One Hell Of A Ride

Willie Nelson | Format: MP3 Download

Product Details

• Original Release Date: April 1, 2008
• Number of Discs: 4
• Label: Columbia/Legacy
• Copyright: (P) Compilation 2008 Sony Music Entertainment
• Total Length: 5:05:28
• Genres:
• ASIN: B0016CTX5Y
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,898 Paid in MP3 Albums (See Top 100 Paid in MP3 Albums)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great collection, but once again...frustrating, April 1, 2008

By 

Mark Weisinger (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: One Hell Of a Ride (4-CD Box Set) (Audio CD)

Let me start by saying that I'm a big Willie Nelson fan, and I hate docking this collection a star. It's not because the material on this set isn't first-rate. On the contrary; everything here is classic. Even some of the lesser-known and/or second-tier songs would be career highlights for most artists. But the problem with this set is the same problem suffered by every Willie Nelson compilation released so far: what's missing from it.

There are several good Willie Nelson compilations on the market right now: the classic (and recently remastered) "Greatest Hits (and Some That Will Be)," the boxed set "Revolutions of Time," and two compilations both called "Essential Willie Nelson" (one a single-disc covering his early years and the other a recent double-disc covering his entire career). While all of these collections are great, none is truly comprehensive. I was really hoping that this would finally be the collection that "got it right," but once again, we're given a Willie Nelson compilation that is frustratingly incomplete.

Scanning the titles on this box, I noticed that some of my favorites were missing. So, I went back to the four previously-mentioned collections, all of which I own, and I made a list of the songs that were included on one or more of those collections but are missing here. Some omissions were major, some minor; but it was surprising just how many true classics were M.I.A. Need proof? Take a quick look at the list below, and see how many of your favorite Willie Nelson songs are on it:

Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning

All of Me

Blue Skies

Faded Love (w/ Ray Price)

Forgiving You Was Easy

I Never Cared For You

Railroad Lady

Heartaches of a Fool

Look What Thoughts Can Do

Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming)

Midnight Rider

December Day

Healing Hands of Time

Darkness on the Face of the Earth

My Own Peculiar Way

Waltz Across Texas

Some Other World

Phases & Stages (Circles, Cycles and Scenes)

Time of the Preacher

It's Not Supposed to Be That Way

Summertime

Everything Is Beautiful (In It's Own Way)

Take It To the Limit

How Do You Feel About Foolin' Around?

I'm Movin' On

Slow Movin' Outlaw

Are There Any More Real Cowboys?

They All Went to Mexico

Texas On a Saturday Night

Heartland

Nobody Slides, My Friend

Little Old Fashioned Karma

Harbor Lights

Without a Song

Good Time Charlie's Got the Blues

Who'll Buy My Memories?

When I Dream

There Is No Easy Way (But There's a Way)

Ole Buttermilk Sky

A Horse Called Music

Nothing I Can Do About It Now

Is the Better Part Over?

Ain't Necessarily So

Kind of shocking. If you're a Willie Nelson fan, you probably found a good disc's worth of must-have classics, and that's my point. Why didn't they make this set a five-disc box and include all of the classics in his catalog? Then, anyone looking for a primer to Willie's career would have the entire canon available for a single purchase.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is a great collection on its own merits, and it is still probably the best place to start for any newcomer. It's also a good compilation, even if you have all of the previously mentioned sets, because it does a great job of finding classic rarities and lesser-known gems. It also does an excellent job of summing up the later part of Willie's career, which has been, honestly, pretty uneven. But as a complete career overview, it's still disappointing.

If you don't own anything by Willie Nelson, I would advise you to buy this set first, but just realize that there's still a lot of great material out there. In addition to the previous song list, there are several albums that are classics in and of themselves ("Yesterday's Wine," "Shotgun Willie," "Phases & Stages," "Red Headed Stranger," "Stardust," and latter-day cult classic "Spirit" being possibly the most essential ones). Maybe one day somebody will get it right. And who knows? If Willie Nelson has a late-career renaissance like Bob Dylan, maybe by then it will need a sixth disc. For right now, though, this will have to do.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A worthy box set for Willie's 75th anniversary, April 15, 2008

By 

DJ Joe Sixpack (...in Middle America) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: One Hell Of a Ride (4-CD Box Set) (Audio CD)

To be sure, there's no shortage of Willie Nelson best-ofs out there, but this far-flung 4-CD set is a real doozy. It draws on Willie's work from a number of labels, including former rivals RCA and Columbia (now both part of Sony-BMG) as well as early '60s recordings on Liberty (owned by EMI), a couple of tracks from his lone mid-period album for Atlantic and various offerings on Universal over the last ten years.

It's a fitting tribute to Nelson, a prolific trendsetter and stubborn iconoclast whose seventy-fifth birthday coincides with the album's release. The collection starts out with a prehistoric demo that Willie made around 1954 or '55, back before his early success as the songwriter of hits such as "Crazy" and "Nite Life..." Even back then, working in the real hillbilly days when Nashville was only beginning to consolidate its power as the center of a new country music industry, Willie had an odd, exceptional air about him. His phrasing was already a little bit weird and his sense of rhythm was kinda cock-eyed. This collection moves from early hillbilly gems such as "No Place For Me" (an indie single that Willie self-released back in 1957), into his early work for RCA, a period that yields several off-the-radar gems, even though Nelson found the Nashville studio system creatively frustrating...

The playlists of this four CD set are not organized in strictly chronological order -- there's a much-welcomed, intelligently thought-out aesthetic at play, which can pair a song from one era with another that compliments it in interesting ways. The big hits are there (although not all of them) but they are sandwiched between less well-known material that more fully illuminates Nelson's creative trajectories. After the "outlaw" era, Discs Three and Four take us into Willie's years of superstardom, and his long run of reinterpreting old standards and teaming up with old pals and heroes, first on a series of duet albums, and then on the Highwaymen records. It's all dutifully sampled, although nothing touches the transcendent beauty of "Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain," which is one of the most brilliant works of country revivalism, and possibly Nelson's finest moment as a song stylist: even with all the other great songs included here, that's the one song that I find myself playing over and over again, even after all these years.

The packaging is pretty cool, too -- it's eco-friendly, with soft cardboard slipcases instead of plastic trays, so it may feel a little unusual at first... But the real treat is the glossy booklet, which has a wealth of super-groovy photographs taken at all stages of Nelson's career, as well as pictures of all of his LPs ever released, which is also pretty neat.

Happy Birthday, Willie!! Thanks for all the great gifts! (DJ Joe Sixpack, Slipcue Music Reviews)

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Stop The Nit Pickin', April 21, 2008

By 

Shell-Zee (Long Island, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: One Hell Of a Ride (4-CD Box Set) (Audio CD)

Come on stop nit pickin'. Seems like everyone has his or her favorite song that's not included on this collection. The problem is Willie has been so prolific for the past twenty five years, that it would be impossible to satisfy everyone even if they had made this a five or six disc collection. All I know is this is a great collection and I'm delighted to find one hundred of Willie's greatest songs all in one collection.

With that said I would like to see a few of Willie's great albums like "Angel Eyes", "Without A Song", "Islands In The Sea" and the "Songwriter" soundtrack (with Kris Kristofferson) reissued. Or maybe Atlantic Records would have the good sense to reissue their terrific three disc collection "Classic & Unreleased". Then again I guess that's a bit of nit pickin' on my part.