Amanda Petrusich on "Reasons to Quit"
The acclaimed music critic reframes the duo’s classic 1983 LP, Pancho & Lefty, as a concept album about easing into middle age.
By John Spong
Amanda Petrusich on March 18, 2022, in Austin.
Rick Kern/FilmMagic
Last November, New Yorker pop-music critic Amanda Petrusich posted a photo of her dog-eared vinyl copy of Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard’s 1983 album, Pancho & Lefty, on her religiously followed Instagram account. In the accompanying text, she tipped her hat to the flea market where she bought it, for a buck, and the black leather jacket she likes to wear when she plays it—plus to Townes Van Zandt, San Quentin prison, freight trains, and potato trucks. As for the experience of actually listening to the record, she described it as, “Very solid Monday morning vibe: a little tired, a little hopeful, a true & heavy ode to holding each other up.”
(Read a transcript of this episode below.)
On this week’s One by Willie, she goes much deeper with her thoughts on Willie and Merle’s first duet album, focusing at the outset on its other top-ten hit (besides the title track), “Reasons to Quit.” The song is a classic Haggard drinking tune, though a little more pensive than most, and Petrusich reframes it—and the whole of Pancho & Lefty—as a study of what she calls the outlaw’s conundrum: i.e., What’s an old rebel to do when the time comes to settle down? From there, we get into Willie and Merle’s long friendship, the all-star band that backed them on the album, Petrusich’s own fraught relationship with “Always on My Mind,” and, in a particularly insightful interlude, the specific ways sad songs can help people when life feels like too much to bear.
One by Willie is produced by John Spong and PRX, in partnership with Texas Monthly. The PRX production team is Jocelyn Gonzales, Patrick Grant, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and project manager Edwin Ochoa. The Texas Monthly team is engineer Brian Standefer, producer Patrick Michels, and executive producer Megan Creydt, with graphic design by Emily Kimbro and Victoria Millner. And Dominic Welhouse provides invaluable research and editing help.
Transcript
John Spong (voice-over): Hey there, I’m John Spong, and this is One by Willie, a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really love.
This week, we talk to New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich, who brings in what Willie nerds will know as “the other top-ten hit” off Willie and Merle Haggard’s classic 1983 album, Pancho & Lefty, the Haggard original “Reasons to Quit.” Now, as anyone who’s read Amanda’s stuff knows—and if you haven’t, I say start with the beautiful tribute to Haggard she wrote when he died, in 2016—she’s a deeply thoughtful, deeply sensitive lover of music. And she brings that to bear here by reframing “Reasons to Quit”—and, really, the whole Pancho & Lefty album—as an examination of what she calls the outlaw’s conundrum, or, rather: What’s an old rebel to do when the time comes to start taking it easy?
From there, we get into Merle and Willie’s long friendship, the all-star team of players that came together to make Pancho & Lefty—and that powered much of Willie’s career for the next ten years—Amanda’s own tortured relationship with “Always on My Mind,” and then, in a particularly insightful little interlude, the specific ways a sad song can help people when life feels like too much to bear.
So let’s do it.
[Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard performing “Reasons to Quit”]
John Spong: I’m thrilled to get to do this with you. And so, then, where we start is, What’s so cool about “Reasons to Quit”?
Amanda Petrusich: Thank you again for having me, John. This is such a treat. I picked “Reasons to Quit,” from Pancho & Lefty, which is an album Willie made with Merle Haggard in the early eighties. Also, John, I like that we’re discussing a song about kind of faltering sobriety during—in late December, which might in fact be the booziest time of year. So, this record came out in 1983. And Merle was 45, I believe? And Willie was 49. I am 44 years old myself, right now. So one of the things I love about this song, and, really, this whole album, is that it’s not about the transition from youth to adulthood. It’s about the transition from adulthood to maybe being a little bit old—which is an equally profound, I think potentially even more profound, moment of deep change and reflection. And I think it’s a moment that you don’t see reflected in a lot of art.
You know, you’ve lived your life a certain way. It’s served you for a time, but it’s not serving you anymore. And yet it feels impossible to change. There’s a quote I love from Merle where he talks about this period, this sort of midlife period, this awkward moment in the arc of an existence. And he said, “Your body’s getting ready to die, and your mind doesn’t agree.” Which I think about all the time, and I think about that a lot in the context of “Reasons to Quit” in particular, which is a song about trying to be better and failing at it, which is poignant—this idea that we get locked into these cycles of behavior that are so obviously horrible for us, but that knowledge alone isn’t enough to stop. “Reasons to quit don’t outnumber all the reasons why.” So I just love this song for all those reasons.
John Spong: I love that. I mean, I know this album better than most other albums I know, and I never thought of it as a concept record. And Willie has all these concept records, and some, you actually have to shoehorn it into the concept to make it—to follow. But this, as these two artists transitioning from being young bucks to old lions, is a wonderful, different way to listen to this record.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, I love that idea. It’s like, I have a very domestic life in some ways. I’m a single parent; I have a young child. I keep the counters clean; I change the sheets. But there’s a part of me that really relates to the idea of sort of bucking against that. And I think that’s such a narrative thread on this record. There’s a very kind of dark and incorrect part of me that thinks we have neutered and defanged ourselves in the service of civilization. And I love that Willie and Merle on this album are really, really, really pushing against that. They’re sort of fighting it with everything they have left.
