Flaming Lips, Neil Young & More

Other interpretations on the album due in November include songs by the Warren Zevon, Sunny War, Nina Simone and the Rolling Stones' Keith Richards.

By Gil Kaufman
August 15, 2024


Pamela Springsteen

Willie Nelson will release his 153rd album, Last Leaf on the Tree, on Nov. 1. The Legacy Recordings LP features a mix of the country icon’s interpretations of songs by Tom Waits, Keith Richards, Beck, the Flaming Lips, Neil Young, and Nina Simone, among others, as well as a handful of tracks written by the singer and his son, Micah Nelson, who also produced the album.

The first single from the collection is a cover of Tom Waits’ “Last Leaf,” a melancholy meditation from Waits’ 2011 Bad As Me album about the autumn of life that speaks to the 91-year-old country icon’s legendarily indefatigable spirit and boundless energy well into his six decade as a performer. “I’m the last leaf on the tree/ The autumn took the rest/ But they won’t take me/ I’m the last leaf on the tree,” Nelson sings in a hushed voice over his signature nylon string guitar strumming in the song that confronts the vicissitudes of aging.

The collection, Nelson’s 76th solo studio album, marks the first time Micah — who performs and produces under the name Particle Kid — has produced one of his dad’s albums, though they have appeared together on family LPs such as 2017’s Willie and the Boys and 2021’s The Willie Nelson Family.

“It’s an approach that I really love and have used a lot over the years — just throwing the clay down and stepping back, then maybe adding a little more, and then maybe shaving down here, and kind of building the tracks that way,” said Micah, 34, who said he used a “sculptor’s approach” to working on the album on which he played more than a dozen instruments, including guitar, piano and “sticks and branches, logs and dead leaves” according to a press release.

Micah also created the album’s cover illustration and made the animation for the “Last Leaf” video, as well as illustrating the album cover and creating the animation for the “Last Leaf” video along with his wife, Alexandra Dascalu Nelson; in addition to digital, CD and LP versions, Nelson’s webstore will also sell an exclusive, limited-edition version with a lithograph created by Micah.

The choice of “Last Leaf” was fitting according to Micah Nelson, as his dad has not shied away from addressing the unstoppable march of time before as well as facing his own mortality via a series of health scares, including on the title track of his 2018 album Last Man Standing, on which he lamented watching “my pals check out.” Micah said, “there are little side-quests, but that became the through-line — facing death with grace.”

That vibe makes sense given such song selections as Warren Zevon’s bittersweet ode to everlasting love “Keep Me In Your Heart,” as well as another haunting Waits song, “House Where Nobody Lives” and the Lips’ joyful meditation on the preciousness of life, “Do You Realize??” Another track that fits the theme of the fading of the light was chosen by Nelson’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, jazz giant Nina Simone’s 1967 song “Come Ye.”

In addition to the Nelsons and Raphael, the album also features guest musicians Daniel Lanois on pedal steel, former Doors drummer John Densmore and Senegalese percussionist Magatte Sow.

Listen to Nelson’s “Last Leaf on the Tree” and see the album’s track list below.




Last Leaf on the Tree track list:

1. “Last Leaf” (written by Tom Waits & Kathleen Brennan)

2. “If It Wasn’t Broken” (written by Sydney Lyndella Ward)

3. “Lost Cause” (written by Beck David Hansen)

4. “Come Ye” (written by Nina Simone)

5. “Keep Me In Your Heart” (written by Warren Zevon & Jorge Calderon)

6. “Robbed Blind” (written by Keith Richards)

7. “House Where Nobody Lives” (written by Tom Waits)

8. “Are You Ready For The Country?” (written by Neil Young)

9. “Do You Realize??” (written by Wayne Coyne/Steven Drozd/Michael Ivins/David Fridmann)

10. “Wheels” (written by Micah Nelson)

11. “Broken Arrow” (written by Neil Young)

12. “Color Of Sound” (written by Willie Nelson & Micah Nelson)

13. “The Ghost” (written by Willie Nelson)

[www.billboard.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2024-08-15 18:50 by bye bye johnny.

Quote
FoolToCry
...does anyone know if keith is on board?

No clue, but Keith loves Willie so no reason he wouldn't be on board!

Quote
DandelionPowderman
A perfect song for Willie!

Definitely, it could have been a Willie tune!

....
Excellent song, I can't wait to hear the cover

What and artist !!!!!!!!!!

Angel flying to close to the ground is a masterpiece !!!!!!!

Bye
Fernando

Way cooool .....
a Keith song and Tom's Last Leaf which keith sang on ....



ROCKMAN

Love, Death, and a Bleating Goat: Inside Willie’s Strange and Beautiful New Album

With ‘Last Leaf on the Tree,’ Willie Nelson and his son Micah have made a masterpiece that is a sonic outlier—but features a whole lot of Trigger.

By John Spong
October 30, 2024


Micah & Willie Nelson / Randi Steinberger

[www.texasmonthly.com]

[archive.ph]

"Robbed Blind"





Full album -
[www.youtube.com]

[open.spotify.com]

Just beautiful! Last Leaf were my sentiments this morning waking up and lookin' out the window. May Willie have another twenty healthy wonderful years!!! This is GREAT stuff!

