Willie Nelson
Countryman#
Lost Highway Records
If the thought of country crooner Willie Nelson doing a reggae album seems incongruous, or like a kitschy stunt, turn on your genre blender. Cannabis consumption aside, Mr. Nelson is a perfect fit for Rastafarian roots music.
The 72-year-old singer-songwriter has the same piratical, outlaw spirit that drew Keith Richards and Johnny Cash to Jamaica in the 1970s. (Both Mr. Richards and Mr. Cash had homes on the island.) There’s something in the air there — perhaps the smoke — that made these white men kindred spirits with black musicians such as Peter Tosh and Bob Marley.
Speaking of Mr. Cash, he donated “I’m a Worried Man,” the third track on Mr. Nelson’s new disc, “Countryman.” The late Man in Black wrote the song with wife June Carter Cash while living in Jamaica and soaking up the local scene. Mr. Nelson performs it here with a little help from reggae legend Toots Hibbert.
Speaking of Mr. Richards, in the mid-’90s, the Rolling Stone rocker executive-produced and performed on an album of Wesleyan hymns set to heartbeat reggae rhythms with a group he dubbed Wingless Angels. In the same way, Mr. Nelson’s “Countryman” aims to tease out the gospel soul that inheres in reggae music.
Regrettably, the album doesn’t quite make it through the Cuisinart, and the chunks and lumps are hard to swallow. Mr. Nelson’s last great album, the Daniel Lanois-produced “Teatro” (1998), was a far bolder recording, drawing out and embellishing as it did the Spanish inflections of Mr. Nelson’s guitar playing. “Countryman,” in contrast, is just a bold idea and little more.
The project has been nearly a decade in waiting; it was shelved after label head Chris Blackwell split from Island Records, Mr. Nelson’s then-home. Roots-music-focused Lost Highway Records revived the idea with, apparently, not much thought to whether the intervening years had killed any currency it might have had in the 1990s.
Typical of Don Was’ helmsmanship, the production value of “Countryman” is bland and colorless. Notwithstanding the odd dub flourish and the inclusion of revamped Nelson nuggets such as “Darkness on the Face of the Earth,” this is reggae of the safest, sunniest sort, with a battery of background singers to hold your hand through the steamy jungle.
What’s good about “Countryman” was good before Mr. Nelson’s intervention. In fairness, though, Mr. Nelson’s inspired covers of Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and “Sitting in Limbo” make good on the promise of the reggae-country crossbreed.
What’s left — songs such as “Do You Mind Too Much if I Don’t Understand,” “How Long Is Forever” and “You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago” — is Mr. Nelson doing reggae for the sake of doing reggae: The tracks could just as easily have been conventional, tear-in-beer country compositions with patly clever lyrics.
If he had performed “Countryman” with real conviction and an eye toward invention, not just to scratch an itch to conquer uncharted territory, Mr. Nelson would have had something. As it is, “Countryman” is an inversion on the proverbial Southern marriage: Reggae and country turn out not to be incestuous enough.
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