Willie Nelson must have been one tortured soul back when he was making his mark as a hit songwriter in the early 1960s. What, other than untold anguish, could have produced the likes of “Darkness On The Face Of The Earth”, “Home Motel”, and “I’ve Just Destroyed The World”? And yet why, when he’s cut such a sanguine stoner figure of late, would Nelson revisit these songs, and others from this period, on his new record, Teatro? With 70 albums to date and no IRS tab hanging over his head, why is he recycling his catalog?
Apart from the fact that Nelson — one of the greatest writers and singers the idiom has known — has earned the right to do so, the material needed it. When Willie first recorded these weepers for Liberty 35 years ago, the label gussied them up with chipper background singers when what they cried out for was the fiddle-and-steel that ruled the hardwood of the era.
Now, of course, no one would mistake Nelson, whose recent work has taken on an acoustic, almost new-agey cast, for a honky-tonker. So rather than going retro, he enlisted producer Daniel Lanois — who, thank God, uses a lighter hand than usual here — to help him recut this early material, as well as three new songs, in a way that reflects the sound in his mind today.
Recorded in an old Mexican theater in the Oxnard, California, Teatro opens with an unearthly rendition of “Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour? (Where Are You, My Love?)”, a pop standard associated with Django Reinhardt. The furtive strains of Nelson’s gut-string guitar, accompanied by his sister Bobbie’s haunting Wurlitzer fills, set the tone for the darkly romantic, Latin-tinged songs that follow.
“The sun is filled with ice and gives no warmth at all/The sky was never blue”, laments a lovelorn Nelson to the flamenco rhythms of “I Never Cared For You”. Desolation likewise pervades the rumba-flavored “Darkness On The Face Of The Earth”. And on “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye”, a twisted tale of jealousy given over to madness, Nelson updates the murder-ballad tradition in his craggiest — and creepiest — baritone.
Ten of the album’s 14 tracks feature Emmylou Harris on background vocals; singing in a lower register than usual, she sounds more like a crone — a wise, earthbound elder — than the angel she often evokes. And her timing, while at first jarring — it’s as if she’s a half-beat behind Nelson — only heightens the feeling of dissolution that pervades the project. That, and the record’s shambling rhythms and arcane instrumentation, helps make Nelson’s latest something of an avant-country answer to the post-rock wonder, Latin Playboys.