Album Review: Willie Nelson, I Don't Know a Thing About Love

Even with his 90th birthday approaching on April 29, country superstar Willie Nelson has pressing stuff to do. High on the agenda is bringing the songbook of his onetime contemporary Harlan Howard to a new generation of music fans. Or at least, giving it a refresh. Enter I Don’t Know a Thing About Love: The Songs of Harlan Howard, Nelson’s thoroughly charming just-released album of interpretations.

Howard, as an accompanying press release notes, wrote many popular songs and enduring standards for a variety of artists in a career spanning six decades. “In 1961 alone, he had 15 compositions on the country charts. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973 and, in 1997, was inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Harlan Howard died in Nashville in 2002, at age 74, and was buried in Nashville City Cemetery.”

This writer who famously defined a great country song as “three chords and the truth” is paradoxically elevated by the unfussy simplicity Nelson brings to these performances, letting the conversational lyrics — which might have been snippets overheard in a saloon and scrawled on a napkin — shimmer in the foreground. To wit, “Life Turned Her That Way” which doesn’t so much offer an excuse for a brittle woman as a glance through a smudged window into her backstory.

Bluesy lead single “Busted,” chronicling a man who is down (like, really down) on his luck, might be the set’s best-known track, previously covered and charted by both Johnny Cash and Ray Charles. The tune seems as relevant today as it doubtless did on arrival in 1962 and is emblematic of the evergreen nature of all these simple gems.

Few have captured the spirit of heartbreak, longing, and loss with such plain-spoken economy as Howard, and while there’s a bittersweet poignancy to hearing the wizened Nelson lament that “There’s too many rivers to cross,” it sure is absorbing.

I Don't Know A Thing About Love: The Songs of Harlan Howard was released March 3, 2023.
Listen to it here.