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Willie Nelson had quite a year in 2023. He earned two Grammys to add to the 10 he’d already won; published a book called Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs; released two studio albums, Bluegrass and I Don’t Know a Thing about Love; was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; toured constantly; and celebrated his birthday with a giant two-night concert event at the Hollywood Bowl on April 29 and 30. All this would add up to an impressive flurry of activity for a young or middle-aged artist, but the birthday Nelson was celebrating was No. 90.
And what a celebration it was, complete with the sort of everyone-and-his-brother guest lists you’d associate with an event like Woodstock or the Band’s Last Waltz. In addition to Nelson himself, the shows featured Beck, Dwight Yoakam, Emmylou Harris, Keith Richards, Lyle Lovett, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Bob Weir, Sheryl Crow, Stephen Stills, and Tom Jones, to name just a few of the approximately four dozen featured artists. Their performances embraced many of Nelson’s own classic compositions, such as “Pretty Paper,” “Hello Walls,” and “On the Road Again,” as well as other numbers that are associated with him, among them “Always on My Mind” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.”
Even the backup band was luminous, with artists like Don Was on bass and the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench on keyboards. So were the presenters, who included actors Ethan Hawke, Helen Mirren, and Woody Harrelson.
Highlights of the concerts have just been released in a package that includes two CDs and a widescreen, surround-sound Blu-ray. The set is called Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90, but there’s nothing short about it: the CDs have a playing time of two and a half hours, and the video is even slightly longer. (And if that’s not enough for you, you can opt for a digital edition that adds 13 bonus tracks.)
Inevitably, perhaps, given the wide range of artists, not every one of the 39 featured performances is memorable, but many of them are. Dave Matthews pours his heart and soul into an acoustic version of Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away,” for example, while Willie’s son Lukas delivers a showstopping rendition of his father’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” in which he sounds almost exactly like his dad.
Another fine moment comes with Rosanne Cash’s reading of “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again),” which ends in an emotional duet with 86-year-old Kris Kristofferson, the song’s composer. Nelson himself has many great parts, too, including duets with George Strait on Townes Van Zandt’s “Pancho & Lefty” and with frequent songwriting partner Buddy Cannon on the poignant “Something You Get Through.”
Well before the show ends—with Nelson’s performance of his signature song, “On the Road Again,” followed by an all-hands-on-deck singing of “Happy Birthday”—you’ll be wishing you’d been there. You’ll likely also be wishing that when you hit 90, you can still be at least half as full of life as Nelson. He has had quite a career and, to quote the title of a Rodney Crowell song featured in this concert, “It Ain’t Over Yet.”
A New Edition of Violent Femmes’ Celebrated Debut
The folk-punk band Violent Femmes has released 10 albums over the years, but its eponymous April 1983 debut LP, which ultimately earned platinum certification, remains its bestseller. The record, which has just been rereleased in a 40th-anniversary deluxe edition, is widely and understandably viewed as its best moment.
Consisting of lead singer, guitarist, and songwriter Gordon Gano, percussionist Victor DeLorenzo, and bassist Brian Ritchie, the trio has frequently been compared to Jonathan Richman; its minimalist approach additionally recalls Richard Hell (the show headliner when the Femmes first played New York) and early Talking Heads. You can also hear echoes of the Velvet Underground—or at least of what that group might have sounded like if it had started making music when its members were teenagers.
That, in fact, is what Violent Femmes did: Gano was an 18-year-old high school student when he wrote most of these songs, and you can sense his teenage angst boiling over throughout the record. In “Kiss Off,” for example, he shouts every adolescent’s nightmare: “I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record!” And, in “Gimme the Car,” one of two tracks added to a CD version of the album in 1987, he begs his father to hand over the keys to his wheels so he can pick up a date and “touch her all over her body.” (In liner notes for the new deluxe release, David Fricke writes that Gano and Ritchie performed that sexually charged song at a National Honor Society induction ceremony at their high school, and that as a result, the institution kicked Gano out and denied him his NHS medal.)
The new edition of Violent Femmes contains the 1983 album and the two numbers added in 1987, plus nine demo recordings and 13 concert tracks, eight from 1981 shows in the group’s Milwaukee, Wisconsin, hometown, and five from a 1983 gig at New York’s Folk City. All this material previously appeared on a 20th-anniversary edition (whose remaster of the original LP is featured here), but fans who missed that might well want to pick this up.
Catbells: Hidden Identity, Open Emotions
Partly Cloudy is the first full-length CD from Catbells, the pseudonym for a dream-pop singer whose real name has not been revealed and who hides her face behind a mask for photographs, videos, and concerts. (Is this some sort of trend? Orville Peck, who appears on the Willie Nelson tribute album reviewed above, is also a pseudonym for an artist who conceals his face with a mask.)
Though—or perhaps because—Catbells doesn’t share her identity, she seems to have no problem with sharing her emotions on this record, which is loaded with ear candy but also a good deal of musical and lyrical melancholy. The midtempo first track, for example, finds her struggling to recover from a failed relationship: “I feel so numb,” she sings. “Do you ever think of me? You moved on so easily…But I just can’t seem to make you fade.” On another number, she confesses, “Every night I lie awake, wondering how much I can take…Trying not to feel makes me want to cry.”
The set closes with a song where Catbells’ ukulele serves as the only accompaniment for her gently delivered vocals, but most of the tracks feature acoustic and electric guitar and drums. Pour Julee Cruise’s music into a blender and mix well with a few ounces of Belle & Sebastian and ’60s “girl groups” like the Caravelles and Paris Sisters and you might come up with something close to what you’ll hear on the consistently likable Partly Cloudy.
