Lucinda Williams on the Pure Poetry of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”

Transcript

John Spong (voice-over): Hey there, I’m John Spong with Texas Monthly magazine, and this is One by Willie, a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really love. The show is brought to you by Still Austin craft whiskey.

This week, we talk to one of America’s greatest, most beloved poets, Lucinda Williams, who’s going to give us a songwriter’s examination of “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” From there she’s gonna get into how shocking it was to first see Willie doing his thing when she moved to Austin in 1974, how weird it was later, in the eighties, to live in an apartment complex Willie owned on South Congress—where she lived, by the way, with the old boyfriend, Clyde Woodward, who inspired her song “Lake Charles”—and then what an absolute honor it was to cut a duet with Willie on a song she wrote herself, “Overtime.”

So let’s do it.

John Spong: It’s you! It is soooo great to see you. 

Lucinda Williams: Oh, great. Wow. I’ve got my “Austin” shirt on.

John Spong: But seriously, I don’t even mean it casually. Mark Rothbaum, a few weeks ago, Willie’s longtime manager, said, “You have to get Lucinda.”

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: We dreamt this up three years ago, and . . .

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: . . . you’ve just been one of the brass-ring guests the whole time. To get to do this and to get to talk about this song?

Lucinda Williams: Thank you. I know, right?

John Spong: Yeah. Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: I know. I was asked . . . it was like, “Okay. Pick your favorite Willie Nelson song.” That’s like asking somebody to pick their favorite Beatles song. I mean, it’s kinda overwhelming, because there’s so many. But that one stuck in my mind.

John Spong: I love that. Well then, on to Willie. Where we usually start is, and it’s always a ridiculous question but specifically in this instance, what’s so cool about “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground?”

Lucinda Williams: That line, first of all. I love that line. Just the image of that, or just what it evokes. That drew me in, right there.

John Spong: Right.

Lucinda Williams: Then I searched, I looked for it, I googled it. I found a recording, a video recording of Willie performing it somewhere, and listened to how he’d sang it and everything. That laid-back, jazzy thing again. You know, what really blew my mind though when I watched that was how well he played guitar.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: God, I was blown away. That blew my mind. I couldn’t get over that. Just, wow. For whatever reason, I didn’t remember him being like that on guitar.

John Spong: It’s stunning. And it’s singular. It’s never the same from night to night . . .

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: It’s weird . . . it’s intricate . . .

Lucinda Williams: It’s amazing.

John Spong: . . . it’s loose. It’s casual. It’s kind of rough.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: I love that you accentuate just that one line, the title, because I mean, I’ve always known this song, and it didn’t occur to me that somebody had to use that phrase first. I mean, it really does seem like this timeless expression that maybe . . . 

Lucinda Williams: It does.

John Spong: . . . initially written on a cave wall.

Lucinda Williams: I think that’s exactly, I think, why I was drawn to it. Because it sounds like something people would’ve said a lot. Like a hundred years ago. Well, if there was . . . maybe this woman was troubled or something, and somebody might’ve said, “Well, she was like an angel, just flying too close to the ground.” It sorta reminds me of that line, “He was just driving down a dead-end road,” like somebody who’s just kinda bound to lose, or born to lose or something.

John Spong: Yeah. Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: That’s a good . . . You pointed that out really well.

John Spong: Thanks.

Lucinda Williams: We’re on the same page with all this.

John Spong: Nice. And in that case, will you listen with me to “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground?”

Lucinda Williams: Yes. This is fun.

[Willie Nelson singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”]

Lucinda Williams: [Sigh] God, that just made me want to cry.

John Spong: Doesn’t it?

Lucinda Williams: Yes. It’s so evocative. I mean, when he gets to that part of the song—”So leave me if you need to. I’ll still remem—”

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: Because he helped her get up, and now she’s going to leave, after he helped her, but he understands.

John Spong: That’s the thing. I mean, I always thought this was a sad song, and in a way it is. But then that’s just all the complications inside of Willie, I think. I guess he was with somebody who was on the rebound, right? It was this great love, and “Whoops, you’re hauling ass?”

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. Exactly.

John Spong: “. . . but, it was so great that I’m grateful just for this time with you.”

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. That’s hard to do.

John Spong: Yeah. Yeah. Don’t we all hope we get there one day?

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. That’s real love.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: In a spiritual sense.

John Spong: Yeah. I was impressed, too, looking closely at this, that the rhyme scheme just doesn’t really even make sense. There’s “down” in the first verse, that sound, that rhyme is  . . . once in the first verse, twice in the second verse, three times in the third verse. It’s a deceptively complicated piece of writing as well.

