Sony Music
2009
Naked Willie
About This Album
In the late '80s, Ted Turner caused a furor by colorizing old black-and-white movies, claiming that this colorization modernized ancient artifacts for an audience that just couldn't bear to see shades of grey on their television set. It was modernization through addition, a misguided venture that never found its contemporary audience because it was trying to seduce an audience that never would have been interested in the first place. About 20 years later, Willie Nelson and his harmonica player Mickey Raphael did a kind of reverse colorization on Willie's '60s recordings for RCA, stripping away the strings, backing vocals, horns -- any of the accoutrements that sweetened Nelson's basic combo. Raphael cleverly dubs this process as "un-production" and there is some precedent for their historical revisionism, notably the Beatles weird rejiggering of Let It Be, which wasn't a flat-out reissue of the scrapped Get Back but a remix of the released album, scrubbing out all of its Spectorisms. That was called Let It Be...Naked and this Nelson collection plays upon that title with its smirky Naked Willie, a title that implies that this music might sound a little bit more unvarnished than it actually does.
Track List (try tracks 5,6,8,12,13 and 16)

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