Willie Nelson - Teatro [25th Anniversary]

Willie Nelson has spent seventy years refusing to do what Nashville told him, which is how he ended up as one of the most beloved American musicians alive. The guitar is beaten to pieces, the phrasing lands behind the beat, and nobody else sounds remotely like him.

Daniel Lanois took Nelson into an old movie theater in Oxnard, California in 1998, set up two drummers, brought in Emmylou Harris to sing harmony, and made the strangest and most atmospheric record in the Willie catalog.

Teatro is drenched in reverb and Latin percussion, and it reframes songs Nelson had written decades earlier. "I Never Cared for You" opens like a flamenco fever dream, "Darkness on the Face of the Earth" and "Home Motel" get a haunted spaciousness, and Harris shadows him throughout. Lanois brings the same cinematic instincts he used on Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind.

Underrated on release and steadily reappraised since, it is the Nelson album for people who love mood as much as melody.

This 25th anniversary edition is pressed on 180-gram vinyl.