Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan Wrote a Song Together After 33 Years

Track four of Willie Nelson’s seventy-ninth album is called “I Can’t Read Your Mind”. It is credited to Nelson, Buddy Cannon and Bob Dylan — the first time Nelson and Dylan have written a song together since 1993.

Dream Chaser came out on 29 May through Legacy Recordings, a month after Nelson’s ninety-third birthday. It runs thirty minutes and fifty seconds.

Thirty-Three Years Between Co-Writes

The last one was “Across the Borderline” in 1993. Three decades later the two men wrote again, with Cannon in the room, and the result sits in the middle of the record rather than being flagged as its centrepiece.

That placement is the interesting part. A collaboration between two songwriters of this standing is, on paper, the most newsworthy thing on any album it appears on, and putting it at track four with no particular ceremony is a decision about proportion.

It fits how both men work. Neither has treated a co-write as an event since roughly 1985, and a song is not improved by being announced as significant before anybody has heard it.

Nelson and Dylan have circled each other for fifty years without a formal partnership — tourmates, mutual admirers, occasional collaborators — and one song every thirty-three years is a plausible rate for two writers who have never needed each other to work.

Buddy Cannon Is on Every Track

The name that recurs is not Dylan’s. Buddy Cannon produced the album and has a writing credit on every song, including the Dylan collaboration.

That is a remarkable arrangement and the reason this catalogue keeps growing. A producer who also writes with the artist removes the hardest part of making a record at this stage — finding material — and turns album-making into a continuous process rather than a project.

The rest of the credits show how the writing is distributed. “Dream Chaser” and “We’d Make a Good Movie” are Cannon, Nelson and Bobby Tomberlin. “Wonder What I’m Gonna Do” and “After All” are Cannon and Nelson. “Fly Away” is Cannon with Bobby Whitlock, and “Whiskey Wants Me To” is Cannon and Tomberlin without Nelson at all.

One track, “Love Overdue”, comes from outside entirely — written by Anna Lisa Graham, Donald W. Poythress and Mickey Raphael, the harmonica player who has been in Nelson’s band for decades. Our piece on who gets paid for a traditional song covers why credits like these matter more than they appear to.

Bobby Tomberlin’s presence on two tracks is worth noting alongside Cannon’s. A pair of writers who appear repeatedly, working with a producer who is also a writer, describes a small and stable workshop rather than a rotating cast of Nashville collaborators.

That is the opposite of how most country records are now assembled. The contemporary norm is a large pool of professional writers cycling through sessions; here the same three or four names generate most of an album.

The advantage is consistency of voice. Songs written by people who have written together for years arrive already sounding like the artist, which removes the step where a producer has to make disparate material cohere.

Thirty Minutes Is the Right Length

The runtime deserves attention because it is so far from current practice. Thirty minutes and fifty seconds across the tracklist is shorter than most EPs now run, and the songs themselves are compact — “Whiskey Wants Me To” at 2:15, “Fly Away” at 2:42, “After All” at 2:58.

That is the length a country album ran in 1970, and Nelson has simply never adopted the longer format the CD era introduced. It is also, for a ninety-three-year-old singer, a practical decision about how much recording is comfortable.

Short songs suit the voice he has now. Nelson’s phrasing has always been conversational and behind the beat, and that approach depends on the listener leaning in — which is easier to sustain across three minutes than across six.

Thirty minutes also makes the album repeatable in a way a longer one is not. A record you can hear twice in an hour behaves differently from one that asks for an evening.

There is a commercial argument against it that has stopped applying. For most of the streaming era, longer tracklists meant more plays per listener and better chart performance, which pushed albums past an hour. That incentive rewards artists chasing chart positions, and Nelson has not been in that business for some time.

Freed from it, the length can be decided by the songs. Nine or ten pieces at roughly three minutes each is what the material supported, and nothing was added to reach a number.

What the Reviews Heard

The notices were unusually consistent for a late-catalogue release. Uncut gave nine out of ten, Mojo four out of five, Far Out four out of five, Hot Press seven out of ten, and Paste a B-.

Tim Cumming at The Arts Desk called it “flawless and hugely enjoyable”, singling out songwriting he found “as astute, funny and affecting as ever” — a phrase that resists the usual condescension applied to records by artists in their nineties.

Ed Power at Hot Press described the album as using Nelson’s “familiar palette” in service of “a grippingly bittersweet survey of life, aging — and whatever comes next”, which is the honest reading of what a record like this is about.

Eddie Fu at Consequence described the title track as Nelson “reflecting on the rapid passage of time”. That the album opens there, and was chosen as the lead single when the record was announced on 18 March, tells you the theme was not incidental.

Seventy-Nine Albums and Still Counting

The number is the thing that most resists comprehension. Seventy-nine solo studio albums, with Workin’ Man having arrived only the previous year, is a rate no other artist of comparable standing has sustained.

Part of the explanation is structural. Nelson has never treated albums as major statements requiring years of preparation; he records when there are songs, releases what he records, and moves on.

That approach was unfashionable for decades, when the industry preferred fewer, bigger records. It has aged well. A catalogue this deep gives an audience somewhere to go indefinitely, and it means no single album has to carry the weight of representing him.

It also means a Dylan co-write can appear at track four of album seventy-nine without the record being reorganised around it. That is a luxury very few artists ever earn.

The economics behind it have changed in his favour too. A catalogue of seventy-nine albums generates continuous streaming income regardless of what the newest one does, which removes the pressure that makes most late-career records defensive.

There is one obvious reading of an album called Dream Chaser, released at ninety-three, whose title track is about the passage of time and whose reviewers reach for phrases about ageing and what comes next. It is the reading everybody involved seems to have accepted rather than avoided.

What the record does not do is turn that into a farewell. There is no valedictory framing, no announced last tour, no dedication page. It is simply the next one, made the way the previous seventy-eight were.

Given how long the catalogue has run and how little the method has changed, that is probably the most accurate thing the album could have been.

Dream Chaser is out now on Legacy Recordings.