John Spong: Precisely. And in particular, on this song, let me, uh—will you listen to it with me?
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, please.
John Spong: Coolio.
[Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard performing “Reasons to Quit”]
Amanda Petrusich: I love that. There’s this—so the third verse in the song, which Willie sings, always makes me laugh, where he says, “I need to be sober; I need to write some new songs that will rhyme.” Like, as long as the songs can still rhyme, you’re fine. When you stop—when you’re too high to make the words rhyme, you’re really in hot water. I love that that’s the bar for these two.
John Spong: Well, and I love that Willie sings that line. Because Haggard, his lines—in the interest of overthinking here, they’re a little bit bleaker. I mean, “I’m hardly ever sober. My old friends don’t come around much anymore.” I mean, he’s kind of, to your point, he’s the one that’s resigned to it. Willie, who, famously, is the workaholic who quit drinking and started smoking pot and credits it with saving his life, but also keeping him productive—he’s the one looking forward. They both ultimately say, “Eh, but anyhow . . .” But there’s a real dichotomy there. There’s a distinction between the way the two are looking at stuff that fits with who I think they are.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, absolutely. I feel the same way. And this whole record feels to me, it’s like a little bit about their friendship, and the way that they held each other up, and the things that they taught each other. It’s quite poignant in that way. And I think Willie has talked a little bit about his friendship with Merle over the years, and the ways that they had a lot in common in terms of how they grew up, their childhoods, things like that. There seems to be a sort of deep thread of compassion and understanding between the two of them that I think is palpable when they sing together. And then they also share this, sort of, what we were talking about earlier, what we might call the outlaw’s conundrum, which is when you’ve committed to an aesthetic of rebellion and lawlessness and excess and self-determination, when the day finally comes that you find yourself craving a little comfort and routine, how do you sort of shift into that? So you can hear, I think, the warmth between them, even though it’s an incredibly dark song in some ways.
John Spong: Well, it’s interesting, ’cause if I understand—so, I think I’ve read in a number of places that Willie, I mean, Merle, says that he and Willie would’ve met at a poker game in ’63, ’64, something like that. And then, of course, Merle skyrockets. His career really takes off in ’66 or so, and Willie’s, not for another ten years. But they’re friends, they travel, they tour together in Europe, they do some package shows and stuff like that. When Willie becomes such a big deal in the eighties and starts doing all these duet albums, he didn’t do one with Merle for a while. And I think, from talking to people in Willie’s orbit, a part of that was—it’s this theory of buddy of mine has—Merle was actually just drinking too much through those years. They were really good friends. But just like Willie never recorded [an album] with George Jones, who’s probably the most famous screwup in country music history. Merle—you wrote about it in the obit you did. He had so many great drinking songs in the seventies, but when you think about it, an album called Back to the Barrooms, Serving 190 Proof, songs like “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink,” “Misery and Gin”—he’s writing about his life with those songs, and an unhealthy level of drinking seems to have been a significant part of it.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think that’s the darkness in the song and maybe some of that sort of tension, as you were saying, in the verses, which is, when Merle sings some of those lines, you think, “Oh God.” And then when Willie sings it, it seems like a little bit lighter or easier. I mean, you can see, as you were mentioning, it seems like weed in particular obviously played a really profound role in Willie’s kind of creative work and his sort of awakening, in the way that he gets through the day. It seems to have been a little harder for Merle, I think, managing some of those things. Maybe that’s the gentle way to put it.
Well, I was thinking about this interview Willie gave after Merle died, when he talked about how in the early eighties, when they were making this record, that they were both trying to be a little bit healthier. And Willie tells the story about how they used to go jogging, and I think the exact quote he said was, “We’d burn one down and run two miles in cowboy boots,” which, you think, “I don’t know. I don’t know how healthy that’s going to get you. Maybe.” Maybe that’s the only exercise we should all be doing, but I think I wonder how much that was Willie saying, like, “Merle, let’s go for a run. Let’s try. Let’s eat some carrot sticks.” I don’t know, whatever it might’ve been, trying to help his friend sort of get a little bit back on track.
John Spong: And that’s the thought. Haggard had cleaned up a little bit. And they were smoking weed instead of getting plastered. And it helped Willie with his productivity, obviously. That’s how we got here. And so I think—I don’t know—that’s fascinating to me that they did that. Talk about how—their voices. For all the other things that they’re both known for. To me, especially with Haggard, I almost always start at his voice.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s something in Merle’s voice. There’s something for me as a listener, as a fan, there’s something really sort of round and solid in the way that he sings. It’s traditionally quite beautiful. I think the tone of his voice is—it’s just beautiful. And Willie has this other thing, where it’s a little more fragile, and there’s a little bit of a crack in it. It’s a little sort of feathery and tender. And I think just the way in which those two things come together, I mean, to me, of all the duets, all the duets records Willie has made over the years, I think Pancho & Lefty is my favorite. I think there’s something about the way their voices kind of complement and challenge each other that’s incredibly powerful.
