Willie Nelson turned 93 on Wednesday, but he’s still not slowing down. Just three days later, on Saturday, May 2, the Red Headed Stranger will headline a concert at the Whitewater Amphitheatre in New Braunfels, Texas. Then he’s off to a string of shows in the southeast before kicking off the 2026 installment of the Outlaw Music Festival Tour on July 3.
Nelson will play these gigs despite suffering a string of losses to his road band — the Family Band — over the last few years. Guitarist Jody Payne died in 2008, bassist Bee Spears in 2011, and Nelson’s longtime drummer and foil, Paul English, passed in 2020. And then there was “Sister Bobbie”: Nelson’s piano-playing older sibling Bobbie Nelson left a gaping hole in the Willie ecosystem when she died in 2022.
John Spong, host of the One by Willie podcast and a contributor to Texas Monthly, has his theory for how Nelson carries on through the loss. In a new interview on Rolling Stone’s Nashville Now podcast, Spong says Nelson’s perseverance is a “spiritual” endeavor, especially when it pertains to Bobbie.
“I cannot imagine how much he misses her, but I also can’t imagine that he doesn’t feel her with him when he’s doing it,” Spong says.
Spong, a Willie scholar who’s interviewed the country music legend countless times and has helped rank his albums for Texas Monthly, gets emotional when he thinks about the fallen Family band members.
“I don’t want to get too goofy about it, but I don’t think [Willie’s] doing it for them. I think in a real way he’s doing it with them,” he says. “Still.”
Spong’s appearance is part a special crossover episode between One by Willie and Nashville Now that looks at Nelson’s albums and song catalog, and also zeroes in on “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” Nelson’s fifth Number One song and the theme to the 1979 Robert Redford film The Electric Horseman. Watch the full episode below.
Download and subscribe to Rolling Stone’s weekly country-music podcast, Nashville Now, hosted by senior music editor Joseph Hudak, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts). New episodes drop every Wednesday and feature interviews with artists and personalities like Vince Gill, Lainey Wilson, Hardy, Charley Crockett, Kings of Leon, the Black Crowes, Carly Pearce, Brandon Lake, Breland, Bryan Andrews, Noeline Hofmann, Devon Gilfillian, Gavin Adcock, Amanda Shires, Shooter Jennings, Margo Price, Ink, Ne-Yo, Rival Sons’ Jay Buchanan, Halestorm, Dusty Slay, Lukas Nelson, Ashley Monroe, Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor, Clever, and authors Marissa R. Moss, Josh Crutchmer, Mark Gray, and Jonathan Bernstein.
Whipped Cream*
Pop Albums Are Getting More Ambitious. Can Audiences Keep Up?
This Music May Contain Hope, the second album from British songstress Raye, makes great demands of its audience. The record nearly runs the length of a feature film and most of the 17 songs sound like they could soundtrack one. When the credits roll at the end — she thanks each and every person who helped create the record for six and a half minutes on “Fin.,” — they conclude a gloriously disorienting listening experience. For most of the album, Raye is asking you to come along as she fights and prays through despair and self-criticism to keep hope alive.
Sometimes that battle is filtered through songs that sound like show tunes or gospel hymns. In the case of “Click Clack Symphony,” they crescendo into a dizzying Hans Zimmer composition. There’s a level of patience and reciprocity the album requires from its listeners: At once confrontational and confessional, This Music May Contain Hope is not designed for detached consumption — and it’s part of a surge of recent releases that find artists creating ambitious records that encourage intentional engagement.
Last year, Hayley Williams released Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party as 17 individual singles. Fans created their own sequencing and narratives guided solely by the themes and sounds they chose. A few months later, Rosalía released Lux, a captivating 18-track record performed in 13 languages. It shares a musical complexity with This Music May Contain Hope and an interrogative spirit with The Apple Tree Under the Sea, the debut album from Hemlocke Springs released earlier this year. Each record is as all-consuming as the ideas they’re engaging with — mental anguish, faith and religion, internal and interpersonal implosion.
Raye often describes music as medicinal. Backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Flames Collective choir on “I Know You’re Hurting,” her melodies and harmonies are bandages and sutures. When she instructs the listener to “close your eyes and let this music get to working,” she exudes the wisdom of an elder passing home remedies through generations. At a time when easier access to music often means increasingly passive listening, these albums replace momentary distraction with connection and compassion. They give the audience something to return to.
