This week, the podcast kicks off a special, Live from Luck! mini-season of OBW, four interviews conducted this March at Willie’s central Texas ranch with artists performing later that day at his annual Luck Reunion. Up first is three-time Grammy nominee Allison Russell, who discusses Willie’s landmark 1978 recording of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” It’s one of the most covered titles in the Great American Songbook, and Allison explains why she thinks Willie’s version is definitive... before...

This week, Willie’s longtime producer and songwriting partner Buddy Cannon talks about one of the most iconic Willie songs of recent vintage, 2017’s “Something You Get Through.” The song was a cornerstone of Willie’s so-called Mortality Trilogy—a series of albums that found him in Aging Wise Man mode and passing along some hard-learned life lessons. Buddy will describe the poignant moment on Willie’s bus that provided the song’s inspiration and the unique, distinctly 21st Century method they...

This week, four-time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke—who in addition to being an acclaimed actor, writer, and director happens also to be a hardcore Willie nerd—discusses “Too Sick to Pray,” a meditative hymn from Willie’s beautiful, pin-drop quiet 1996 album, Spirit. Ethan says the song and album were touchstones for him when he first became a father in the late 90s, before going on to describe the way Willie’s music connected him with his own dad as a kid, peppering his memories with digressions...

This week, singer-songwriter Norah Jones—a nine-time Grammy-winner and go-to Willie duet partner—talks about “Permanently Lonely.” It’s one of those songs Willie has recorded repeatedly, but she focuses on his early-sixties demo, sitting at her piano to illustrate the jazzy intricacies of the song’s melody, and marveling at what she calls the beautifully harsh poetry in its lyrics. She’ll also describe the way she leaned on Willie’s music when she left Texas for New York City, the first time...

This week, legendary Muscle Shoals bass player David Hood talks about recording Willie’s classic 1974 album Phases and Stages with his fellow Swampers, focusing on his favorite track on the record, “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling in Love Again.” Phases was, of course, named Willie’s finest album ever by Texas Monthly, and it prompts memories from Hood on the fabled R&B producer who brought the project to Muscle Shoals, Jerry Wexler; the mere two days they took to cut it; and the weird...

This week, Americana singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff talks about the cut that closes Willie’s 1973 album Shotgun Willie, “A Song for You.” It was arguably Willie’s first iconic cover song, written by one of his closest friends and most important collaborators, Tulsa legend Leon Russell, and it prompts Nathaniel to think aloud about the biker funeral where he first heard it; the crazy, early-70s days when Leon and Willie first hooked up...and the great lesson Nathaniel learned from Willie...

This week, Willie’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, talks about a song Willie cut not long before leaving Nashville for good in 1972, the aptly titled “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture.” Mickey was just a sideman on the Dallas folkie scene when he first heard it, and it’s the song that made him want to play with Willie. He talks about that experience, plus what his fifty-plus years with Willie have been like, from joining the band to shows they played until dawn, mysterious...

This week, one of America’s greatest living composers, Jimmy Webb, the writer of such classics as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston,” “Macarthur Park,” and “Wichita Lineman,” talks about another of his iconic songs, “Highwayman.” Willie, of course, recorded it with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson in 1985, and it went on to win that year’s Grammy for best country song, as well as give country’s first supergroup their name. From there, Jimmy touches on...

This week, Vince Gill—a 21-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and honkytonk historian—talks about “Healing Hands of Time.” It’s a song Willie’s cut several times, but Vince focuses on the version from 1976’s The Sound in Your Mind, before getting into the power of an irresistible first line in a lyric, the seminal role in country music history played by Willie and his old friend Ray Price, and why writing a song that helps people through a hard time—like “Healing Hands” and...

This week, we ring in Willie’s 89th birthday with his daughter Paula Nelson, who talks about “Devil in a Sleeping Bag,” off of his 1973 album Shotgun Willie. It’s a song Willie wrote about his longtime drummer and best friend, Paul English—who happens to be Paula’s namesake—and it gets her thinking about Paul’s dual role as Willie’s well-armed money-collector, a gunfight her dad was in, and hanging with Michael Jackson at the “We Are the World” recording session—before closing with some sweet...

Singer-songwriter-superstar Kacey Musgraves goes deep into Willie’s back catalog to discuss “Are You Sure.” It was one of the first demos he cut when he moved to Nashville—though it’s probably best-known by the duet Kacey and Willie recorded for her Grammy-nominated 2015 album Pageant Material—and it prompts her to talk about what she calls “real-ass country songs,” the lucky joint Willie gave her, and singing “Rainbow Connection” with him at the 2019 CMA awards. Oh and she also does the best...

Season 3 launches on April 20th with Kacey Musgraves, Vince Gill, Nathaniel Rateliff, Jimmy Webb, and many others.