John Spong: Merle makes me think a little bit of Ella Fitzgerald, only in that it’s an objectively, undeniably beautiful voice.
Amanda Petrusich: Yes.
John Spong: Whatever else might be happening, you can’t not be impressed with that. And then with Willie’s, I like—“fragile” is such a great word, too. There’s something conversational about the way he sings, which is a little bit phrasing, but also just a little bit the sound of the voice. It’s a speak-singing sometimes, almost, and a lot of whispering, and that creates this personal connection with me when I’m listening. That’s just different from listening to Dean Martin, or somebody like that, as much as I enjoy that. Or even Haggard—I feel like he’s talking to me in a different kind of way.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, no, I completely agree, John. It’s a really interesting combination of things and feelings and sounds. There’s a—Merle and Willie released another record together, and I think it was in 2015, Django and Jimmie. Have you listened to that album? There’s a cover on there of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” that—a song that’s been covered a lot. Really tough to beat the original performance of that song. But it just kills me. And I think it’s that exact same thing we’re talking about. It’s that sort of strange tension between the two of them and the way that they deliver a line that—when Merle sings on that cover, “I gave her all my heart, but she wanted my soul,” I just think, “Man, that’s the outlaw. That’s it.” But they both—and Willie’s appearance on that song is a little more, sort of, contrite, and a little more generous. Merle had that, I think, that sort of toughness, and almost a little bit of a distance that—yeah, I mean, it works. I think they work together so well.
[Willie Nelson performing “Always on My Mind”]
John Spong: You like Pancho & Lefty, the album, and you know it well. Does it sound like it’s from the eighties to you?
Amanda Petrusich: God, that’s such an interesting question. No. I think to me it feels like a seventies record, even though it’s ’83. Right? What about you? You hear the early eighties? I mean, there is a kind of a gleam to it, a professionalism.
John Spong: There’s that. But it actually gets to something—well, so it’s produced by Chips Moman. Do you know much about Chips? Can you tell me about Chips? I know him in relation to Willie, but not some of the—[more] broadly, who’s Chips Moman?
Amanda Petrusich: Well, I wish I knew more. I wish I could tell you more. I know he was a beloved and quite popular session guitarist. And I know he worked with Willie on some of his more famous tracks, but he’s really best known for being a producer at Stax, and then later for opening American Sound, I believe was the name of his studio? A beloved and tremendous studio that produced an almost uncanny number of incredible songs, but a guy who I think had a singular ear, an intimidating ear, who could kind of tell you immediately what was going right and what was going wrong in a performance. So it is very cool that he—did he produce all of Pancho & Lefty, or is it just a couple songs on there? The whole record?
John Spong: The whole thing. Yeah, and it’s this wonderful thing, because he didn’t have to do anything with Willie to get into the Hall of Fame, right? He did From Elvis in Memphis, you know? And “Son of a Preacher Man” is recorded in his studio. And he puts together those Memphis boys with Reggie Young and Gene Chrisman and Bobby Emmons and all these just badasses. But he also [co]wrote “Luckenbach, Texas,” and he recorded—
Amanda Petrusich: Ahhh, the Waylon song! Yeah, yeah.
John Spong: Yeah. He produced Ol’ Waylon for Waylon. And so that’s when—I think that’s when Willie comes into his orbit and gets to know him. And so that’s ’77 or ’78. And then, so, a few years later, Willie buys his golf course out in the country and decides to turn the clubhouse into his studio. And so he brings Chips to design the studio. And so the famous Pedernales recording studio where so much, you know—where Julio Iglesias flew in. That’s what Chips did with Willie. And when they’re finishing up building out the studio, they start to record some stuff. And they record “Whiter Shade of Pale,” and they recorded a song Chips wrote, “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” which is just magic.
Amanda Petrusich: Killer.
John Spong: And then they put it on hold, because Merle’s coming to town. Oh, but one other thing in there I do love—supposedly, I did hear that they had tried to cut “Whiter Shade of Pale” with Waylon, earlier, on a duet thing, and I don’t know if they got the track down and it didn’t work, or if they just didn’t get it, but the famous quote from Waylon was, “What the hell is a vestal virgin?!”
Amanda Petrusich: That’s a great question, frankly.
John Spong: Yeah, I’m not altogether sure—and leave it to Waylon to ask, right? “Don’t put them words in my mouth!” So Merle’s coming to town to cut this record, and that’s how they get to Pancho & Lefty, and it’s all those Memphis boys, and it’s Chips, who becomes Willie’s studio band through the eighties. And it ends up leading to “Always on My Mind,” which was a monster for Willie. And City of New Orleans. Reggie Young was such a huge part of what Willie accomplished in the eighties, and again, another guy that was already a Hall of Famer before they even hooked up. It’s interesting to me that these songs, which do have a poppy gleam to me, also have these absolute street cred dudes putting them together.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, yeah, of course. I think that’s a great way of putting it. There’s a lot of the smoothness, the sort of Nashville sound on this record, but there’s a bit of Memphis in there, too—if we were to think of those two things as a sort of yin and a yang, a binary, something that’s like a little looser, a little scrappier, a little dirtier, versus that sort of very clean, very smooth, very lovely thing that was happening in Nashville. I think you do hear both of those elements in this.
