Neil Young and Jack White Stripped These Two Willie Nelson Classics Back to Their Roots

On his thirty-third album, A Letter Home, Neil Young explores songs by Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, The Everly Brothers, and Ivory Joe Hunter, among others. The album was produced by Young and Jack White, and released by and recorded at White’s Third Man Records in Nashville.

“These are songs by great songwriters who influenced me while I was growing up … people, singers, songwriters that would just be able to play their own instrument and sing by themselves, and just deliver a song,” said Young during an appearance with White on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2014. (Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” is the “newest” track on the album.)

“That was something that made a big difference to me when I was younger,” Young added, “so that’s why I chose those songs, because they mean so much to me.”

A Letter Home also features two covers of Young’s friend and Farm Aid co-founder Willie Nelson: “On the Road Again” and “Crazy.”

Young’s analog-measured renditions of Nelson’s are stripped back to the bare minimum, with nothing more than a harmonica and acoustic guitar, on “Crazy,” and a little light piano and harmonies (by White) added to “On the Road Again.”

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Jack White’s Voice-O-Graph

During a Record Store Day event at Third Man Records in 2013, White debuted his Voice-O-Graph, a reconstructed 1947 coin-operated recording booth, and let visitors use it to record and press their own vinyl, and Young, who was in town at the time, stopped in.

While he was talking to White, a kid went into the booth and started playing one of Young’s songs.
“I said to Jack, ‘I want to try that,’” recalled Young. “I want to try somebody else’s song.” After testing out the booth himself, Young told White, “I can do an album in there.” He added, “You get inside it, and you’re in a zone. You close the door, and it’s like you’ve gone back, way back.”

Young returned to Third Man, and one of the first tracks he recorded for A Letter Home was Nelson’s “Crazy.” Nelson originally wrote the song while living near Houston, working as a radio DJ in Houston, Texas, and playing some local shows. During his 30-mile commute from where he lived in Pasadena to Houston to play the Esquire Ballroom, Nelson would have an hour to write new songs, and he penned “Night Life,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Crazy,” and more during those commutes.

After moving his family to Nashville, he started writing for Pamper Music, and fellow songwriter Hank Cochran, who co-wrote Cline’s 1961 hit I Fall to Pieces” and She’s Got You,” saw the potential in “Crazy” and pushed it to her manager, Owen Bradley. Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick, also heard Nelson performing it one night at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge and woke his wife up to make her listen to the song in the middle of the night.

At first, Cline wasn’t too crazy about the song and nearly passed on it. “It almost didn’t happen because Patsy, who recorded it in a Nashville studio, tried singing like me,” recalled Nelson in 2023. “Big mistake. No one should ever try to follow my style of phrasing. Not that I don’t like my style. I do. I believe it’s natural, at least for me. But it’s offbeat. I tend to kick way back behind the beat or hurry up ahead of the beat. As my good buddy Waylon Jennings once said, ‘Willie wouldn’t know where the beat is if it bit him in the butt.’”

Once recorded for Decca Records in ’61, “Crazy” became one of Cline’s biggest hits, reaching No. 2 on the Country chart. After Cline’s next No. 1, “She’s Got You,” from the album Sentimentally Yours, she had two more hits in 1962, “When I Get Thru With You” and “So Wrong,” before her death in a plane crash a year later. Nelson later released his version of “Crazy” on his 1962 debut, …And Then I Wrote. 

‘Honeysuckle Rose’ and “On the Road Again”

Young’s second cover on A Letter Home, Nelson’s 1980 “On the Road Again,” is also reimagined as a roots song. Written for the film Honeysuckle Rose, where Nelson stars as Buck Bonham, a country singer who faces all the challenges of life on the road, “On the Road Again” stapled the soundtrack.

“On the Road Again” became Nelson’s ninth No. 1 on the country charts, earned him a Grammy for Best Country Song, and has been covered by Nelson and his Highwaymen bandmates, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson, along with renditions by Rosemary Clooney, Deana Carter, Sheryl Crow, and Vince Gill, Alanis Morissette, Buckcherry, Kacey Musgraves (as a duet with Nelson), and more.

“That’s really Willie,” Young said of “On the Road Again.” Young added, “He really feels that and he defines that feeling of being a musician on the road, perfectly.”

Photo: Douglas Gorenstein/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank