"He’s not going to go gentle into that good night, and he’s going to make vital, life-affirming work till his last breath.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him,” Willie sings here, cementing forever that even though Willie has written some of the best love songs ever, his songs about having good times with his friends are often the most emotionally wrenching. Willie looks back fondly on them getting stoned together and writing songs for each other, and how they were brothers.
Willie and Merle were touring together when Merle fell ill and died last year, so the news hit him especially hard. The album’s emotional showstopper is “He Won’t Ever Be Gone,” a song about Merle Haggard’s death. “Your Memory Has A Mind Of It’s Own” is maybe the only sincere country song about memory loss ever written, while “Still Not Dead” confronts waking up and surfing the web to find that the world is convinced you’re dead. There’s “Old Time,” a song that will have anyone that wakes up every morning to see their hairline receding and their paunch expanding in their feels (“Pray for mercy and a few more days” Willie sings). The original title of God’s Problem Child was I’m Not Dead, a direct reference to the health scare reports, and the fact that death and aging hang over the album like spectres. Willie himself has had some health scares the last 12 months-his manager has had to come out recently to deny reports that he was “gravely ill”-but he perseveres with God’s Problem Child, his 61st-ish studio album (depending on what you count) and first of original material since 2014. Waylon, Johnny, Merle, Elvis, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins to a man they’ve passed on and left Willie as the only O.G. Willie’s old enough to remember World War II first hand he’s lived long enough to see his music issued on seven different delivery platforms (45, LP, 8-Track, Cassette, CD, MP3, Streaming Service) and to have outlived every single one of his contemporaries. In five days, and one after this album physically comes out, Willie Nelson turns 84. This week's album is Willie Nelson's God's Problem Child. Every week, we tell you about an album we think you need to spend time with.