One Hell of a Ride [Box] [by Willie Nelson, CD, 2008]

Navigating Willie Nelson's immense body of recordings can be daunting even for committed fans. There is so much music and so much of it good that it's hard to keep straight, especially as each of h... more

Navigating Willie Nelson's immense body of recordings can be daunting even for committed fans. There is so much music and so much of it good that it's hard to keep straight, especially as each of his many eras has been compiled, collected, and reissued countless time, leading to a discography thick with redundancies -- and then there's the stubborn fact that for Willie, making music is like breathing, something that comes naturally, something that happens every day, so he keeps building upon that discography, releasing an album or two each year, which only adds to the confusion for neophytes and longtime fans alike. All of this is a roundabout way to say that there are plenty of Willie Nelson albums out there, that there's a surplus of compilations, but of all these, nothing offers such a complete, useful overview of his entire career as Columbia/Legacy's four-disc 2008 box One Hell of a Ride. This is not the first Willie box that Legacy has released, of course -- in 1995 they put out the triple-disc Revolutions of Time: The Journey 1975-1993 -- but this is the first box to ever attempt a thorough overview of his career, beginning with his earliest singles for Sarg and D, running through the countrypolitan Nashville productions of his Liberty Records and his wonderfully rambling RCA recordings of the '60s, then settling into the star-making sides for Columbia in the '70s and '80s, yet the set doesn't end there, as it runs through his albums for Island and Mercury in the '9... less