But just in general, it’s funny listening to you talk about that, John. I love hearing about these sort of moments of interconnection and this sort of broad and complicated artistic and creative community that these guys were all involved in. The ways in which they all changed each other’s lives and changed each other’s work. It’s really wonderful. I worry sometimes that we are losing that, a little bit, as the way we make music and kind of consume music becomes sort of a little bit more digital, a little less rooted in place and community that—I mean, whatever. Not to sound like everyone’s great-grandmother complaining about how things used to be so much cooler. But those connections, I think, are so crucial for all of us, for anyone who does creative work, sort of meeting people who inspire you and help you and, I don’t know, help you sort of understand what you’re doing in a new way. Yeah, every time I hear about that or I think about all those connections, it’s very moving.
John Spong: Well, and it’s awesome, because to me, one of the great lessons, if not the lesson, of all this Willie work is that it’s about relationships. And real relationships. His recording career doesn’t work until Bobbie’s in the band, his sister. It’s all real. And so one of my favorites, the other great guitarist on this record is Grady Martin. And Grady is this historic, immortal Nashville session guy. On “El Paso,” [singing] . . . that’s Grady Martin. You know, the cleanest, most wonderful, tasteful [picker]. Supposedly—I’ve seen it two different ways, but I think he did the guitar on “Pretty Woman,” the big riff on “Pretty Woman.”
Amanda Petrusich: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That seems right.
John Spong: But, so, when Willie’s making Honeysuckle Rose, in 1980, Slim Pickens, the rodeo bull rider slash character actor, is going to play the lead guitar player, longtime lead guitar player in his band. And so when they’re onstage together, Slim Pickens doesn’t know how to play a guitar solo like that, so they brought Grady in as his stunt double, and they used a close-up of Grady’s hands on the guitar and then cut back to Slim making his B. B. King face, or whatever.
Amanda Petrusich: I love that.
John Spong: But then Grady, he was in semi-retirement then—he just never left the band. He’s like the greatest guitar player ever, and he thought it would be fun to go on the road with Willie for the next twenty years. And be in the studio with him. And he’s Haggard’s favorite guitarist ever. And so—
Amanda Petrusich: Oh, is that true?
John Spong: —that’s these guys, coming together. Yeah.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. That’s so cool. That’s so cool. I mean, because you think of—when one thinks of Grady Martin, it’s like the sixties stuff, the Patsy Cline stuff, but the fact that he had that, it makes me really happy, actually, to hear that he was Merle’s favorite guitarist.
John Spong: The other thing I wanted to ask, and all that—because you did, we talked a little bit about the gleam. It’s interesting to me, and it gets at something that you talked to Willie about, when you did the great Q&A with him at the start of the lockdown—the conventional wisdom, the myth, the legend is that in the sixties, RCA and Nashville and Chet [Atkins] were mean to Willie, and they made him do stuff that he didn’t want to do, and that’s why he didn’t have any success, and they tried to make him pop, and he had to go make it simpler and dirtier, and all that stuff. When he hits, at the end of the seventies, he leans hard into country music that will sell. And that will get on the radio. And again, “Always on My Mind,” “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before”—which is not Chips, but City of New Orleans, this record, there is a shine to it. It’s interesting to me that—it makes me think that the idea about the sixties is not necessarily exactly the way it happened.
Amanda Petrusich: That’s so interesting. There was a moment in my life where I—Willie’s recording of “You were always on my mind” was maybe my least favorite song in the world. I had a moment as a sort of young, bratty, stupid, punk rock kid where I just thought, “This is the height of schmaltz and sentimentality, and this is so corny, and it’s unlistenable, and it reminds me of being in a drugstore buying cough drops,” and I couldn’t bear it. And it’s funny because now, as I’ve gotten older and maybe sort of lived a little, calmed down a bit, now I find it to be a very loving and sincere and vulnerable performance. But absolutely, there was a moment where I found that amount of, I don’t even know what the word is for it—corniness, I guess; it’s an incredibly corny recording—I just, I simply could not bear it. I mean, what’s your relationship to that song?
John Spong: I’m a kid in Texas, so it’s on the radio everywhere, and actually, there were two things it did. One, since Willie’s music was everywhere, forming an opinion about specific songs was more of an evolution. I did recognize it as an Elvis cut the first time I heard it, which I thought was weird. And I liked it. But then I remember seeing him singing it on the David Letterman show, specifically. And I thought, “Oh wait. He just became—he’s not just our dude, is he? He means something much bigger to everybody.” Because it’s kind of like [how] not long after that, he’s in “We Are the World.” And the only other country artist is Kenny Rogers, and it’s like—who makes so much more sense in that room, right? Until you think about it—no. Like, Willie’s one of the guys in the room that nailed his take, on the first take. He had to sing it a couple of times for the people around him, but that’s how good he is. And so there was something about this song. At first I was like—and I am a big ballad guy, anyhow; I’m fine with a big power ballad—but it unlocked some things for me. It made me start thinking about him differently. For which I’m—that’s a big part of my relationship with his music, I guess.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. Well, of course. And we all have those moments too. I think when we’re younger, and an artist that really felt like ours from the place we’re from, or from our generation, whatever it might be—when you kind of realize the vastness of their reach, and how many other people also think of this person as theirs, it can be a little heartbreaking.
