Carla Bozulich

We noted in the previous installments (1 and 2) how Willie Nelson’s 1975 album Red Headed Stranger (Spotify) represents the realization of a distinctive artistic vision. It challenged the conventional wisdom of the recording industry when it was released. One of the things that made it so distinctive was that its production was radically pared down–so much so that record industry executives thought they were listening to a demo tape.

Nelson put his stamp on the story and the way it was told. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” is closely identified with him now, but was a standard before and after. A few artists have taken up “Hands on the Wheel.” Carla Bozulich, however, has taken on the whole shootin’ match, though. She’s done it with a markedly different style, complete faithfulness to the spirit of the original, and with Nelson’s blessing and participation. After the earlier more extensive posts, we’re going to cap off this week with a short one listening to Bozulich’s take on this modern classic.

Red Headed Stranger (2003) is Bozulich’s first solo album, her previous work being with a few Southern California post-punk bands. A few years after the 2000 re-release of Nelson’s original, she was looking for a solo project, but didn’t want the burden of writing the songs for it. She found Nelson’s recording to be a compelling modern folk tale. The rest, as explained in this article from SFGate, involved a few trusted collaborators, and the perhaps unlikely path of the initial recordings making their way to Nelson himself. He asked to join the project, and the final Bozulich recording includes Nelson playing “Trigger” (his guitar) on a few tracks, and singing on two of the concluding ones.

Nelson with “Trigger”

Here is Bozulich’s recording of the album in full.

Red Headed Stranger (2003), by Carla Bozulich (Myspace)

You can judge for yourself, of course, how faithful Bozulich is to the core spirit of Stranger, but I think she’s remarkably successful at being both true to the original and devising a rewarding new musical take on the core story. Perhaps a great part of this success is that she doesn’t distort the story or lyrics.  There are small variations as she sings the story. She seems to think important to clarify that the “bay” referred to in “Red Headed Stranger” is a pony, for example, but she does not manipulate the core tale to different thematic ends, and sings the song just as Nelson’s narrator does–sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first.

Nels Cline

She makes quite a few more changes musically. Sometimes her take is atmospheric; sometimes it’s jazz. The biggest re-make, in my estimation, is “Red Headed Stranger” (the song) itself. Her version is almost 11 minutes long, with a droning opening and a slow-tempo telling of the story. It takes so long to pick up, I was convinced for a period of time that she sang the whole song twice–once slowly, and the second time more up-tempo. The trajectory of the arrangements through the album goes from the atmospheric/experimental at the beginning to more straightforward country at the end.

While I like Bozulich’s version very much, I don’t feel the redemption in it in the same way I do in Nelson’s original. Perhaps the path of redemption in Bozulich’s take is found in that gradual transition in arrangements, which begins somewhere in the middle of “Red Headed Stranger,” passes through a murkier, more complicated version of “Just As I Am,” and meanders a bit before arriving at a sweet rendition of “Hands at the Wheel,” with Bozulich and Nelson singing a charmingly wobbly duet.

Other Paths

I’ve really enjoyed the time with Red Headed Stranger over the past few weeks, and there are quite a few more paths to explore that I don’t have time to go down at the moment. Perhaps in the months ahead we’ll return and give a listen to Stranger’s legacy in other recordings–both covers of its component songs and later albums it influenced. It also may prove interesting to see how Nelson attempted to reinterpret the story in the movie that he released eleven years after the album. I’m not optimistic that the movie will be as successful as the album, but some of his choices as producer there might show us something worth exploring. I touched on it only obliquely in the previous post.

We also haven’t done anything with the four-song coda that Nelson added to the re-release version. He added Bach’s Minuet in G, “I Can’t Help It (If I’m Still in Love with You),” “A Maiden’s Prayer,” and “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” If you want to listen to them, they are included in the Spotify link to the album I provided in the previous posts. Their addition may have just been a marketing trick, and they may have just been the best recordings among the songs Nelson pruned out of the original project, but it’s intriguing to think where they might have fit in the original and weigh the trade-offs of excluding them.

If I’ve learned anything over the weeks, though, is that there are layers and layers here, and you can only excavate so many of them at a time. This album, in particular, is not easy to pigeon-hole, and the thematic issues it raises aren’t always easily settled. Perhaps I’m most hopeful that somewhere down the line one of our other Murder Ballad Monday bloggers will give us her (or his) take on the project and the directions it leads.