THis is a fabulous album - and just a few months since releasing The Border, which I also loved. But this is a step up - son Micah Nelson stripping it down a bit. Robbed Blind I love, but the whole album is brilliant! Here's to the nonogenerian (?) supremacy!
Reviewed it for The Arts Desk which went live today - a link for anyone interested .... thanks.
Willie Nelson's Last Leaf on the Tree review

Willie has possibly the strangest cadence in all of music. Fantastic sounding album and Robbed Blind is amazingly huge. Stripped down? HA! Cinematic is more like it.

Does Keith have to be on board?

Rod

There use ta be some footage of Tom & Keith
in a recording studio doing Last Leaf On The Tree ...



ROCKMAN

From Apple Music:

Not many artists get the chance to ask themselves how to make their 153rd album feel special. But not many artists are Willie Nelson. Still a workhorse into his nineties, the beloved country icon has been going at a pace of about two studio records a year for some time, owing to his partnership with producer Buddy Cannon, who’s worked out a plug-and-play system to keep Nelson and his trusty longtime companion, nylon-stringed 1969 Martin guitar Trigger, recording covers and the occasional original at a clip of as many as 14 in a single day. While efficient, this hasn’t always allowed for a lot of spontaneity or variety, so when Nelson’s manager wanted to try shaking things up, he didn’t have to look far for a new collaborator: Nelson’s son Micah, who records as Particle Kid.

“I was flooded with a million different emotions all at once, and my imagination was having a field day with all the possibilities, all the directions it could take,” Micah tells Apple Music. “How can I blend my more sort of impressionistic DIY approach to music with his own ethos and style and aesthetic and his history? How can we merge all those things in a way that feels natural and authentic?” The initial idea was an album of Tom Waits covers, but as Micah revisited Willie’s albums Spirit and Teatro, from 1996 and 1998, respectively, he landed on an approach that became Last Leaf on the Tree.

“One thing I felt wasn’t showcased enough on a lot of the records that my dad had been making was silence and space and room for Trigger and him,” Micah says. “So Spirit came to mind, which is one that I always loved as a kid. There’s four things happening in the whole album—there’s no bass, there’s no drums. It’s my dad, Aunt Bobbie on piano, Johnny Gimble on a fiddle and Waylon Payne on his guitar. And you don’t miss anything. It’s such an emotionally potent record, and you can hear everything going on—it’s like you hear the soul of the people playing. It’s a very slippery slope with music—there can be so much sound that you can’t hear anything.”

With this in mind, he cast a wider net, presenting for his father a more eclectic selection of songs to work with. Some, like Waits’ “Last Leaf” and “House Where Nobody Lives”, and particularly Warren Zevon’s final transmission “Keep Me in Your Heart”, are by contemporaries of Willie’s, facing the spectre of death head-on. But Micah also included more recent artists like The Flaming Lips, whose elegiac “Do You Realize??” has a different urgency in this context. “I didn’t sit down and go, ‘I want this album to be about death and love,’” says Micah. “I grew up loving The Flaming Lips. That song came to my head, and when I imagined my dad singing, it had a whole new weight to it, knowing his whole life history and how many of his friends are gone.”

The sparse arrangements keep the focus on Willie’s distinctive, sometimes unsteady delivery. “You can hear the detail of my dad’s voice at his age, and every lyrical phrase of Trigger,” says Micah. “All of those things are part of the composition, part of the painting.” Willie’s takes on lovelorn ballads like Beck’s “Lost Cause” or Keith Richards’ “Robbed Blind” don’t feel like they’re about a relationship—they feel like they’re about all the relationships. “I look at those and I go, ‘Oh, these are country songs, and this is something my dad’s experienced on more than one occasion, so he can relate to this and sing it honestly.’ With a song like ‘Lost Cause’, a 20-year-old singing that is one thing; a 92-year-old singing it and suddenly it becomes far more existential.”

For Micah, the album’s highlight isn’t any of its revelatory covers, but rather the one song he and his father wrote together, “Color of Sound”. “All these reinterpretations were really great, but I wanted to have at least one song on there he wrote himself that was current. We were sitting on the bus, and I asked him if he’d written anything new, if he had any new songs, and he said, ‘No, I wrote them all.’ Then he said, ‘Well, I got this one thing: If silence is golden, what color is sound?’ To me, that was where I felt like, ‘OK, now this is our record. We have this song we wrote together.’”

If Last Leaf on the Tree were to be Willie Nelson’s final album—and there’s no reason to assume it will be—it would be a fitting and definitive capstone on a singular American life and career. But for Micah Nelson, it’s that and so much more. “Honestly, I’m just grateful that he’s lived long enough to be able to make this record with me, that he’s this healthy at this age and has this much spunk left,” he says. “It’s profoundly meaningful. Also, just the understanding that I might not ever get another chance to make a record with him, so this has to say something.”

Quote
MadMetaphoricalMax
THis is a fabulous album - and just a few months since releasing The Border, which I also loved. But this is a step up - son Micah Nelson stripping it down a bit. Robbed Blind I love, but the whole album is brilliant! Here's to the nonogenerian (?) supremacy!
Reviewed it for The Arts Desk which went live today - a link for anyone interested .... thanks.
Willie Nelson's Last Leaf on the Tree review

Thank you. This link works: [theartsdesk.com]

ROCKMAN

Thanks, I didn't realise the first link was a crock!
A record well worth your time, and Robbed Blind is just one highlight....

I was truly looking forward to listening to Robbed Blind, because Willie Nelson covering one of my fav Keith solo tunes seemed the perfect combination, but - I'm lowering my voice because I don't want to sound disrespectful - mmmmm ... so so

C