Willie Nelson once said that 1996’s Spirit was his favourite album of the many he’d made in his decades-long career. Recorded in a single afternoon with a guitarist, a fiddler and his sister Bobbie on the piano, the album captures the grace of his art in strokes so broad and effortless it feels almost like montage, or something witnessed from above. There are touches of Spanish and Tex-Mex and classical music (“She Is Gone”, “Mariachi”); country ballads (“I’m Not Trying To Forget You”, “I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes”); and hymns as bare and upright as that tree in the backyard there (“We Don’t Run”, “I Thought About You, Lord”). Spirit sounds pure and delicate—but also strong and resolute. It sounds like the last word. Nelson had been spending time going through his catalogue, putting together a book of song lyrics and a box set of early and unreleased material. He’d also been let go from his label, and was pulling away from his troubles with the IRS. Nelson had both the future and the past in mind, and in stripping his music to its skeleton, he recalled the dreamy sparseness of Red Headed Stranger while also laying the groundwork for Teatro, an album that captures the same reflective mood with more atmosphere and colour. It’s easy to fetishise Spirit for the same reasons it’s easy to fetishise the last recordings of Billie Holiday or Leonard Cohen, or the songs that make up Johnny Cash’s American series: This is music that sounds like it’s being made by someone who’s prepared for death. Of course, Willie Nelson didn’t die, at least not in the colloquial sense. But it does seem like he was making peace with the silence that eventually comes. Joe Gracey, Spirit’s engineer, said they recorded live to a two-track digital tape, meaning there was no way of correcting mistakes or changing levels in the mix. There’s something a little poetic, then, in ending the album with a five-minute instrumental piece: Nelson was in the room, of course, playing his guitar. But he had nothing else to say.