These days, WILLIE NELSON albums come in two varieties: quickies knocked out as favors to friends and those that he puts some real effort into. During Willie’s past few years of untethered label-hopping, we saw more of the former than the latter. HEROES (Legacy), however, marks his return to Sony Music, the parent company of Columbia, where he recorded from the mid-seventies until the mid-nineties. And it falls somewhere between his two extremes: it’s a focused studio effort featuring top-tier guest stars and a top-notch producer (Nashville veteran Buddy Cannon), but it’s also a favor to his son Lukas, who wrote or co-wrote three of the songs and appears on nine tracks. As a songwriter, Lukas is still a work in progress, though a promising one. As a singer, he sounds like a tinnier version of his dad. But to be fair, even the big names on hand here—Kris Kristofferson, Ray Price, Merle Haggard—come up short; none have Willie’s uncanny ability to slip into a song. Willie fully inhabits Wayne Carson’s “A Horse Called Music” (sung as a duet with Haggard); a stirring remake of Floyd Tillman’s “This Cold War With You” (with Price and Lukas); a rare new original composition, “Hero” (with Jamey Johnson and Billy Joe Shaver); and surprisingly credible covers of Tom Waits and Pearl Jam. There’s the usual helping of hokum (“Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” a song featuring Snoop Dogg that somehow took five people to write), but Nelson, who just turned 79, seems more committed than he has in some time. by Jeff McCord
As ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO’s BIG STATION (Fantasy) demonstrates, even inveterate rockers eventually face their mortality. The album’s opener, “Man of the World,” sets the tone: “Duct-taped together for one last ride,” the 61-year-old Escovedo sings, and then, “Feel life dissipating.” Though the Ramones-like “Oh yeah!” that punctuates that line suggests he’s kidding, what follows— the title track’s evocation of the afterlife, a description of Escovedo’s environs as “the bottom of the world,” and a desperate need to feel something, anything, on “San Antonio Rain”—indicates it’s not entirely a joke. Self-reflection has always been a trademark for Escovedo, especially since his health took a turn for the worse a decade ago, but Big Station cuts deeper; on songs like “Too Many Tears,” the air hangs heavy with regret. Yet none of that seems to have affected the actual music, which is Escovedo’s most adventurous in years. This is his third consecutive collaboration with producer Tony Visconti (best known for his work in the seventies with David Bowie) and co-writer Chuck Prophet, but unlike Real Animal and Street Songs of Love, it’s not a straight-ahead guitar release. Big Station sports a cello, a violin, an infectious new-wave vibe, and crisp arrangements flush with backing vocals, horns, and hand claps. There are a couple of superfluous tracks, including a drippy cover of “Sabor a mí,” but what sticks with you is how energized Escovedo sounds, even when he’s contemplating his own decline. by Jeff McCord
Mary Karr and Rodney Crowell
Photograph by Deborah Feingold
Before Mary Karr began working on Kin (Vanguard), the 57-year-old poet and author of the celebrated memoirs The Liars’ Club, Cherry, and Lit had never written a song in her life and was reluctant to give it a try. But the 61-year-old singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell realized that he and Karr had something valuable in common: both of them grew up in tough circumstances on the Texas Gulf Coast, and both of them left for greener pastures. When they finally started working together, they came up with an album’s worth of songs compelling enough to draw guest appearances from the likes of Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, and Kris Kristofferson.
Rodney, it was you who contacted Mary?
RC: Yeah, I did, sort of ingeniously. I put her name in a song.
MK: On Rodney’s [2003] song “Earthbound,” I get name-checked right next to Tom Waits and Aretha Franklin. There’s no list of names I would rather be included in.
Then we wound up meeting in New York, and it was like we had known each other our entire lives. Rodney and I went to the same juke joints when we were kids, we both rode our bikes behind mosquito trucks.
RC: We come from hardworking people. There’s something about that influx of people who came from sharecrop farms to the Texas Gulf Coast. It’s not that different in some ways from Detroit—people could get labor jobs, have a chance of a little bit better future. My people came from western Tennessee and western Kentucky.
MK: My family came from Tennessee.
Both of you have brought so much of that part of Texas into your art over the years. What is it about it that stays with you?
MK: It’s the ugliest place on the planet in some ways. There’s a lot of misery and suffering. But there’s also enormous humor and great poetry. The people know how to take an ass-whooping, but they also know how to get back up.
RC: People ask me, “What is the mystique of the Texas songwriter?” Well, we ran barefoot from March until November. I think there’s something about being a barefoot kid that gets you closer to the place—you take root. Of course, I don’t think either one of us could wait to get out of there.
Rodney, after you read The Liars’ Club, did you have the idea of collaborating with Mary right away?
RC: When I finished that book, I said, “This writer is a born songwriter.”
MK: Rodney kept saying, “We can make a record.” I was like, “Rodney, I don’t know anything about writing a song. You know everything, and I feel like a dumbass.”
What convinced you?
MK: We were talking on the phone, and I told him that when I was younger they always said about me, “If the law don’t want you, neither do I.” He said, “That’s a great title for a song.” And not long after, Rodney was in New York with his guitar on his knee and we were banging out that song. It just came naturally.
Were you involved in the recording?
MK: Rodney would let me come to the studio because I was so awestruck.
RC: Let me interject here. Rodney didn’t let Mary come to the studio, Rodney wanted Mary in the studio. People like Vince and Emmy have been around me for a while and love me, but Mary comes in the room and they perk up a little bit because they want to sparkle for her. So you get more than if it had just been me there.
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