Lucinda Williams: But then when he sings it, he makes it sound really simple and basic. That’s the beauty of it, I think.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: To me, when I read it, there’s an understanding that comes through. It’s not complicated. It’s not one of those things you have to dig to try to figure out what it’s saying.

John Spong: Right.

Lucinda Williams: That part about—”I patched up your broken wing and hung around for a while, trying to keep your spirits up and your fever down” . . .

John Spong: Right.

Lucinda Williams: . . . like some wild thing that he’s captured. He’s captured this wild thing, and he’s drawn to her for that reason. But then the same thing that he’s drawn to is going to fly away and leave him. I mean, there’s so many layers of it. At the same time that it’s simple, there are all these different layers that you can keep digging up, kind of. Yeah.

To me, that’s what a great song does. This is a really good song. It’s really well-written. I mean, I don’t . . . wasn’t even thinking about the rhyme scheme thing, necessarily. That didn’t really stand out to me that much, whether it was weird or unusual, or whatever.

John Spong: Well, that’s the thing with your writing, you don’t worry about it either. You write what you’re. . . . If I can be so presumptuous, rhymes aren’t the key thing in every Lucinda Williams song, and that’s because you’ve got something to say, and it’s going to come out the way you’re feeling it.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. Well, sometimes I rhyme, and I didn’t realize I was always doing this, but I’ll take a word in the middle of a line, and I’ll rhyme it with something else. It’s not always the last word. That’s more that traditional thing, that traditional rhyme schemes would be more like, the end of the line would rhyme with the end of the next line and so on and so forth.

John Spong: Those internal rhymes . . .

Lucinda Williams: Yes. Internal rhymes. A lot of it depends on where the attack is when you’re singing, like the cadence of the song. That’s what I like about this song, another thing, is he builds up to the rhyme.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: When I was listening to it, I was interested in how he phrased it. His phrasing is really unique, how he holds it out. “So leave me if you need to.” He doesn’t rush right into the next part. “Leave me if you need to. I’ll still remember . . . Angel flying too close to the ground.” The way he presents it is . . . you can’t rush through it. It wouldn’t have the same feeling.

John Spong: It would lack something. A few years ago, in some research I was doing, I found this Willie album that had never been released before. It was Willie Sings Hank Williams.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, wow. I didn’t even know about that one.

John Spong: No. You wouldn’t. I think some weird box set put it out.

Lucinda Williams: It was real obscure.

John Spong: No, it was just never released. Then I think it was when Willie was having his IRS trouble, the Home Shopping Network [Correction: QVC] put out a box set of stuff that Willie had just pulled out, like, from under the bed.

Lucinda Williams: Really?

John Spong: He got some money off of them to help pay off his debt.

Lucinda Williams: Right. Yeah.

John Spong: One of them was this . . .

Lucinda Williams: Bless his heart.

John Spong: Yeah. It worked. We still got him. The weird thing about the Hank Williams record, it was done with Nashville players. It was beautifully done. But he wanted it to be a straight tribute to Hank. So, he didn’t imitate Hank . . . but because Hank always sang on the beat . . .

[Willie Nelson singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”]

. . . Willie sang on the beat, and listening to him sing on the beat is one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve ever heard.

Lucinda Williams: Really?

John Spong: It made no sense compared to any experience I’d ever had.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. Well, that’s what I was going to say. He’s so behind the beat when he sings on this one. That’s what—I just love that it just, ah.

[Willie Nelson singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”]

John Spong: So when did Willie and his music first come into your life?

Lucinda Williams: Well, I moved to Austin the first time in 1974. That’s when I remember hearing, it was those few years during that part of the seventies, when I first heard Willie . . .

John Spong: Yeah. That was . . .

Lucinda Williams: . . . you know, go see him play sometimes. What struck me about Willie Nelson, when I very first went to see him was, it would almost make me uncomfortable—was how he would slow . . . everything was so slow, and I wasn’t used to that at the time. But he just held things back to the point of like, “Oh.” I mean, it was a lesson. It was a good lesson for me though. Because there was all this space in the music, which is crucially important, especially in the jazz world.

But I hadn’t heard anything like that before, especially in country music. Like, I remember seeing him at Austin City Limits, and everything was just real studied and slow, and it was so behind the beat that . . . but that was Willie. 

