Album title: God's Problem Child
Artist: Willie Nelson
Genre: Country
Nationality: American
Release date: April 28
Position in Discography: Seventy-second
Estimated Rating:
Familiar with this artist? Uh, duh!
Familiar with the genre or subgenre? A little
Average RYM Score: 3.29
If you talk of the legends of country music you have to include this man. He's right up there with Cash, Williams, Haggard and the rest. Two hundred and forty years in the business and still going strong. And though he may have used text messaging to swap lyric ideas with his producer, Nelson doesn't seem to be the kind of guy to embrace new technology and change his sound with it. This could have been recorded in the fifties or sixties, with the bouncy acoustic “Little House on the Hill” that opens the album, the soft piano ballad “Old Timer” and although the title of “Delete and Fast Forward” certainly shows that he's not stuck in the twentieth century, musically it's still the purest country you'll come across.
“Love of a Woman” is one of the most simple and beautiful country ballads I've heard in quite a while, and the vaguely Mexican-tinged “Butterfly” is really nice too, though I do know that melody. Might be an Elton John song. There's a great sense of humour and gentle poking at his own mortality here with songs like “Old Timer,” “Still Not Dead” (with its clever line “Woke up to find the Internet said I had passed away”) and the title track. Ah, the old master still has it, and he don't need your fancy electronic doohickeys and computers and a million producers and guest stars to make a country album that effortlessly blows all the competition out of the sky easy as a champion skeet shooter. To borrow a phrase from the Member of the Year 2017: unassailable.
Check out more from this artist? Yup
Check out more from this genre or subgenre? Yes
Actual Rating:
