Willie Nelson knows pain. He’s been through it, he’s wallowed in it, he’s come out the other side of it. Though to younger listeners he may come across as a somewhat washed-up kitsch emblem, his songs bear the brunt of his experiences and embody the outlaw country movement that saw Willie, along with Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, eschewing the normal constraints of Nashville. In 1975 Willie recorded ‘To Lefty, from Willie’, an accolade to the honky-tonk innovator comprising an entire album of Lefty’s material. Now, 35 years on, it’s Willy’s turn to bask in the rays of his own sunshine.
‘To Willie’ sees Matthew Houck’s Phosphorescent digging deep into Willie Nelson’s back catalogue and emerging with an album of 11 songs that you won’t find neatly lined up like soldiers on a greatest hits collection. Covering a multitude of sins washed down with a big ol’ spoonful of penance, ‘To Willie’ is a drunken haze of booze, women, Jesus, regret and redemption. Houck’s world-weary voice splinters and chokes with emotion over songs such as ‘Permanently Lonely’ and ‘It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way’ and you just fucking know that he’s feeling it for real. Whereas Willie can sing “So excuse me for lookin’ like my world just ended/And excuse me for lookin’ like I just lost my best friend/But the last thing I needed/The first thing this mornin’/Was to have you walk out on me” with the reflective luxury of a man who’s made his mistakes, with Houck’s renditions you can nigh on hear the dressing ripping away from freshly dressed wounds. But it’s not all heartbreak and retribution; the honky-tonktastic ‘I Gotta Get Drunk’ has all the charm of that stage of a messy night that there’s just no fixing – the only thing that’s left to do is pour another whiskey, laugh and say ‘fuck it!’.
Fans of Phosphorescent’s beautiful 2007 album, ‘Pride’, be warned: this is not a follow up album filled with hymnal etudes. Rather it’s a pensive pause in Houck’s career that allows him to pay delicate respect and admiration to the music that made him the man that he is today.