Raye included the voices of her grandparents at the start of “Life Boat.” The portion her grandfather contributes, where he says, “I’m living, not giving up,” was recorded just days before his death. More voices flood in across the next four minutes. They all repeat some variation of “I’m not giving up, yet,” some with more desperation than others. “Say it,” Raye says, stern and direct. “Say, ‘I’m not giving up, yet.’” The mantra is set against the kind of thudding club beat that defined the earliest phases of her career. Drums and synthesizers are interspersed with delicately arranged strings, but there’s something transcendent about the contours and echoes of Raye’s voice.
That kind of vocal power is something Rosalía speaks about often: Duende. The flamenco term refers to a type of enchantment delivered through an especially evocative vocal performance. It’s not necessarily about technical prowess, or precision. “There’s something so ethereal and divine about el duende,” Rosalía told The New York Times last year. “El duende is something that visits you. It’s something that comes to you.” It makes the listening experience feel targeted and personal. This funneled into Rosalía on Lux. The record unravels in a way that transcends the barrier of language.
Rosalía begins “Mundo Nuevo” in Spanish. Its translation reveals she’s searching for a hint of truth. She finishes “De Madrugá” in Ukrainian with something searching for her this time. “I’m not looking for revenge,” she sings. “Revenge is looking for me.” The London Symphony Orchestra and the Escolania de Montserrat i Cor Cambra Palau de la Música Catalana choir bolster the album, their arrangements ranging from anxious and erratic to soothing and hypnotic.
Rosalía introduced Lux with the first single “Bergain,” which splinters across German, Spanish, and English. When Yves Tumor’s voice cuts through on the song’s outro, the persistent repetition of “I’ll fuck you till you love me” is harsh and abrasive against the preceding moments. Rosalía chases that friction across Lux. Like her mix of languages, she challenges the listener with existentialism and ruminations on the afterlife. It might turn some listeners away, but the ones who stay are rewarded.
Most of the record was inspired by saints, like Teresa of Ávila or Joan of Arc. Their history adds a third layer to the depth of Lux; Hemlocke Springs similarly fixates on religious motifs on The Apple Tree Under the Sea. She weaves in medieval tales and impulsive adventures made for a storybook. Positioning herself as a character in her fantastical stories gives her audience someone to root for while creating some distance between fiction and reality.
In that sense, The Apple Tree Under the Sea shares a theatrical ease of access with This Music May Contain Hope. Raye’s cautionary tales about traitorous South London men who should be banned from WhatsApp play into the same spectacle as Springs’ “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Ankles” and “Moses.” There’s a prelude towards the end of The Apple Tree Under the Sea that features the voice of a man who sounds far away as he preaches about sin and final judgements. It gets even harder to hear him when the sounds of running horses and marching feet cut through. The suspense builds into an orchestral outro that leads into “Sense (Is),” a booming, optimistic song about making the most of a clean slate and a glass half full.
Springs’ journey is the shortest within this set of albums. It spans 10 songs in just over half an hour, but retains its complexities with winding plot twists. Where she leans into communicating through stories and allegories, Raye through a version of theater, and Rosalía essentially through multinational cathedrals, Williams’ Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party brings listeners into an excruciatingly vivid reality. The achingly haunted “True Believer” walks the streets of Nashville. It moves down Broadway and past repurposed clubs. It attends the churches and questions the rhetoric presented in them. It runs parallel to the moments across the album that brings listeners into a home with fragile glass walls.
The album’s most shattering moment arrives towards the end: “Good ‘Ol Days.” It’s not as distressing as “Negative Self Talk,” or as sobering as “Whim.” It glides along a warm groove and drops burning one-liners with pointed specificity. What fortifies it the most is an appearance from Williams’ grandfather midway through the song. “You are so tacky/I think that’s why I love you so much,” he says in a voicemail message. “I just had to call you first on my new phone/I love you, y’all have a blast, bye.” The interlude emphasizes just how interior the content of the record is, made up of real moments, people, and feelings.
There’s a false perception in pop music that the best way to connect with the masses is to keep things broad — that vague generalizations are easier for people to latch onto. But the hyper-specificity and confrontation on these albums form real connection, creating the feeling that the listener is being trusted with someone else’s secrets and struggles — and safe to embrace their own, too.
There’s bravery in how these artists are driven by conviction. They understand the reach their platforms provide, but have little interest in idolatry. They each use different formats to craft a sense of togetherness even in their most intimate moments, like it means more to show someone they aren’t alone than to tell them. They ask for patience as they remind listeners it’s commendable to try. Some people don’t come to music looking for this; it can be challenging to have an artist in your ear telling you to bring your most shattering emotions and memories to the surface. But those are the kind of records that endure over time.