So I’m sure that Letterman moment, that “We Are the World” moment, you thought, “Wait a second; he’s mine. What’s he doing out there?” I have that experience with many, many artists over the years, and yeah, I mean, Willie and Merle both had these pretty significant commercial moments in the early eighties, which again is interesting, to come back to “Reasons to Quit” and the sort of thematic arc of that song—that’s an interesting thing to have happen in your mid-forties, as an artist. A funny moment to be sort of commercially surging in a new way. But yeah, you’re right. I think the gleam and the sort of poppiness, they both kind of accepted it, I think, into their music at the same time.
[USA for Africa performing “We Are the World”]
John Spong: You said you have another version of “Reasons to Quit”?
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. So this is a cover of “Reasons to Quit” by a guy named Phosphorescent, which is the alias of a singer and songwriter named Matthew Houck—I hope I’m saying his name right—who’s from Alabama. I believe he’s based in Nashville now, but I sort of became familiar with his music when he was bumming around Brooklyn a while back. But in 2009, he released an album called To Willie, which is all Willie Nelson covers, and it opens with “Reasons to Quit.” And I think we were talking about the difference between the way Merle and Willie sing some of those lines. There’s a real kind of brittleness and almost anxiety, I think, in the way that Phosphorescent delivers these lines. That, to me, sort of gets to the kind of grimness of the song and also the beauty of the song. Maybe we could listen.
[Phosphorescent performing “Reasons to Quit”]
Amanda Petrusich: It’s really lovely, isn’t it?
John Spong: That was awesome.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. I mean, a song that good, anybody could sing it. It’s going to sound amazing. But I think there is a real kind of fragility in that performance. And we were talking a lot about the professionalism of Pancho & Lefty, and the way in which that was recorded, and these extraordinarily expert musicians who played on it. And I think now we’re hearing maybe a slightly messier—and I say that word with a lot of love and admiration—with a slightly messier recording of it, but it nonetheless works. I really love that version. That whole record is great.
John Spong: Yeah. I was struck by the fragility, the vulnerability in his voice. But also, there’s a confidence that comes off, too. Because the way he changes their phrasing? Where he dropped “outnumber . . . don’t outnumber all the reasons why” in the first chorus, it’s nervy. But it also points that he knows the song, and he really loves the song. It was true to what they did, but his. And also, it’s weird; there was something kind of ethereal—I dunno, there’s something in the production that made it feel like maybe he was high in that moment. There was a gauziness, a wooziness to it that was, like, “I know I’m not gonna talk you into it right now.”
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, it is. That’s good. “Woozy” is exactly the right word for it. You’re exactly right. Yeah. Yes. And it’s funny because the song, I mean, the more we talk about it, the more I think I’ve always thought of it as, yeah, there’s a lot of sadness in it, right? There’s a lot of saying—there’s admission of defeat. There’s an admission of failure that’s really rare, I think, especially from guys like Merle and Willie, who were pretty tough. I mean, they were pretty tough, and they were intimidating, and they were at the top of their game. And it was to see them both sort of grappling with this question of aging and “How do I do this?” “How do I sort of change from one phase of life to another without completely giving up on or betraying who I am?” I think it’s a really tough question, and it’s a really interesting question. And it’s funny, too, because Phosphorescent was quite a bit younger when he recorded that song than Willie and Merle were, and I think maybe it is a song that needs to be sung by somebody who’s sort of been through it and trying to figure out what happens next.
John Spong: A few more miles on ’em?
Amanda Petrusich: Yes, exactly. Exactly. But I do love that version. I love the wooziness of it, as you said, and, I dunno, the vulnerability of it.
John Spong: How’d you become a Willie fan? You grew up in the Hudson Valley area? Obviously you’re an omnivore. I mean, anyone that’s read you knows that. But how, specifically, do you come to Willie, or rather, does he come to you?
Amanda Petrusich: Right. Well, Willie comes for us all, I suppose. But you’re right, it’s not particularly in or of my culture. I grew up in upstate New York in the Hudson Valley, just on the banks of the river there. I grew up not far from where Pete Seeger lived, and there was this sort of folky kind of—it was just a sort of different side of the sixties and the seventies and that music. I was born in 1980, so by the time I came around, those guys were a little bit less active. But it was a big—people listened to Bob Dylan, and they listened to Pete Seeger, and they listened to Joan Baez. So it was sort of that side of things. I came to Willie a little bit late. I was probably in my mid- to late twenties when I entered—very quickly, I sort of fell through a trapdoor in the ground. I got very, very, very, very, very into Waylon Jennings. And so Waylon was sort of my entryway into Willie, speaking of, sort of, a beloved and famous outlaw. But that was it for me. And then from there—I am trying to think of what my first favorite Willie Nelson record was. God, I’m not sure. It’s a great question. What was it for you?
