One By Willie
In “One by Willie,” Texas Monthly’s John Spong hosts intimate conversations with a range of prominent guests about the Willie Nelson songs that mean the most to them. But this series isn’t just about the songs. It’s about what music really means to us—the ways it can change us, take care of us, and connect us all. Songs featured in the episodes can be found on Apple Music. Listen here.
Episodes
June 2, 2023 • 37 mins
This week, one of the greatest, most innovative record producers in history, Daniel Lanois—think U2’s The Joshua Tree, Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, Peter Gabriel’s So—talks about the landmark album he made with Willie, 1998’s Teatro. He’ll start with a deep cut, “I’ve Loved You All Over the World,” but then, being Lanois, he’ll start to float...to Cuban dance clubs, Texas honkytonks, and Mexican movie houses...to art that exists o...
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May 26, 2023 • 35 mins
This week, legendary singer-songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard—one of Willie’s oldest running buddies and a founding father of Americana music—talks about the signature song that opens every Willie show, “Whiskey River.” It might as well be the national anthem of Texas, but for Ray it prompts some highly personal, absolutely hilarious memories of times he’s heard Willie play it, before sending him deep into that time he was kidnapped by ...
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April 27, 2023 • 31 mins
This week, we ring in Willie’s monumental 90th birthday with his son, acclaimed singer-songwriter Lukas Nelson, who discusses “I Never Cared for You.” It’s a favorite deep-cut of true Willie lovers, a song he’s recorded repeatedly through the years; the original, 1964 single was the record that first made Leon Russell a Willie fan. But Lukas focuses on the 1998 version off Teatro because he was nine years old and in the studio when...
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September 15, 2022 • 26 mins
This week, we wrap up the special Live from Luck! mini-season of OBW with California-based
singer-songwriter Natalie Mering—known to fans by her stage name, Weyes Blood—who will discuss another standard off of Stardust, Kurt Weill's 1938 composition, “September Song.” It’s a classic that Natalie discovered the same way Willie did, through a Frank Sinatra record, and it prompts crystal clear memories of the night she first heard Wil...
singer-songwriter Natalie Mering—known to fans by her stage name, Weyes Blood—who will discuss another standard off of Stardust, Kurt Weill's 1938 composition, “September Song.” It’s a classic that Natalie discovered the same way Willie did, through a Frank Sinatra record, and it prompts crystal clear memories of the night she first heard Wil...
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September 1, 2022 • 27 mins
This week, in the third installment of OBW’s special, Live from Luck! mini-season, Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Steve Gunn discusses the penultimate track on Red Headed Stranger, “Hands on the Wheel.” It’s the song with which Willie wraps up the RHS narrative, when his roaming, vengeful preacher finally finds love and a home. And Steve, who first made his name as a virtuoso guitarist, focuses on the way Willie used subtle guita...
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August 18, 2022 • 30 mins
This week, in the second installment of OBW’s special, Live from Luck! mini-season, hardcore honky-tonker Charley Crockett talks about Willie’s little-known 1961 recording of “Face of a Fighter.” It’s another old Pamper demo, a barroom weeper Willie never did get around to cutting for a proper album, but one that, in Charley’s opinion, is so strong that if just about any other country artist had come up with it, it’d be the best so...
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August 4, 2022 • 25 mins
This week, the podcast kicks off a special, Live from Luck! mini-season of OBW, four interviews conducted this March at Willie’s central Texas ranch with artists performing later that day at his annual Luck Reunion. Up first is three-time Grammy nominee Allison Russell, who discusses Willie’s landmark 1978 recording of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” It’s one of the most covered titles in the Great American Songbook, and Allison exp...
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June 22, 2022 • 36 mins
This week, Willie’s longtime producer and songwriting partner Buddy Cannon talks about one of the most iconic Willie songs of recent vintage, 2017’s “Something You Get Through.” The song was a cornerstone of Willie’s so-called Mortality Trilogy—a series of albums that found him in Aging Wise Man mode and passing along some hard-learned life lessons. Buddy will describe the poignant moment on Willie’s bus that provided the song’s in...
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June 15, 2022 • 39 mins
This week, four-time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke—who in addition to being an acclaimed actor, writer, and director happens also to be a hardcore Willie nerd—discusses “Too Sick to Pray,” a meditative hymn from Willie’s beautiful, pin-drop quiet 1996 album, Spirit. Ethan says the song and album were touchstones for him when he first became a father in the late 90s, before going on to describe the way Willie’s music connected him with ...
