Aus der New York Times:
WILLIE NELSON
“Songbird”
(Lost Highway)In the enviable position of having nothing to lose, Willie Nelson has knocked around prodigiously during the last 15 years of record making: a kids’ album, a jazz album, a reggae album, lots of collaborations and homages. Producers with vastly different styles have benignly captured him for a few days, and he has sailed through each experience intact, unchanged, fully inhabiting himself, if not fully inhabiting the emotional truth of each song.
Ryan Adams, who has more ideas for songs and records than he can use for himself, was the captor for Mr. Nelson’s newest album. He produced “Songbird,” using his own country-rock band, the Cardinals, abetted by Mr. Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael; he wrote one of the songs too. “Songbird” is a studiously distressed honky-tonk record, with a lot of echo, feedback, splintered edges, unstable tempos and steel-guitar solos boosted up in the mix: in short, a very good recent Ryan Adams record, except for the absence of Mr. Adams’s voice.
This album includes songs outside anything resembling Mr. Nelson’s normal repertory: those by Leonard Cohen (“Hallelujah”), Gram Parsons (“$1,000 Wedding”), the Grateful Dead (“Stella Blue”) and Fleetwood Mac (“Songbird”). None give you that dizzy feeling that comes when a new voice inhabits the precise dimensions of a song you know well. Mr. Adams has worked hard to give each song its own special, shambling environment, and in some places — particularly the Parsons song — he designs crescendos with vicious emotional swells that make you forget how stylized the songs are. But more to the point Mr. Nelson’s voice is an instant rearranger: he can even break up Mr. Cohen’s granite delivery into mysterious microclimates of rhythm.