Willie Nelson - God’s Problem Child

Pitchfork 76

In the face of their own imminent mortality, our greatest singer-songwriters have pivoted towards that darkness to deliver some of their most profound lines. “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” Leonard Cohen sang on last year’s swansong You Want It Darker. David Bowie portended: “Something happened on the day he died/Spirit rose a meter then stepped aside” on his final album, released two days before his own passing. Now in his early 80s, Willie Nelson too has his mind turn to the dwindling of days. “Well I woke up still not dead again today/The internet said I had passed away/But if I died I wasn’t dead to stay/And I woke up still not dead again today,” he deadpans on the boot-shuffling “Still Not Dead,” a sentiment to file alongside his 2012 collaboration with Kris Kristofferson and Snoop Dogg, “Roll Me Up.”

For all of the cosmic wisdom that Willie infused into the country music paradigm in the early ’70s, he now favors playing the cosmic joker in his twilight years. For God’s Problem Child, he took to swapping lines with co-writer and producer Buddy Cannon via text message, giving the seven songs they wrote via thumbs a casualness and looseness they otherwise wouldn’t have. “I’m writing it all down in this stupid ol’ song/I made a mistake Lord, I thought I was wrong,” he quips on “I Made a Mistake,” his feigned mea culpa finding him equate himself to Jesus, Elvis, and Robert Ripley. Approach the Tao of Willie for spiritual succor and you might get a puff of smoke instead.

At times, Nelson’s nonchalance makes some of the more topical concerns on God’s Problem Child feel a tad hackneyed. “Delete and Fast Forward” tackles the post-election malaise, but there’s little solace to be taken in “don’t worry too much/It’ll just drive you crazy again.” Coming from a man born during the Hoover administration, perhaps it is just one big circle to be fast-forwarded through, but it reduces the real world stakes for those affected by the election’s outcome. Though at song’s end, Nelson hints that there’s always a falling short: “We had a chance to be brilliant/And we blew it again.”

That leaves plenty of space for the other veteran songwriters to slip Nelson their own meditations on aging. Veteran Gary Nicholson pens “He Won’t Ever Be Gone,” an ode to fellow outlaw Merle Haggard, who departed last year, his most famous titles embedded in the lines. Longtime Kristofferson sideman and “Breakfast in Bed” writer Donnie Fritts, who’s “Old Timer” is given a tender reading by Nelson. A song about late-stage heartbreak and the reality of watching the people you’ve known in your life slowly bowing out, it explores the divide between a failing body and still acute mind. “You think that you’re still a young bull rider/But you look in the mirror and see an old timer,” he sings, subtly drawing out the “ooo” for heart-rending effect. It’s a sound echoed by the elongated tones of Mickey Raphael’s harmonica, a solemn prairie wail that’s accompanied Nelson since Redheaded Stranger.

The title track is penned by Jamey Johnson and Tony Joe White, the former keeping the outlaw country banner high, the latter best known for the swamp-rock standard, “Polk Salad Annie.” White’s worn-leather baritone joins Nelson and Johnson, as does the late Leon Russell, making his last vocal appearance. For all of the convened voices, its Nelson and stirring guitar solo—eloquent in still-spry bursts—that speaks loudest.

And Nelson and Cannon’s ballad “It Gets Easier” details one of the real tragedies of growing old, the ease in which one can withdraw from loved ones and social living. “It gets easier as we get older to say go away,” he sings, save for the last line, where he sings of withdrawing wholly from the outside world yet still missing his love. It’s the sort of soft-spoken phrase that cuts through all of the smoke and finds Nelson detailing these twilight years in his own peculiar way.