One Hell of a Ride [Box Set]

Disc 1
1	When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song 1:30
2	No Place for Me 1:20
3	Man with the Blues 2:07
4	Nite Life 2:32
5	Hello Walls 2:25
6	Funny How Time Slips Away 3:04
7	Crazy 2:53
8	Half a Man 2:27
9	Mr. Record Man 2:14
10	One in a Row 2:34
11	The Party's Over 2:26
12	Texas in My Soul 2:02
13	Good Times 2:29
14	Sweet Memories 3:15
15	Little Things 3:19
16	Any Old Arms Won't Do 2:33
17	Everybody's Talkin' 3:25
18	Pins and Needles (In My Heart) 3:20
19	Once More with Feeling 2:39
20	I Gotta Get Drunk 2:16
21	Laying My Burdens Down 2:39
22	What Can You Do to Me Now 3:29
23	Kneel at the Feet of Jesus 2:48
24	I'm a Memory 2:26
25	Family Bible 3:13
26	Summer of Roses 2:07
27	Yesterday's Wine 3:14
28	Me and Paul 3:51
29	The Words Don't Fit the Picture 2:46
Disc 2
1	Good Hearted Woman 2:59
2	You Left a Long, Long Time Ago 2:41
3	She's Not for You 2:32
4	You Ought to Hear Me Cry 2:42
5	It Should Be Easier Now 2:47
6	Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys 3:28
7	If You Can't Touch Her at All 3:04
8	I Can Get off on You 2:25
9	Blackjack County Chain 2:03
10	Johnny One Time 2:45
11	Bring Me Sunshine 2:13
12	I Just Can't Let You Say Goodbye 2:46
13	Shotgun Willie 2:44
14	Sad Songs and Waltzes 3:08
15	The Troublemaker 1:53
16	Uncloudy Day 4:41
17	Bloody Mary Morning 2:51
18	I Still Can't Believe You're Gone 4:20
19	Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain 2:21
20	I'd Have to Be Crazy 3:27
21	If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time 2:06
22	Always Late (With Your Kisses) 2:26
23	She's Gone, Gone, Gone 2:32
24	I Never Go Around Mirrors 2:37
25	Stardust 3:53
26	Georgia on My Mind 4:21
27	A Song for You Live 2:42
Disc 3
1	Whiskey River Live 3:34
2	Till I Gain Control Again Live 5:53
3	Stay a Little Longer Live 3:28
4	Heartbreak Hotel / Leon Russell 3:02
5	One for My Baby (And One More for the Road) / Leon Russell 2:36
6	Help Me Make It Through the Night 4:01
7	Midnight Rider from the Electric Horseman 2:52
8	My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys from the Electric Horseman 3:07
9	Crazy Arms / Ray Price 2:44
10	On the Road Again from Honeysuckle Rose 2:35
11	Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground from Honeysuckle Rose 4:30
12	Mona Lisa 2:33
13	I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter 3:02
14	Always on My Mind 3:34
15	Old Friends / Roger Miller 3:09
16	Pancho and Lefty 4:49
17	Reasons to Quit 3:33
18	In the Jailhouse Now / Webb Pierce 2:09
19	Why Do I Have to Choose 3:13
20	City of New Orleans 4:52
21	To All the Girls I've Loved Before / Julio Iglesias 3:34
22	Three Days / Faron Young 3:13
23	Touch Me / Faron Young 2:37
Disc 4
1	Write Your Own Songs from Songwriter 3:20
2	Heart of Gold 3:11
3	I'm Movin' On / Hank Snow 2:47
4	Seven Spanish Angels / Ray Charles 3:51
5	Highwayman 3:03
6	Living in the Promiseland 3:23
7	What a Wonderful World 2:16
8	Country Willie 3:47
9	Graceland 4:47
10	Valentine 3:38
11	What Was It You Wanted 5:27
12	Still Is Still Moving to Me 3:33
13	Too Sick to Pray 2:43
14	Everywhere I Go 3:53
15	My Own Peculiar Way 3:40
16	Nuages 3:41
17	Rainbow Connection 4:32
18	Mendocino County Line / Lee Ann Womack 4:34
19	The Harder They Come 3:39
20	Bubbles in My Beer 2:51
21	When I've Sung My Last Hillbilly Song 3:27

