Willie Nelson - Red Headed Stranger

Willie Nelson isn’t just from Austin — he is Austin. He’s our patron saint, our poet laureate, our spiritual guru and our pharmaceutical advisor. So you know we had to include a Willie album, and this is one of his best. Here’s what the musical geniuses at Waterloo have to say about it:

“Red Headed Stranger has more in common with the Western novels of Louis L’Amour than it does with Sgt. Pepper. Unlike Pepper, Willie’s 1975 concept album actually tells a story. Willie wrote a handful of new tunes to sequence alongside spare arrangements of older songs by some of country music’s most acclaimed writers, including Hank Williams and Hank Cochran. With a recording budget of just $4,000, Stranger told a haunting tale of betrayal, murder and desolation on the frontier. When Willie delivered the finished album to Columbia, a misguided record exec wondered, ‘When are you going to finish it? It’s a pretty good demo.’ Forty-five years later, that ‘pretty good demo’ remains one of the towering achievements of Willie’s recording career. And he made it for less than half of what it cost the Beatles to create the album cover for Sgt. Pepper.”

— Patrick Floyd, Waterloo Records