John Spong: Oh my. You know, it might’ve been this one? Because I’m fifteen years older than you, I think. So I’m in high school, I’m starting high school in 1980, and there’s all the stuff you’re supposed to love, Red Headed Stranger, and then Phases—as you go down, Stardust, Phases, duh, duh, duh. Honeysuckle Rose was kind of filmed in and around where I lived, and so we were paying attention to that. And then here comes “On the Road Again” and “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” which were the two singles off that soundtrack, and those are massive. They’re standards now.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, yeah.
John Spong: So that’s kind of the way in. And so at least for the next ten to fifteen years, enjoying Willie music was a going-forward thing for me, as new stuff came out. And so this record killed me when it came out. I was actually more of a Haggard guy through then. It was when I got older, and I think—to sound completely goofy—as my taste grew more refined, I was able to go back and listen to the earlier Willie and get it in a way I wouldn’t have. Like, the first time I listened to Red Headed Stranger was like the first time I listened to Pet Sounds. I knew I was supposed to dig it, and it sailed way the hell over my head. I did not get it at all.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, same. That’s so funny. We had sort of parallel journeys in that way, I suppose, even though we were living in places where Willie occupied a sort of different percentage of the cultural imagination. But I also feel like I didn’t, didn’t really get it. I didn’t really get Willie Nelson until I was maybe forty years old, before something kind of clicked. I had to catch up. He was just always a few feet ahead of me. I mean, he’s that kind of artist. And then you sort of have a moment where it clicks. Red Headed Stranger was one for me, too, where I thought, “Oh my God.” Then suddenly it’s like, “Well, he’s the greatest American artist of all time, you know?” Then it just it kind of clicks into place very quickly. Have you interviewed Willie before, John? I should know this.
John Spong: It’s been a long time ago. I haven’t since doing all of this Willie work, but I did talk to him, it was about ten or fifteen years ago. And it was great because a friend of his showed up. And talk about it all being about relationships—there was this old Lone Star Beer representative who I had interviewed earlier in the week for this story. And when we were getting off the phone, he said, “When are you going to talk to Will?” And I said, “Uh, Wednesday.” And he said, “Oh, cool, I’ll be there.” And I was like, “No, Jerry, that doesn’t work at all.” But then, luckily, he was. Because Willie—you’re not going to ask him . . . I don’t know what your experience was like, but I’ve never been able to ask him a question he hasn’t [already] been asked 150 times, at a minimum. And by everything I know, he doesn’t really like looking back on all that stuff anyhow. And so Jerry carried the weight of the conversation and prompted memories out of Willie I would’ve never gotten on my own. But that’s the thing: It quit being an interview and started being these two buddies talking and me eavesdropping. And I got real lucky that way.
Amanda Petrusich: That’s perfect. That is really perfect. And seems to sort of say something, too. I mean, we were talking about this already, but to, I don’t know—how he’s the most comfortable, or how his mind works the best, it is that idea, right? It’s a bunch of people in a room joking around and collaborating and making fun of each other a bit and encouraging each other a bit. And that seems to be where things sort of bloom in this world. So yeah, so triangulating the thing probably was quite comfortable for him, to not have it be a sort of one-on-one thing, to have the attention be a little bit diffused. Because I think he does have a lot of humility and is reluctant always to kind of give himself too much credit for anything. And yeah, I imagine being a product of these highly collaborative environments probably shaped him in that way.
[Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard performing “Reasons to Quit”]
John Spong: Can I pivot a little bit? I wonder—so many of the people who’ve been on the show have talked about, because you were just talking about how “Reasons to Quit,” if you think about it, it really is a lot sadder than it presents on its face. How and why do sad songs work? Because, so, like, a lot of the guests on the show have talked about it, and Billy Strings said recently, “Sad songs both are the blues and the cure for the blues.” And then Miranda Lambert went a little deeper—not deeper, but she said it a little bit more succinctly—she said, “They make you not feel alone, or so alone, in it.” And then there was the—Mother Jones recently called you a hero for the year for 2024, as it wound down. And in the interview, you put it even more succinctly, I thought. You said, “It really helps to hold our darkest and most lonesome feelings with other people, especially in ways that maybe aren’t”—and this is the part I really loved—“overly prescriptive or results-oriented.”
