WILLIE ROLLS ANOTHER ONE

Ride Me Back Home—the latest LP from smokin’ 85-year-old Willie Nelson—drops on 6/21 from Legacy Recordings. It’ll be his 13th album since he signed with the label in 2012, and his fifth in the last three years.

The title track is Willie's rendition of a song co-written by Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Sonny Throckmorton expressing a love for horses and their spirituality.

"Sonny lives right by Willie's Luck Studio," producer/co-writer Buddy Cannon points out. "He said he wrote that song because he was over there and saw Willie's horses. I don't even know if Willie knows that or not."

The horses Buddy's referring to are a group of more than 60 Willie has adopted over the years, rescuing them from the slaughterhouse and giving them a home on his Luck Ranch.

"With Willie Nelson's Ride Me Back Home, the artist rounds out a trilogy about mortality that began in 2017 with God's Problem Child and was followed in 2018 with Last Man Standing," notes music journalist Mikal Gilmore. "Ride Me Back Home, though, brings a different component of mortality into view: empathy."

On the LP, Willie covers Billy Joel ("Just the Way You Are"), Mac Davis ("It's Hard to Be Humble," with sons Lukas and Micah Nelson) and Guy Clark ("Immigrant Eyes" and "My Favorite Picture of You"). He also revisits "Stay Away From Lonely Places," an outlaw-country deep cut from 1972’s The Words Don't Fit the Picture.