The Border (album)

The Border is the 75th solo studio album by American singer-songwriter Willie Nelson. It was released on May 31, 2024, through Legacy Recordings. Produced by Buddy Cannon, the album contains four original songs by Nelson and Cannon along with six songs from songwriters such as Rodney Crowell, Shawn Camp and Mike Reid.

The album's lead single and title track, a cover of Crowell and Allen Shamblin's song "The Border" from Crowell's 2019 album Texas, was released on March 14, 2024.

Background

Nelson and Cannon's four songs, like most of their compositions were written over text threads. Cannon found more material for the album at a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame lunch with Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin, which led Reid to send in "Nobody Knows Me Like You" and Shamblin to submit "The Border", which in turn inspired Nelson's manager Mark Rothbaum to suggest another Crowell song, "Many a Long and Lonesome Highway".

Critical reception

The Border received positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received a score of 79 out of 100 based on six reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Graeme Thomson at The Spectator found that "the material on The Border smartly plugs into Nelson’s mythos", praising Nelson's guitar playing and his ability to communicate while comparing the record's "sombre, stately mood" to the 1996 album Spirit. Texas Monthly, a magazine which has reviewed all of Nelson's albums, found "Willie in better voice and more active on Trigger than he’s been since 2018’s Last Man Standing" and singled out "Nobody Knows Me Like You" as a highlight. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at AllMusic considered The Border as a sequel to Nelson's 2022 record A Beautiful Time, finding the "levity" in an album where Rodney Crowell contributes the "weightier material", concluding that The Border "doesn't quite feel like a final chapter but rather a welcome coda restating Nelson's strengths with casual ease."

Track listing

Personnel

Musicians

• Barry Bales – acoustic bass
• Jim "Moose" Brown – organ, piano, synthesizer
• Buddy Cannon – background vocals
• Melonie Cannon – background vocals
• Fred Eltringham – drums, percussion
• James Mitchell – electric guitar
• Willie Nelson – lead vocals, Trigger
• Mickey Raphael – harmonica
• Bobby Terry – acoustic guitar, electric guitar, steel guitar

Technical

• Buddy Cannon – production
• Andrew Mendelson – mastering
• Tony Castle – mixing, engineering
• Adam Battershell – engineering assistance
• Joey Salit – engineering assistance
• Luke Armentrout – engineering assistance
• Michelle Freetly – engineering assistance
• Sean Badum – engineering assistance
• Taylor Chadwick – engineering assistance
• Shannon Finnegan – production coordinator
• Mark Rothbaum - executive producer

Other personnel

• Frank Harkins – art direction and design
• Pamela Springsteen – photography (Trigger)
• Kelly VanDellan and William Silver - photography (Big Bend)

Charts

References