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. Well, thank you. That’s very kind of you. Yes. I think, I mean, I think that’s the—it sounds so dopey to say, but it’s the beauty of music, right? I mean, it’s that—it’s not asking anything of you other than to just, sort of, hold a thing with someone for three minutes. To sort of be in this feeling and share it and feel it. And you’re not trying to solve your problems. It’s not—putting on a sad song and screaming into your pillow, or whatever it is you may do in that moment, it’s not going to fix it. But it’s a moment, I think—when I was working on a book maybe a decade ago, about collectors of extremely rare 78 rpm records, these sort of prewar, very obscure blues songs that were recorded, of which there’s maybe one or two kind of extant copies of this thing left in the world. Highly, highly rare recordings. And 78’s are sort of a messy format. And listening to a 78, even on a really well calibrated and kind of high-tech turntable, it still sounds like an emanation from underground, or something. It’s sort of messy. It’s hard to connect with, sonically. It’s garbled. The records have been scratched up. They’re a hundred years old, whatever. But there was this thing when I was spending a lot of time with that music, which in some ways felt very far away—it was made by performers about whom we knew very little, decades and decades and decades ago. I couldn’t totally hear their voice, I didn’t know what they looked like—so there was a lot of distance there, sort of intellectually, between myself and the thing. But I would hear nonetheless in these performances, this sort of deep yearning for communion, for a sense of togetherness with another person. And it would kind of remind me that this thing that’s very essential to our humanity, the ways in which we love and we lose and we hurt and we feel joy and ecstasy and wonder and hope, just how sort of stupidly universal all those feelings are—
John Spong: Yeah.
Amanda Petrusich: —because I could hear it in these vocals. And it really moved me. I think it made me feel like the world was actually quite small. And that we were sort of all in this thing together. And it sounds like I’m about to start singing “We Are the World” and doing the Willie parts. I’ll actually do the Dylan parts. The Dylan parts are more suited to my voice. But yeah, I think sad music can do that. I think it’s just a hand to hold in your darkest moment. And it’s not going to solve your problems. It’s not going to fix anything. It’s just like a little squeeze when you need it. It’s just a person you don’t know coming from somewhere else, who’s simply saying, “Yeah, I have felt that s— too, and it hurts.” And sometimes that’s all you need. I think you just need a little solidarity. Because when you’re really in the weeds with grief or any kind of loss or feeling of, I don’t know, loneliness or isolation, I think you just, that’s what you need. You just need to know you’re not alone with it. You need to know it’s a very normal and human thing to feel, and that other people have felt it too. And, yeah. ’Cause otherwise, you look around and you see everyone living their sort of beautiful, easy lives, and I think it’s quite possible to get sort of resentful and angry and whatever. And I think sad songs stop us from doing that. They say like, “Hey, we’ve all been here.” Sorry, it’s a very long, rambling answer.
John Spong: No, it’s perfect. ’Cause it’s, well, I mean, it’s two things. It’s, one, it’s community. It’s the not-being-alone part, but “community” is a great word for it. But it’s also that there’s not a fix, and there doesn’t need to be a fix, you know? And so, my dad was an Episcopal priest, but also a, in Austin, a pretty well-known grief and crisis counselor. And he was known as the guy in town, when somebody lost a kid, they went to my dad. But one of the things that he did with that work was he taught seminary students how to get ready to be—how to deal with that. How to be pastoral caregivers. And he was unorthodox in how he did it. When they would go and they would work on oncology units, and they would work in ICU units—and they would do this every day during the summer and then meet with him the next morning to talk about it. And he had these great rules of thumbs. Like, you can’t wear your collar into that room. Then you stick out. Then you are an authority figure. Then they’re looking to you for an answer. You’re not going in there with an answer. Don’t offer a fix. Just be there with them. Do not tell ’em about anything in your past. He would never put it this way in class because this isn’t the way you learn, but it was like, don’t talk about your own experience with something like this. A conversation that a chaplain has in that moment can never be about the chaplain, in any capacity.
Amanda Petrusich: That’s really beautiful.
John Spong: There’s no fix. Be there with it. And the songs do that.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. Yeah, completely. That’s such a beautiful story, and I will remember that. I think that’s—yeah. Yes, of course. You can’t fix it. And I think grief, too—you have to just feel it. It feels bad; you have to feel it anyway. And music can kind of, I think, help you stay with it and actualize that and sort of bear down on it rather than pushing it aside. I think all of that is incredibly important.
John Spong: I was thinking about it, and it’s like—especially because after you said the bit about not being prescriptive or results-oriented, not looking for a fix. It’s like—Brené Brown and I talked about this. It’s like, “Amazing Grace” doesn’t necessarily heal, itself, but it helps you get through. And it’s a Willie song, actually—“It’s not something you get over, it’s something you get through”: That’s a song he wrote five, ten years ago. But also, yeah, the songs, they’re not a ladder to help you climb out of the murk. They’re like a life preserver—I don’t want to get too cheesy about it—but they are; they’re a life preserver. They will keep you afloat in the murk, and you might be able to shut your eyes for a little bit and remember another time or something easier. But in any event, you’re with other people.
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah, absolutely. And they’ll help you feel—I mean, it’s a shortcut to feeling. And I think that’s, again, I’m sorry to be corny myself, but I think that’s the most important thing we can do when we’re struggling, is to really let ourselves feel that. Feel the hard parts. And I think music accelerates that, and it can kind of help us. It’s like a shortcut to kind of getting there and really doing the work, feeling the thing.
John Spong: Yeah, and it’s cool. Because, back to “Reasons to Quit,” they identify, they prescribe the cure in the title of the song: it’s “quit.” But nope. Can’t do it.
Amanda Petrusich: I know. I know.
