Willie Nelson sets ‘Ride Me Back Home’ for June 21st

Title track available now digitally

Legacy Recordings, a division of Sony Music Entertainment, will release Ride Me Back Home, Willie Nelson’s new studio album (and 13th for the label), on Friday, June 21st. Ride Me Back Home will be available on CD, vinyl and digital formats as well as part of exclusive merch bundles on Nelson’s web store. The album’s title track is now available digitally.

The title track “Ride Me Back Home” is Nelson’s sublime rendering of a song co-written by Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Sonny Throckmorton expressing a love for horses and their spirituality. “Sonny lives right by Willie’s Luck studio,” longtime friend/producer/musical compadre Buddy Cannon points out. “He said he wrote that song because he was over there and saw Willie’s horses. I don’t even know if Willie knows that or not.” The horses to which Cannon refers are a group of more than 60 that Willie has adopted over the years, rescuing them from the slaughterhouse and giving them a home on his “Luck” ranch.

“With Willie Nelson’s Ride Me Back Home, the artist rounds out a trilogy about mortality that began in 2017 with God’s Problem Child and was followed in 2018 with Last Man Standing,” observes American writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. “Ride Me Back Home, though, brings a different component of mortality into view: empathy.” A reflective, upbeat journey through life, love and time’s inescapable rhythms viewed from Nelson’s inimitable perspective, Ride Me Back Home finds the artist in full appreciation of every moment, sharing his experience in songs he’s written and songs he loves to sing. This is the 13th album that Cannon has produced for Nelson in a little over a decade and the album debuts three new songs co-written by the pair: “Come On Time,” “Seven Year Itch” and “One More Song to Write.”

Alongside his new compositions on the album and the title track (which Throckmorton co-wrote with his daughter Debby, Joe Manual and Lucinda Hinton), Nelson pays musical tribute to a variety of pop and country songwriters and performers, covering Billy Joel (“Just the Way You Are”), Mac Davis (“It’s Hard to Be Humble” with Lukas Nelson and Micah Nelson) and a pair of songs by the late American country/folk artist Guy Clark (“Immigrant Eyes” and “My Favorite Picture of You,” the title song from Clark’s 2014 Grammy-winning Best Folk Album).

Filling out Ride Me Back Home are Nelson’s soulful interpretation of Buzz Rabin’s classic country composition “Maybe I Should Have Been Listening,” his take on Skip Denenberg & Dan “Bee” Spears’ “Nobody’s Listening” (before his death in 2011, bassist Spears had played with Nelson for more than forty years) and the artist’s 2019 return to “Stay Away From Lonely Places,” an outlaw country deep cut Nelson first wrote and recorded for his 1972 album The Words Don’t Fit The Picture. “I’m the biggest Willie Nelson fan there is, and I thought I knew every song that he ever did. But I had never heard that song. It sounded totally new to me,” states Buddy Cannon, who lobbied to get Nelson to revisit the track. “He’s a born troubadour. It’s the greatness: That early genius that was him and his songs is still there.”

Earlier this year, Willie Nelson’s My Way, his musical homage to Frank Sinatra (and 12th Legacy album), took home the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album and became Nelson’s 13th Grammy win.

CD | LP

1. Ride Me Back Home
2. Come On Time
3. My Favorite Picture of You
4. Seven Year Itch
5. Immigrant Eyes
6. Stay Away From Lonely Places
7. Just The Way You Are
8. One More Song To Write
9. Nobody’s Listening
10. It’s Hard To Be Humble (with Lukas Nelson and Micah Nelson)
11. Maybe I Should’ve Been Listening

Buddy Iahn
Buddy Iahn

Buddy Iahn founded The Music Universe when he decided to juxtapose his love of web design and music. As a lifelong drummer, he decided to take a hiatus from playing music to report it. The website began as a fun project in 2013 to one of the top independent news sites. Email: info@themusicuniverse.com