John Spong: In the early seventies, during your first stay in Austin, he’s not a big deal yet . . . but he mattered locally, right? I mean, that whole scene, that Cosmic Cowboy, all that stuff is coalescing around him and Jerry Jeff and Murphey and Willis and B.W. and those people. And you, you’re just a kid busking on campus?

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. I was just a kid. I was in my twenties. A friend of mine had gone to Austin and called me up, and he said, “You have to come out here. You got to come out here. It’s amazing. It’s magical and wonderful.” So I went, and he was right. The streets were swarming with singer-songwriters and all those people you mentioned, Gary P. Nunn. I remember going out to, what was that, Soap Creek Saloon, which used to be out in the country.

John Spong: Out on Bee Caves.

Lucinda Williams: I’d go out there and Gary P. Nunn would play, or Jerry Jeff. It was just everywhere.

John Spong: I’ve got a soundboard recording somewhere of Willie at Soap Creek, from about that time.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool. But then you moved back in ’81 and lived in a place called . . . I’ve heard some people refer to as the Willie Hilton?

Lucinda Williams: Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. God, I can’t believe that got out.

John Spong: What was the Willie Hilton?

Lucinda Williams: That was these apartments . . . it was this little apartment complex that was next door, or right behind, where Soap Creek moved when it moved into town.

John Spong: Yeah. Right. By the Continental Club.

Lucinda Williams: On South Congress. There were these apartments, I guess, that Willie bought and owned? And different crazy, wild musicians would rent ’em and live in ’em. There was a swimming pool and all. I lived in one with this guy, Clyde Woodward. He’s the one I wrote “Lake Charles” about.

John Spong: I was gonna say, he figures prominently in the Lucinda folklore.

Lucinda Williams: Yes. And Margaret Moser, I think, was hanging around there quite a bit.

John Spong: The old Chronicle writer . . .

Lucinda Williams: Yes.

John Spong: Those apartments, there was actually . . . it’s telling, maybe, that you weren’t aware of the whole thing. There were 330 of them. It was actually fourteen acres. It went all the way down to the Opry House. Somehow Willie owned all of that from like ’78 to ’98.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: Or I guess he sold out in ’88, is what he did. But Tim O’Connor still owned it. But the Opry House was the most important music venue in Austin through those years.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, yeah. That was a great venue. Yeah. And I remember Willie’s name being associated with it.

John Spong: Tim ran it for him. And it’s funny. The Continental Club was right there. It was going through a renaissance. The guy that ran it was Roger One Knight? If you remember Roger?

Lucinda Williams: Oh, yeah.

John Spong: He’s a buddy now. He said, “Oh, I remember Clyde. He came in, and he said he was Lucinda’s manager, and he’s always trying to come in and getting us to book her. But we would just end up drinking and getting high all night, me and Clyde.” He said he really enjoyed Clyde’s company.

Lucinda Williams: That sounds about right.

John Spong: Okay. Who all else, do you remember, was over there? Alejandro told me that he didn’t live there, but his dope dealer did, so he was by a lot.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. He was probably over there. They were actually more like motels, motel rooms, kind of. Like those old trailer courts.

John Spong: That’s what it had been.

Lucinda Williams: The old kind of motels. Yeah.

John Spong: In the sixties, it was supposedly the biggest motor lodge in Texas.

Lucinda Williams: Really?

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: Wow.

John Spong: And the Opry House was a convention center. It was this little separate seat of government. But then when those guys had it, when Willie had it, it was just a very different place.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. I guess they were cheap enough for the musicians to be able to afford. Willie, of course, was real tolerant as a landlord. That’s when Margaret . . . I mean, not Margaret, Liz Lambert started buying up some of those old motels, like the . . .

John Spong: The San Jose . . .

Lucinda Williams: What was that one?

John Spong: . . . across the street.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. The San Jose.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: Which apparently had been a similar type motel in its day.

John Spong: Yeah. It stayed. It got seedy in the eighties and stayed that way until Liz got it. Because that was the other thing, up the street was the dirty movie house, the Cinema West, if I’ve read right. The hookers that walked the street in front of the dirty movie house, many of them also took advantage of the cheap rent at the Willie Hilton.

Lucinda Williams: Right. Exactly. The Willie Hilton. I forgot it was called that. I should have talked to you before I finished my book.

John Spong: You got another one . . . you’ve got another one in you. I know it. I just read your first.

Lucinda Williams: Well, you could write one just about that time in Austin, because there’s so much to say. But I don’t always remember. You’re really good with the details.