The original Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders squad burst onto the field back in 1972—the same year Title IX passed, the same year Deep Throat came out, and a year before Roe v. Wade. Sarah Hepola digs into the untold stories behind the global pop culture phenomenon, from the stripper who allegedly inspired the squad’s creation, to a scandalous Playboy cover shoot that was partly a battle over fair wages, to the ongoing debate about sexuality and women’s bodies in a post-#MeToo world. The result...

There’s something different about Texas. But how do you define it without resorting to cliches about cowboys and oilmen? At Texas Monthly, we think the answer is through stories — stories like the ones we’ve been telling for almost 50 years. On State of Mind, you’ll hear those stories from our talented writers and from a wide array of other Texans. Each of them is a window into the experience of life here. Join us each week for a new story about life in the Lone Star State, from the Texas...

This week, we celebrate Willie’s 88th birthday with singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow, who discusses what may be the single best-known song that Willie ever wrote, “Crazy.” She’ll walk us through what it means to compose a pop standard, explaining the differences she hears in Patsy Cline’s original, 1961 version and the one that Willie still does nightly, but she’ll also describe what it does to her heart when she hears her 10-year-old son singing “Crazy” in the kitchen. And then she’ll get into...

Even though singer-songwriter Rodney Crowell had already been a diehard Willie fan for 10 years when Phases and Stages came out in 1974, he says he was positively gobsmacked by the album’s lead single, “Bloody Mary Morning.” On this episode he dives deep into all that, then goes on to describe his first recording session with Willie a few years later...including the red Camaro he saw doing donuts outside the studio when he got there. And you will not guess who was driving.

Singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen first heard “Mr. Record Man” as a pre-teen Houston kid who’d just raided his older brother’s record collection. It’s another deep cut off Willie’s 1962 debut album, and it makes Keen think of a dance floor mishap at his first Willie show, the time his car caught fire in the parking lot at Willie’s 4th of July Picnic, and that uncanny Everyman quality that is such a big part of Willie’s appeal. Songs from this and other episodes from One By Willie are...

Singer-songwriter Shakey Graves—who answers to Alejandro Rose-Garcia when he’s not onstage—discusses Willie’s biggest pop hit singing solo, “Always on My Mind.” It had been one of Elvis Presley’s signature songs of the '70s before Willie covered it in 1982, and Alejandro explains how Willie managed to pull off the impossible: stealing a song from Elvis. Then he describes the undying appeal of a good power ballad and that surreal time he signed Willie’s guitar.

Acclaimed singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, a four-time Grammy winner and certified roots music royalty, examines “Night Life,” one of Willie’s first compositions to earn its way into the American musical canon. It’s a song that makes her nostalgic for the clean-cut, smooth-crooning Willie of the early ‘60s, but also brings up the effect of a Depression-era upbringing on artists like Willie and her dad, Johnny Cash. Oh, and she also breaks out her cell phone to play one of her favorite covers...

Acclaimed producer T Bone Burnett (Counting Crows’ August And Everything After; the Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack; dozens of others) discusses one of the darkest songs Willie ever wrote: the early-60s murder ballad “I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye.” The song debuted on Willie’s 1966 album Live at Panther Hall in Fort Worth, Texas, and T Bone talks about being in the audience that night—because of course he was; he’s T Bone Burnett—along with what it was like to produce Willie...

Willie’s daughter Amy Nelson was just five years old when she first heard Kermit the Frog sing “Rainbow Connection” in The Muppet Movie, and she spent the next twenty years trying to talk her dad into recording it. In 2001, he finally did, with Amy—an accomplished musician in her own right—co-producing. She describes the way that session grew into a magical, extended-family affair mixing songs Willie once sang to his kids with a few of his more grown-up favorites, resulting in Rainbow...

Don Was, the legendary producer who recorded Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me” and the B-52s’ “Love Shack,” and has worked with everyone from the Rolling Stones to Bob Dylan, calls Willie’s recording of “Across the Borderline” his favorite track he ever worked on. It was the title cut to the 1993 album that breathed new life into Willie’s career, and it prompts Don to discuss the fragile magic of a perfect first take, what it’s like to go out to eat with Willie and Ringo Starr, and...

Singer-songwriter Steve Earle was a longhaired, seventeen-year-old San Antonio kid when he first heard “Local Memory,” a deep cut off 1973’s Shotgun Willie. He calls it the song that first taught him that a country lyric could read like literature. Steve goes on to describe the very real tension that still existed between hippies and rednecks when Willie played outside Austin in the early 70’s, and Willie's wonderfully off-color nickname for him.

A new lineup of distinguished guests on their favorites, from an Outlaw classic to a Kermit the Frog cover.

Lumineers lead singer and co-songwriter Wesley Schultz first heard “Pretty Paper” when his parents played Willie’s classic, 1978 holiday album of the same name while driving around their New Jersey neighborhood looking at Christmas lights. The song is a Yuletide standard—so much so that a lot of listeners don’t even know Willie wrote it—and it prompts Wes to think aloud about the power of lonesome songs during the holiday season, give an unexpected, apples-to-apples comparison between Willie...