The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, December 25, 2025

Notably: Let us now praise Willie Nelson: 92, still writing songs, still recording, still performing, still smoking weed. These days he preludes his shows with “Living in the Promiseland,” a 1986 single. It’s not quite showing Baby Jesus and Mary and Joseph in ICE-tightened zip ties, but it’s the same idea “‘Promiseland’ joined Nelson’s preshow in the spring, after ICE ramped up its raids on immigrants,” Alex Abramovich writes in a profile of Willie in the current New Yorker. “The lyrics speak on behalf of newcomers: “Give us your tired and weak / And we will make them strong / Bring us your foreign songs / And we will sing along.” The video cuts between footage of Holocaust survivors arriving on Liberty ships and of Haitian migrants on wooden boats. In Camden—two nights after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, one night after the State Department warned immigrants against “praising” his murder, hours after bomb threats forced the temporary closure of seven historically Black colleges—the images hit hard. When the video ended, three things happened at once: stagehands yanked the scrim away, Nelson sang the first notes of “Whiskey River,” and a giant American flag unfurled behind him.” But that’s as political as the piece gets, which is unfortunate, given the headline: “How Willie Nelson Sees America.” We do not learn much about how today’s Willie sees today’s America. Trump isn’t mentioned once. It’s a nice break. It’s also an insightful profile of his music, which is all that matters really. As Annie Nelson, his wife, put it: “Let’s face it, we’re being divided intentionally. That’s part of the playbook—divide and conquer. It’s been around a long time. When somebody’s saying hello to somebody without knowing their political ideology, and they’re just enjoying music together, that’s church. That’s healing. That’s really important right now. Really, really important.”

Merry Christmas.

“Shotgun Willie” is the first Nelson album I fell in love with. I’d heard some of his stark Nashville demos in college—they’d floored me—but “Shotgun Willie” threw me for a loop. The beat on some songs sat so far back, it sounded like it was calling, long distance, from a Wilson Pickett session. (Nelson’s producers, Arif Mardin and Jerry Wexler, had worked with Pickett, too.) Donny Hathaway wrote the string charts; the Memphis Horns played on the title track. Country radio didn’t know where to put it, and it didn’t sell, but “Shotgun Willie” gave Nelson a sound closer to what he heard in his head, and material that he still plays. For the follow-up, “Phases and Stages,” Wexler took him to Muscle Shoals, in Alabama, to work with the rhythm section that had backed Pickett and Aretha Franklin. The album, which Nelson recorded in two days, told a divorce story, twice: side one from the wife’s point of view, side two from the husband’s. It sold about as well as the previous record. Atlantic shuttered its Nashville office soon afterward. Bleak as the album is, it has an emotional sophistication that Nelson’s early songs lacked, with narrators working their way through the wreckage rather than wallowing: “After carefully considerin’ the whole situation / I stand with my back to the wall / Walkin’ is better than runnin’ away / And crawlin’ ain’t no good at all.” Texas Monthly, which keeps a running list of Nelson’s albums—all hundred and fifty-five of them, ranked—puts “Phases and Stages,” a “perfect record,” at No. 1.

–From Alex Abramovich’s profile of Willie Nelson, The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2025.

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.