John Spong: Probably it has a lot to do with not having lived through that stuff. But when Wayne Nagle, who had the rehearsal complex there, the ARC, next to the Opry House, he told me that when they finally sold it in ’98, when Tim O’Connor finally got out of owning the Opry House and being a landlord, Tim said that . . . because they didn’t want police presence on the property, he said, “No one would benefit from that.” When the tenants like yourself didn’t pay rent for a couple months, they wouldn’t start eviction proceedings. They would just go take the front door off the apartment.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, God. I don’t remember that.

John Spong: Well, that means you paid your rent. I think that’s good on you.

Lucinda Williams: Okay. I guess. Yeah. Clyde probably sold a bunch of pot or something and paid the rent.

John Spong: That would make sense, too. But Wayne said that when they sold the place, the inspectors for the city were going through the Opry House. It had all these weird side rooms and back rooms and stuff. It was just this rabbit’s warren. He said that the inspectors found ten 40-gallon drums filled with bricks of Mexican weed.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, wow.

John Spong: Wayne said, “We hadn’t seen Mexican weed on the streets in a long time in that period. I think it must have just gotten lost or forgotten.” When I asked Tim about it, he just looked at me and said, “John, that weed had neither been lost nor forgotten. That’s all I’m telling you about that weed.”

Lucinda Williams: That’s hilarious. Oh, my God.

John Spong: That’s pretty cool. And you’re right there in the middle of it.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. Yeah. Those were special times in Austin during that time. 

[Willie Nelson singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”]

John Spong: Tell me about recording “Overtime” with Willie.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, yeah. That was one of the highlights of my entire career.

John Spong: Really?

Lucinda Williams: Oh God, yeah. I mean, he just nailed it. I wrote it to be kind of, have that . . . I wanted it to have that behind-the-beat jazz feeling. He got that. He captured it. We played it live together at . . . there was a Willie Nelson tribute. But I’m trying to remember where. I think it might’ve been in L.A. actually.

John Spong: I think you’re right. But before that, because I’m trying to remember, because we talked about this a long time ago . . . I think you had said that one of the things that you were so proud of, because you had always heard, maybe, Ray Price singing that song. You said it just had this smooth, as you say, jazzy thing . . .

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: . . . that you and Willie were both on the same record label. You were on Lost Highway. So they said, “We need to get you to record. He wants to record . . . he wants to cover one of your songs.” But then when you got to the studio, they had already done the backing tracks.

Lucinda Williams: They’d already picked the key and cut the track. It wasn’t exactly in the right key for me, is what it was. So I was nervous about that. But somehow, I pulled it off and we did it. I think we traded off verses maybe, or something like a duet kind of a thing.

John Spong: What’s this song about? Do you remember what prompted you to write that one?

Lucinda Williams: Well, just a love relationship. Unrequited love. Trying to get over somebody and how that can drag out. You think you’re never going to get over him, and it’s always going to be horrible.

John Spong: But you’ll get there over time. That’s the whole point.

Lucinda Williams: You get there.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. Yeah.

John Spong: When you did the studio version with Willie, there’s such a vulnerability in the way that you sang it. But it sounds like . . . what you told me once, “Well, that’s because it was higher than I’m used to singing it.”

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: But then the live version, I do have that queued up. Can we watch that together?

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. I thought that came out really good.

John Spong: Oh, it’s breathtaking. 

Lucinda Williams: Was that at the Wiltern, in L.A.?

John Spong: I think that’s right.

Lucinda Williams: For some reason, that’s what I connected it with.

[Lucinda Williams and Willie Nelson singing “Overtime” live]

Lucinda Williams: Oh, God. Woo.

John Spong: Isn’t that great?

Lucinda Williams: Oh, my God. That was just . . . it doesn’t get any better than that. I got to sing with Willie on my song. I mean, that’s it. That’s the ultimate compliment for a songwriter and a singer.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: Bless his heart. He was enjoying it. He looked like he was really digging in . . . like he got it.

John Spong: Yeah. Yeah. Well, a special song will do that to somebody. But I mean, your hug at the end, when y’all are done singing together . . . it’s a real hug.

Lucinda Williams: It really is. Yeah.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: There was a vibe. There was a good vibe there.

[Willie Nelson singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”]

John Spong: Have you spent much time with him other than that? You’ve toured a little, right?

Lucinda Williams: I never was able to spend that much time with Willie. I felt kind of shy around him. I looked up to him. He was a really looming, big figure in my life. You know how a lot of people went out to Willie’s ranch and hung out and all that, I never did make it out there, for whatever reason. I have gone on Willie’s tour bus, the infamous tour bus, with all the pot smoke and everything.

