Willie Nelson's Red Headed Stranger perhaps is the strangest blockbuster country produced, a concept album about a preacher on the run after murdering his departed wife and her new lover, told entirely with brief song-poems and utterly minimal backing. It's defiantly anticommercial and it demands intense concentration -- all reasons why nobody thought it would be a hit, a story related in Chet Flippo's liner notes to the 2000 reissue. It was a phenomenal blockbuster, though, selling millions of copies, establishing Nelson as a superstar recording artist in its own right. For all its success, it still remains a prickly, difficult album, though, making the interspersed concept of Phases and Stages sound shiny in comparison. It's difficult because it's old-fashioned, sounding like a tale told around a cowboy campfire. Now, this all reads well on paper, and there's much to admire in Nelson's intimate gamble, but it's really elusive, as the themes get a little muddled and the tunes themselves are a bit bare. It's undoubtedly distinctive -- and it sounds more distinctive with each passing year -- but it's strictly an intellectual triumph and, after a pair of albums that were musically and intellectually sound, it's a bit of a letdown, no matter how successful it was.
Red Headed Stranger
Willie Nelson
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Red Headed Stranger Review
by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Track Listing
Title/Composer | Performer | Time | Stream | |||
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1 | Willie Nelson | 02:26 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
2 | Willie Nelson | 01:32 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
3 | Willie Nelson | 01:13 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
4 | Willie Nelson | 01:36 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
5 | Willie Nelson | 02:21 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
6 | Willie Nelson | 04:00 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
7 | Willie Nelson | 00:53 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
8 | Willie Nelson | 00:26 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
9 | Willie Nelson | 01:47 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
10 | Willie Nelson | 00:47 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
11 | Willie Nelson | 01:56 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
12 | Willie Nelson | 05:24 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
13 | Willie Nelson | 02:52 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
14 | Willie Nelson | 04:22 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
15 | Willie Nelson | 02:19 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
16 | Willie Nelson | 00:40 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
17 | Willie Nelson | 03:32 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
18 | Willie Nelson | 02:16 | SpotifyAmazon | |||
19 | Willie Nelson | 02:26 | SpotifyAmazon |