Ride Me Back Home, Willie Nelson

Ride Me Back Home, Willie Nelson, 2019, :43

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

You know what you're getting with a modern day Willie album. The slow songs will be melancholic and wistful, the light songs will be silly and funny, there will be an unexpected cover made entirely his own (here it's Billy Joel's "Just the Way You Are"), and the whole will be flawlessly executed with the skill and grace of a man who's been churning out classic songs his whole life.  Favorite tracks: "Come On Time" (not an exhortation to arrive early, but a gentle rebuke, in apostrophe form, to Time), "Ride Me Back Home," "Seven Year Itch, "It's Hard To Be Humble."

Ghosteen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Currently doing one album for each year, 1960-2020. Today: 2019.

Ghosteen, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, 2019, 1:08

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

This is the album born out of Nick Cave's grief at losing his son in a terrible accident.  This is the album in which he is saying that his son is here next to him, not in his heart, but with him.  It's a gorgeous work of art.  It's also terribly abstruse and poetic and personal and ethereal and insular.  It just is, this album; it doesn't ask for your approval or your understanding.  I think that you can no more quantify or criticize this album than you could a dream.  Favorite tracks: "Bright Horses," "Sun Forest."  It's difficult to take them out of context, however.