ALBUM REVIEW: A Front-Row Seat to Willie Nelson’s 90th Birthday Celebration

Ain’t nothing wrong with celebrating your 90th birthday all year long, especially when you’re Willie Nelson.

The party started April 29-30, when dozens of popular music’s biggest names — and some well-chosen lesser-knowns — gathered at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles to celebrate Willie’s actual birthday. (Though he was born a few minutes before midnight on April 29, 1933, Willie’s birth certificate listed April 30 as his date of arrival.) The two-night set list included 66 different songs Nelson wrote or recorded in his improbable seven-decade career.

You don’t organize an event that massive without documenting it. A nearly three-hour concert film hit theaters in June for a short run; earlier this week, CBS aired a shorter version on prime-time TV. And now, with the release of Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90 (Live at the Hollywood Bowl), there are three more ways to hear the magic of that April weekend: A 53-song digital release available for download and streaming, a 21-song double-vinyl package, and a 40-song 2-CD set that includes a three-hour Blu-Ray video disc.

We’ll focus on the digital release here, since it has the most songs. Let’s start with the highlights. There are bigger names on this bill than Willie’s son Lukas Nelson, but none (save Lukas’ brother Micah) as genetically close to the living legend himself. You can hear that connection clearly when Lukas sings “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”; it’s probably the best song Willie ever wrote, and Lukas’ solo acoustic rendition was the finest moment of these shows. As for the marquee names, the double-shot of duets between Willie and George Strait on their recent novelty hit “Sing One With Willie” and Townes Van Zandt’s timeless “Pancho & Lefty” is hard to top. Though for sheer ageless star power, there’s newly minted octogenarian Keith Richards joining Willie on the perfectly selected Billy Joe Shaver classic “Live Forever.”

If you want powerful vocal performances, check out Jamey Johnson’s slow-burn-to-blazing-fire version of “Georgia on My Mind.” Anyone who needs further proof of just how fast and high Allison Russell’s star is rising can check out her duet with Norah Jones on “Seven Spanish Angels.” Want deep cuts? Check out Micah Nelson’s fascinating “The Ghost” from a fairly obscure 1967 Willie album, served up as an atmospheric blast with help from Daniel Lanois’ steel guitar. And for a billowing cloud of comic relief, there’s Willie and Snoop Dogg hamming it up through “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.”

For those in the crowd that weekend, no moments were more dramatic than Kris Kristofferson’s cameos — with Rosanne Cash on night one for “Loving Her Was Easier” and with Norah Jones on night two for “Help Me Make It Through The Night.” You’ll need to see the film or TV version (or Blu-Ray disc) to appreciate what the crowd felt when Kristofferson slowly strolled onstage — but it’s quite valuable to have the audio documented, too. Kristofferson’s weathered voice gently breaks with the weight of decades, restored by the empathetic beauty of his duet partners’ voices.

So what’s missing? About a dozen songs performed at the shows didn’t make the cut, some for understandable reasons. The Neil Young/Stephen Stills contributions “Long May You Run” and “For What It’s Worth” are ultimately more those artists’ songs than Nelson’s, though Willie has performed them both over the years. And an attempted second-generation “Highwayman” collaboration with Lukas and Micah plus Shooter Jennings and Rosanne Cash was a better idea on paper than it sounded onstage. Harder to figure is the omission of Sturgill Simpson’s “I’d Have to Be Crazy”; Simpson is definitely the highest-profile artist from the live shows to not appear on the recorded version.

British legend Tom Jones is represented with “Opportunity to Cry,” but my memory from those nights is that his reading of “Across the Borderline” (the title track to Willie’s standout 1993 album) was more memorable. And while there’s nothing wrong with Nathaniel Rateliff’s house-band rendition of the Leon Russell gem “A Song for You,” I thought The Lumineers’ hushed duo presentation the previous night was more emotionally resonant. Including both versions would have been preferable to the one song that appears twice here: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” from Bob Weir (night one) and Beck (night two).

But maybe we’ll hear all those extras on a future box set with bonus tracks. Meantime, dive into tracks by all the other acts I didn’t even get around to mentioning above, including Sheryl Crow, Billy Strings, Gary Clark Jr., The Chicks, The Avett Brothers, Lyle Lovett, Leon Bridges, Margo Price, Dwight Yoakam, Ziggy Marley, Tyler Childers, Edie Brickell & Charlie Sexton, Warren Haynes, Charley Crockett, Miranda Lambert, and more.

Long Story Short: Willie Nelson 90 (Live at the Hollywood Bowl) was released Dec. 15 via Legacy Recordings.