Album Description: Two CD set/Digipak includes the original classic album plus a 16 track bonus disc highlighting his further excursions into the Great American Songbook. Willie Nelson is a singer, songwriter and actor. He is widely regarded as one of the most beloved and notorious country music singers. He reached his greatest fame during the so-called "outlaw country" movement of the 1970s, but remains iconic, especially in American popular culture. Willie Nelson is loved across around the world by many generations with his timeless songs of the common person struggling in this life and making the best of circumstances.
Disc 1:
Stardust
Georgia on My Mind
Blue Skies
All of Me
Unchained Melody
September Song
On the Sunny Side of the Street
Moonlight in Vermont
Don't Get Around Much Anymore
Someone to Watch Over Me
Disc 2:
What a Wonderful World
Basin Street Blues
I'm Cofession' (That I Love You)
I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter
Floating in Stardust I may not like every song sung by or written by Willie Nelson but the songs on this double album are great. Many of these are older standards; many were written by Hoagy Carmichael. Although I had the original Stardust on cd, I was more than happy that I purchased this 30th anniversary edition. I listened and found myself floating in Stardust.
CLASSIC "REAL WILLIE" What more can I say, it won a Grammy, took Willie to the Whitehouse....launched his career as a movie star.... This is what Willie Nelson is all about, a true classic laidback songwriter & musician that loves REAL MUSIC, not the crap that Nashville pushed and continues to push today, I have every Willie ever recorded and this started it for me,,,,,Grab "TWO MEN WITH THE BLUES" while your at it, I say it is the BEST Willie since STARDUST, it really is, it's another Grammy winner in my book.
Nelson's classic lengthened, but difficult to improve Country artists taking on pop standards wasn't a new idea when Willie Nelson released the ten tracks of 1978's Stardust LP. Ferlin Husky had released an entire album's worth on 1957's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and other country stars regularly drew from the Great American Songbook. Nelson himself had recorded "That Lucky Old Sun" two years earlier for his The Sound in Your Mind LP. What made Stardust so audacious was the confluence of Nelson's iconoclastic career and the times in which the album was released. Where his outlaw compadre Waylon Jennings had directly confronted Nashville, Nelson vented his subversion by retreating to Texas, and waxing concept albums like "Phases and Stages" and "The Red Headed Stranger."
Nelson's previous release, the 1977 tribute to Lefty Frizzell, "To Lefty From Willie," didn't straightforwardly set the stage for an album of standards, but the depth of his song selections, the respect he showed the material, and his idiosyncratic phrasing revealed an interpretive stylist whose talent stretched well beyond his own words. With the outlaw country movement in full swing, Nelson's choice to drop an album of classic American pop was perhaps the most revolutionary move of his career. Recorded with his band and produced by Booker T. Jones, Nelson re-contextualized the songs to expose their common roots in the American experience, much as Ray Charles had managed with 1962's "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music."
Predictably, Columbia's brass didn't have a clue, yet the album turned into the biggest success of Nelson's career, producing a pair of chart-topping singles ("Blue Skies" and "Georgia on My Mind," the latter snagging a Grammy®) and the #3 "All of Me," sold millions of copies, and stuck to the country album chart for over ten years! The album's crossover success wasn't quite as pronounced, though it did stay two years on the pop album chart. Nelson's vision brought the songs of Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington, George & Ira Gershwin, and others to a new audience and a new generation. He did this by staying true to both the songs and his own art, blending together a reverence for the compositions with his personal musical style.
The arrangements include several of Nelson's trademark sounds, including Mickey Raphael's harmonica and Nelson's gut-string guitar; Booker T's organ adds soul, jazz and gospel notes throughout. Nelson's band proves itself superb company for pop standards, able to underline the vocals and swing ever-so-lightly as needed. The results are a perfect rendering of pop standards in the Willie Nelson style. As strongly as these tracks took hold with the public, they exerted an even deeper spell on Nelson, who continued to record from the pop songbook for years to come, including 1981's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" LP.
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