But whenever I’d go on his bus, he’d just be sitting there holding court. We were never able to sit and get into a conversation or anything.

John Spong: Do you feel like there’s things that you’ve learned from him, just from his example?

Lucinda Williams: Oh, yeah.

John Spong: Like what?

Lucinda Williams: Well, like I was talking about before about space, allowing space to occur in a song and not rushing, and just that relaxed way he has of singing and the way he approaches a song, and just that relaxed behind-the-beat kind of thing.

John Spong: I think I have a quote here somewhere. There was that great New Yorker story about you, like twentysomething years ago, that Bill Buford did, but he described your writing. He said, “Her songs are not traditional rock and roll, if only because they’re more written, more preoccupied with the concerns of language and image than most rock tunes.” If you substitute “country” for “rock and roll,” that’s a pretty good description of Willie’s songs and imagery, too.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. It is. Yeah. Because he was always . . . well, you know, I had trouble getting a record deal for years because my music, quote, fell in the cracks between country and rock, which is, to me, that’s what Willie’s is. I mean, I think that’s what Hank Williams was, too, really.

John Spong: Yeah. Huge blues influence on Hank Williams.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

John Spong: Yeah. But so, that’s the music side of things, but there’s also Willie as just like a good neighbor, Farm Aid and taking care of people and loyal friend and stuff. Is there a great lesson . . . is there a great lesson in Willie’s life that . . .

Lucinda Williams: Well, I mean, to me, being big, like he got, world famous, really . . . the fact that he was so down to earth and didn’t forget about his people, the people he grew up with, and the people who came to his shows and supported him and everything. He never got above his raising, like they used to say.

John Spong: Well, can you imagine putting out two records a year when you’re ninety? That’s the other thing. He also just never quits.

Lucinda Williams: I know. That was the other thing that . . . his aging, that didn’t become a big thing with him. I mean, there he is running around the country on a tour bus, smoking tons of marijuana, wearing braids . . . with long hair in braids and a cowboy hat, and he’s ninety-something years old. I mean, nobody else could keep up with him. He was just . . . that was Willie Nelson.

John Spong: Yeah.

Lucinda Williams: That right there is what defined him, really. [It] was, “I’m Willie Nelson. I’m ninety-something years old. And by God, I’m going to live the life I want to live.” That’s what he put out there. You had to accept it. You had to just go, “Okay, man.”

John Spong: Well, that whole idea, that whole unapologetic, “Take me as I am . . .” that’s what he’s been doing since he was 40. I mean, that’s what happened when he finally hit it big. I love that. You’re the only artist I can think of that had . . . that broke big, and nationally, later in life even than Willie did. You did it at 45. He did it at 40, which was always the thing that kept young people hopeful.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. Exactly.

John Spong: It’s crazy.

Lucinda Williams: Yeah. He didn’t think twice about it. It was just that, “This is what I do.” It didn’t matter how old he was. He was still doing the same thing at ninety that he’d probably done at twenty. 

John Spong: Cool. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Lucinda Williams: Oh, I really enjoyed it. I felt like we could sit and talk for a long time about Austin.

John Spong: Next time you’re in Austin, tell Liz to find me.

Lucinda Williams: I will.

John Spong: But also, you’ve had a rough two or three years. To be visiting with you is . . . it’s good to see you kicking so much ass.

Lucinda Williams: Thank you. It’s my bad-girl spirit that keeps me going.

John Spong: That’s what Willie says when they said, “How have you lived long?” He said, what is it, “Pure thoughts and clean living.”

Lucinda Williams: Yeah.

John Spong: Cool.

Lucinda Williams: There you go.

[Willie Nelson singing “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”]

John Spong (voice-over): All right, Willie fans. That was Lucinda Williams talking about “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” A huge thanks to her for coming on the show, a big thanks to our sponsor, Still Austin craft whiskey, and a big thanks to you for tuning in. If you dig the show, please subscribe, maybe tell a couple friends, and visit our page at Apple Podcasts and give us some stars. Please also check out our One by Willie playlist at Apple Music.

And that is a wrap on Season 5. We are going to take a little break in production, but should be back late summer with more episodes. So in the meantime, why don’t you go through our archive and listen to some episodes you might have missed. And if you don’t have the bandwidth for that, why don’t you put your favorite Willie record on? It kinda makes everything better, doesn’t it?

We’ll see y’all soon.