What could be a better cred-building exercise for a young indie-folk songwriter than to cover the works of Willie Nelson? Yet Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, isn't interested merely in demonstrating the depths of his scholarship and reverence for the forerunners of his craft with his all-covers tribute to the Red Headed Stranger, To Willie. He wants, as Hot Chip might put it, to half nelson full nelson Willie Nelson, to wrestle intimately with the man's songs and what they're capable of communicating. In doing so, Houck proves himself an adept interpreter of Willie's piercing Christian grace, while indirectly revealing by the limitations of his scope-- the true remarkable human breadth of Nelson's artistry.
Houck does a couple of things extremely well, and to his immense credit he spends most of To Willie working in those veins. As he's demonstrated over the course of Phosphorescent's three very fine LPs of original songs, Houck is a master at conveying weariness, desolation, and spiritual hunger, often through a cracked, warbling bleat. That open-throated yelp is absent here, but Houck's keen understanding of fallenness and deliverance suffuses almost all of the album's best efforts. The opening "Reasons to Quit" is an addict's lament Nelson recorded as a duet with Merle Haggard (and was penned by Hag, actually), and while the original may have flashed a perverse resilience towards self-destructive behavior, Houck burrows into the numbing futility contained in a line like "coke and booze don't do me like before." It's followed, powerfully, by "Too Sick to Pray", an overlooked gem from Nelson's 1996 album Spirit that epitomizes spiritual exhaustion, with Houck sadly and perfectly putting across its overwhelming loneliness. Likewise, on "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way", desperation again cracks all of Houck's surfaces, his tremulous uncertainty echoed in the out-of-tune-sounding guitars.
The music of the church has informed Houck's own work for some time, and at his best here he treats Nelson's songs like precious, fragile hymns. "Walkin'," "The Party's Over", and "Can I Sleep In Your Arms" are all undergirded with solemnity, with the third a revelation. It might sound like heresy considering Red Headed Stranger's "Can I Sleep" is perhaps the most revered song of the collection, yet Houck arguably improves it, adding a heartbreakingly delicate lilt to the end of each verse's penultimate line that wasn't there before.
Talented and sympathetic though he may be, Houck is still working with a far more muted palette than Nelson, a fact most evident when he tackles jauntier, more clever material like "I Gotta Get Drunk", "Pick Up the Tempo", and "The Last Thing I Needed (First Thing This Morning)". Certainly it's admirable Houck didn't just pick 11 of Willie's most woebegone efforts to best suit his own forlorn MO, yet it's plain he lacks the wry humor and restless humanity of his interpretive object. Houck's impressive effort nonetheless inevitably sends you back to Nelson's originals, only illuminating their brilliance-- the sly threat of "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way"; the proud, tight-lipped terseness of "Too Sick to Pray"; the bitter wisdom of "Permanently Lonely" (which Houck does a nice job recontextualizing with spacey, narcotized synths). And, of course, there's Nelson's comic facility, which often cloaked his most devastating revelations, like how the accumulation of everyday bullshit on "The Last Thing" ("I opened the door on my knee") gives way to overwhelming loss and grief. It's simply more proof that Nelson's matchless command of so many song styles and emotional states poses a daunting challenge to any presumptive handler of his canon. Houck still deserves plenty of plaudits for nailing the ones he knows.