John Spong: But if they did quit, who would know this song? If they quit, if at the end of this song—“You’re right, let’s go for a jog—”
Amanda Petrusich: It would be a horrible song. “Put on your cowboy boots; let’s run down the street.” No, that’s what—it’s a song about failure, right? I mean, it’s a song about saying, “I know I need to stop doing this thing that’s horrible for me. I know I need to stop dating this ghastly man or doing this drug, whatever it is, but I can’t. Because it feels good, and I’m whatever. I’m not, I’m not . . .” I love that. I think it’s so human and it’s so honest. And it, too, is neither prescriptive nor results-oriented. Right? It’s saying, “There’s a lot of reasons to quit, but you know what? We’re still doing it.”
John Spong: Yep. Yep. Yep.
Amanda Petrusich: What’s more honest than that?
[Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard performing “Reasons to Quit”]
John Spong: Willie—Willie still puts out two albums a year. He’s at number 153, and I know that there’s at least two more in the can.
Amanda Petrusich: Good Lord.
John Spong: One is a Haggard covers album. There’s a Haggard covers album, I think will come out in the second half of 2025.
Amanda Petrusich: That’s amazing. I love that. I love that. I think they—what a friendship.
John Spong: Yeah. He’s, he’s still creating his legacy, but what is that legacy? What is—what’s Willie’s legacy? Is music different because of him, country or otherwise? Or what’s the thing?
Amanda Petrusich: Yeah. Yes, of course. And I think, in ways so sort of vast and complex, it’s almost hard to kind of clarify or isolate them. I think, yes. I think American popular music, the American Songbook, would be a very, very different thing without Willie Nelson. I think—God, when I try to think about what Willie brought to American popular music. I mean, I think the outlaw thing, which is fun to sort of joke around about, I think is nonetheless incredible. I mean, I think that attitude of rebelliousness and confidence and a sort of playful kind of insouciance is—I mean, I think we hear that in everything now, right? I mean, that’s become, sort of, so foundational to popular music. But I think it’s really just his sort of presence and his voice and the way that he delivers the lyrics, his phrasing, his tone. There’s just nothing like it. He’s such a, kind of, profoundly unique artist. Yeah, it’s really hard. It’s like, I can’t—it’s really hard for me to . . . [and] it’s my job. I am a professional music critic, I’m sorry to report. And I’m absolutely failing at answering this question with any kind of precision, but—
John Spong: I have a different understanding. You put it in a way that hadn’t occurred to me. There’s a hundred reasons that I think he did whatever about different accomplishments, but I have a vastly different understanding of the American Songbook, because of Stardust in particular, but that’s not the only time he did that. He did that over and over, and I know those songs differently now because of the time he spent as my tour guide with them.
Amanda Petrusich: Right. Because when Willie sings a song—when Willie sings a classic song you’ve heard a million times before, he just sings it differently. I don’t know. He inhabits it in a way that feels a little bit extrahuman.
John Spong: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. Well, then, to make it . . . the same question, but much easier—or much harder—you have a four-year-old, Nico. Someday she’s going to ask you who Willie Nelson is. I guess it depends on how long it takes her to ask, but how do you sum him up for her?
Amanda Petrusich: Oh. I love that question. So Nico, she’s three. She’ll be four in June. She’s a very curious listener, and she wants to know everything about an artist that we’re playing. God, Willie Nelson. How do I sum him up for her? He’s the Red Headed Stranger. He’s a . . . oof. Now, John, now I want to write it all out. I want to write her a letter and give it to her for Christmas. And it’s, “This is what you need to know about Willie Nelson.” Can I do it in one line?
John Spong: I love to intrude, but I am cool enough to know not to intrude on that.
Amanda Petrusich: Well, I think that—
John Spong: You just wrote yourself a note! You’re going to do it. You’re the f—ing best! You are the best!
Amanda Petrusich: Busted.
John Spong: I’m about to start crying!
Amanda Petrusich: Busted.
John Spong: Oh my God. Oh my God.
Amanda Petrusich: No. I think I’m going to start crying too. I think, I mean, how do you tell someone—you just play the songs, right? You just drop the needle to the vinyl, and you say, “This is Willie Nelson.” There’s no other way to communicate that than to just play. To just let her hear it. But I think he’s—he’s everything. I don’t know. He’s the voice of American music. He’s the voice of American pain and American joy and all of it. It’s sort of all in there in this incredibly, kind of, generous and humble thing, this way that he expresses himself. Yeah, I think I would just play her the records. Ah, John . . .
John Spong: Sorry.
Amanda Petrusich: We’re both going to be crying. We’re both—
John Spong: It’s awesome. I even had some tracks queued up to make you cry. I’m not going to do that. You’re awesome.
[Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard performing “Reasons to Quit”]
John Spong (voice-over): All right, Willie fans. That was Amanda Petrusich, talking about “Reasons to Quit.” A huge thanks to her for coming on the show, and a big thanks to you for tuning in. If you dig the show, please subscribe, maybe tell a couple friends, and visit our page wherever you get your podcasts and give us some stars or type in some comments. Every little bit of that helps more than you know.
Please follow us on Instagram at @onebywillie—all one word—find us on Bluesky, and join our ever-expanding Willie conversation at the One by Willie group on Facebook.
I’m your host, John Spong. Thanks for listening.