Heroes

My friend Jim and I first went into the woods to shoot tin cans when I was 19. For the next 45 years, there wasn’t a summer that didn’t include at least one shooting expedition, most of those outings culminating in music and tequila back at the house. Jim died a couple summers ago, and as I listened to this new Willie Nelson album, I kept wishing Jim could hear it, too. He would have loved “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die,” a spot-on number Nelson does with Snoop Dogg and Kris Kristofferson. And when Nelson and Merle Haggard sing “A Horse Called Music,” it can move a harder heart than mine. The duet with Sheryl Crow on the Tom Waits song “Come on Up to the House” is as consoling a song as I can imagine, and the line “come down off your cross, we need the wood” is brilliant. “Hero,” sung with Jamey Johnson and Billy Joe Shaver, is as good a song as Nelson’s ever written, and that says a lot. But damnit, Willie, missing Jim was bad enough without you adding this album to that loss.