Country (and Western) Matters

While we were on the road, we picked up a couple of CD's for the car; we were looking more for the sing-along kind than kickass driving beats. Since we were driving through country & western territory, we added Country Goddess Emmylou Harris to the Eagles (that Winslow thing) and for good measure, bought Willie Nelson's new Countryman release.

Mrs. DjStan and I are both Willie fans (we saw him in concert at the Beacon on NYC's Upper West Side a few years ago – I think every Texan in the city turned out for that one), and I often get into the car humming "On The Road Again". The new album, ten years in the making, is mostly a collection of Willie-ized reggae standards and reggae-ized Willie standards. With few exceptions (nice versions of "The Harder They Come" and "Sitting in Limbo"), it's not great reggae and it's not great country - the arrangements and production don't support the songs very well, and I don't think producer Don Was ever really gets Willie's way of singing over, under, around, and through the beat. But Willie is just about always good company, and it made for some nice traveling/singing moments. Thankfully, he also resisted the temptation to record the gazillionth version of "Rivers of Babylon".

The album was released with two covers, depicted above. The first – and the original one – depicts a marijuana leaf. The second, the result of Wal-Mart's refusal to carry the first, shows a palm tree (although I also saw the palm tree cover in a Borders in Phoenix). Yup, a palm tree - the plant that always comes to mind when you think of Jamaica and/or Willie Nelson. They might as well have just stuck a tulip on the cover and been done with it. You know - Jamaica, land of wooden shoes and windmills.

On the road trip we also scanned for radio stations while driving through Arizona, and picked up plenty of country. The top-40 Nashville sound is - in general -incredibly sentimental and overblown for the most part (which is why I prefer the c&w music generally referred to these days as alt.country or traditional country or even "Americana"), but some of it is so goopy it's funny. Take the Andy Griggs song, "If Heaven", which includes the line "If heaven was a pie, it would be cherry". That one had us spinning lines beginning with "If heaven was…" for a day or two. On the other hand, we did get to hear "Pencil Neck Geek" on the same station, which made up for it.

By the way, it is the opinion of Mrs. DJStan that if if heaven was a hotel, it would be the Arizona Inn. I concur.