Barnes & Noble

With this truly awesome Willie Nelson retrospective, the folks at Columbia/Legacy, experts at assembling compelling box sets, the have raised the bar to a daunting standard. Bookended by two versions of one of his earliest original tunes, "When I've Sang My Last Hillbilly Song" -- the first being the tinny, spare original executed at radio station KBOP in Pleasanton, Texas, in 1954, and the last, recorded in 2007, a full-band rendition with rich, ambient sound, Mickey Raphael's mournful harmonica moans, sister Bobbie Nelson's church piano, and Willie's own stinging, gut-string guitar solos and understated, bluesy vocal -- One Hell of a Ride rolls out another 98 cuts from every phase and stage of Willie's monumental career. It does what a good box set should: inspire both casual and truly ardent fans to head back into the catalog and listen with new ears for deeper hues of musical and emotional complexity. As this collection asserts, when Willie hasn't been serving up some beautiful, self-penned poetry in song, as he does predominately on the first three discs, he's made impeccable, bold choices in cover material. There's the brisk country shuffle he employs to bring a fresh, celebratory feel to Paul Simon's "Graceland," one of many startling moments on his Don Was-produced gem, Across the Borderline. As well, the duet tracks reveal an artist both confident of his place in the universe -- to the point where he can stand toe-to-toe with Ray Charles on the beautiful, Billy Sherrill-produced lament "Seven Spanish Angels" -- and eager to demonstrate a larger point, as he does in a rousing 1984 rendition of Hank Snow's classic "I'm Moving On" that features the writer himself pitching in with a couple of smoking-hot verses of his own; at a time when the industry Snow helped build had almost forgotten him, Willie made sure others didn't.

The big, beating heart of his body of work is highlighted on the latter part of Disc 1 and the entirety of Disc 2, in adventurous selections culled from the monumental '70s albums beginning with Yesterday's Wine and embracing Shotgun Willie, Phases and Stages, Red Headed Stranger, and The Sound in Your Mind and culminating in the staggering, unpredictable breakthrough of the classic pop renderings comprising 1978's mega-hit Stardust. Equally startling, arguably, is the development charted in Disc 1's first half, which begins in the aforementioned Texas radio station in 1954, with Willie in serious vocal debt to Lefty Frizzell and systematically crafting a signature sound, not only vocally and instrumentally but especially as a writer with the 1961 tsunami of "Hello Walls," "Funny How Time Slips Away" and "Crazy": remarkable recordings all, comparable to the celebrated hit versions of each recorded during Willie's brief tenure with Liberty before RCA found him. All of the usual suspects are accounted for here: Waylon, the Highwaymen, Hag, Emmylou, even Julio Iglesias, as well as the standards of the Willie canon. In the end, what to do but tip your hat and stand in awe? It has indeed been a hell of a ride, for the iconoclastic Willie and for those fans and fellow musicians who have followed him on his odyssey. David McGee

All Music Guide

Navigating Willie Nelson's immense body of recordings can be daunting even for committed fans. There is so much music and so much of it good that it's hard to keep straight, especially as each of his many eras has been compiled, collected, and reissued countless time, leading to a discography thick with redundancies -- and then there's the stubborn fact that for Willie, making music is like breathing, something that comes naturally, something that happens every day, so he keeps building upon that discography, releasing an album or two each year, which only adds to the confusion for neophytes and longtime fans alike. All of this is a roundabout way to say that there are plenty of Willie Nelson albums out there, that there's a surplus of compilations, but of all these, nothing offers such a complete, useful overview of his entire career as Columbia/Legacy's four-disc 2008 box One Hell of a Ride. This is not the first Willie box that Legacy has released, of course -- in 1995 they put out the triple-disc Revolutions of Time: The Journey 1975-1993 -- but this is the first box to ever attempt a thorough overview of his career, beginning with his earliest singles for Sarg and D, running through the countrypolitan Nashville productions of his Liberty Records and his wonderfully rambling RCA recordings of the '60s, then settling into the star-making sides for Columbia in the '70s and '80s, yet the set doesn't end there, as it runs through his albums for Island and Mercury in the '90s and 2000s. For sheer scope, this beats all, but what makes One Hell of a Ride so useful is that it covers all the ground accurately, picking a blend of hits, concert staples, and relative obscurities to present a career overview that may be illuminating even for serious fans, as this tells a full, complete story with its 100 tracks

Like many great stories, the details may be fudged a bit here -- on the second disc the tracks don't quite follow in chronological order -- but that doesn't matter because all this tweaking is done in service of the bigger picture, which is as it should be when a picture is this large. Listening to the whole of One Hell of a Ride, it's hard not to marvel yet again at the enormity of Willie's career. If he had only authored the standards "Nite Life," "Crazy," "Hello Walls," and "Funny How Time Slips Away," his place in history would be assured, but this set illustrates how Nelson strengthened the jazzy sophistication underpinning these tunes by digging deeper into Western swing, just as he slyly brought rock, folk, and pop flourishes into his music. By the time the Outlaw years roll around in the midst of the second disc here, his music was hard to peg -- certainly it was country, but not in the strictest definition, as it encompassed so much more, from the stark Red Headed Stranger to the lush Stardust, and what is remarkable about One Hell of a Ride is that by listening to it from beginning to end, none of these moves feel forced, all the evolutions feel natural, and the excellent fourth disc -- which neatly cherry-picks from a rollercoaster two decades of recordings -- illustrates that his evolution did not end when he achieved superstardom, but rather he kept finding new truths in music, sometimes through new tunes, sometimes by revisiting the past, as the nifty book-ending of the set with a new version of his first recording "When I've Sung My Last Hillbilly Song" makes clear. Willie will continue to build upon the legacy offered within this box, but that will not change the fact that this is the best place to learn and appreciate that legacy, and to learn to love it. Stephen Thomas Erlewine