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June 8, 2022 • 34 mins
This week, singer-songwriter Norah Jones—a nine-time Grammy-winner and go-to Willie duet partner—talks about “Permanently Lonely.” It’s one of those songs Willie has recorded repeatedly, but she focuses on his early-sixties demo, sitting at her piano to illustrate the jazzy intricacies of the song’s melody, and marveling at what she calls the beautifully harsh poetry in its lyrics. She’ll also describe the way she leaned on Willie’...
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June 1, 2022 • 28 mins
This week, legendary Muscle Shoals bass player David Hood talks about recording Willie’s classic 1974 album Phases and Stages with his fellow Swampers, focusing on his favorite track on the record, “(How Will I Know) I’m Falling in Love Again.” Phases was, of course, named Willie’s finest album ever by Texas Monthly, and it prompts memories from Hood on the fabled R&B producer who brought the project to Muscle Shoals, Jerry Wexler;...
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May 25, 2022 • 32 mins
This week, Americana singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff talks about the cut that closes Willie’s 1973 album Shotgun Willie, “A Song for You.” It was arguably Willie’s first iconic cover song, written by one of his closest friends and most important collaborators, Tulsa legend Leon Russell, and it prompts Nathaniel to think aloud about the biker funeral where he first heard it; the crazy, early-70s days when Leon and Willie first ...
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May 18, 2022 • 35 mins
This week, Willie’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, talks about a song Willie cut not long before leaving Nashville for good in 1972, the aptly titled “The Words Don’t Fit the Picture.” Mickey was just a sideman on the Dallas folkie scene when he first heard it, and it’s the song that made him want to play with Willie. He talks about that experience, plus what his fifty-plus years with Willie have been like, from joining...
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May 11, 2022 • 27 mins
This week, one of America’s greatest living composers, Jimmy Webb, the writer of such classics as “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Galveston,” “Macarthur Park,” and “Wichita Lineman,” talks about another of his iconic songs, “Highwayman.” Willie, of course, recorded it with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson in 1985, and it went on to win that year’s Grammy for best country song, as well as give country’s first su...
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May 4, 2022 • 29 mins
This week, Vince Gill—a 21-time Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, guitarist, and honkytonk historian—talks about “Healing Hands of Time.” It’s a song Willie’s cut several times, but Vince focuses on the version from 1976’s The Sound in Your Mind, before getting into the power of an irresistible first line in a lyric, the seminal role in country music history played by Willie and his old friend Ray Price, and why writing a song that...
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April 27, 2022 • 32 mins
This week, we ring in Willie’s 89th birthday with his daughter Paula Nelson, who talks about “Devil in a Sleeping Bag,” off of his 1973 album Shotgun Willie. It’s a song Willie wrote about his longtime drummer and best friend, Paul English—who happens to be Paula’s namesake—and it gets her thinking about Paul’s dual role as Willie’s well-armed money-collector, a gunfight her dad was in, and hanging with Michael Jackson at the “We A...
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April 20, 2022 • 32 mins
Singer-songwriter-superstar Kacey Musgraves goes deep into Willie’s back catalog to discuss “Are You Sure.” It was one of the first demos he cut when he moved to Nashville—though it’s probably best-known by the duet Kacey and Willie recorded for her Grammy-nominated 2015 album Pageant Material—and it prompts her to talk about what she calls “real-ass country songs,” the lucky joint Willie gave her, and singing “Rainbow Connection” ...
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April 15, 2022 • 1 min
Season 3 launches on April 20th with Kacey Musgraves, Vince Gill, Nathaniel Rateliff, Jimmy Webb, and many others.
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December 6, 2021 • 3 mins
The original Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders squad burst onto the field back in 1972—the same year Title IX passed, the same year Deep Throat came out, and a year before Roe v. Wade. Sarah Hepola digs into the untold stories behind the global pop culture phenomenon, from the stripper who allegedly inspired the squad’s creation, to a scandalous Playboy cover shoot that was partly a battle over fair wages, to the ongoing debate about sex...
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April 29, 2021 • 28 mins
This week, we celebrate Willie’s 88th birthday with singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow, who discusses what may be the single best-known song that Willie ever wrote, “Crazy.” She’ll walk us through what it means to compose a pop standard, explaining the differences she hears in Patsy Cline’s original, 1961 version and the one that Willie still does nightly, but she’ll also describe what it does to her heart when she hears her 10-year-old...
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