Willie Nelson

There's another connection between two secret sharers: Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson both
convince you they just did whatever they did off the top of their heads. That's why
Nelson's two big statements of the Nineties - 1993's Don Was-produced Across the
Borderline and 1998's Daniel Lanois-produced Teatro - lack the magic of the austere Spirit,
the instrumental Night and Day or even the casual remakes on last year's unnotic... More >

It's another kiddie record gone to seed by another codger who's been around too long to believe in the end of the rainbow. Or has he? A typically ramshackle one-off cut without drums in Nelson's home studio over Christmas break, it makes too much room for daughter Amy and, for some reason, the songs of Mickey Newbury (maybe Mickey's kids could use the royalties). But what you can expect to pay for the illusion of effortlessness is the reality of effortlessness, which is that sometimes it falls on its face. Here that doesn't happen often. "Playmate" and "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover" are born again, and where once it was agony to hear Newbury intone the half-past-dead "not all my God-like thoughts, Lord, are defiled," from Nelson that's just one plain truth among many. The truth he wrote himself just last year wants us to know that heaven is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. (Grade: A-)