Willie Nelson wanted to do it his way.
With full creative control from Columbia Records, Willie had to get as far away from Nashville as he could to record his eighteenth studio album. He had a concept album in his sights about a preacher who kills his wife and her lover and seeks redemption after the vengeful act. It wasn’t a story that Willie could tell via Nashville’s “Countrypolitan,” a pop-infused commercially-oriented sound popularized by artists such as George Jones.
Willie picked Autumn Sound Studios in Garland in 1974 to make it. It was reportedly the first 24-track studio in Texas, and he’d already gathered the songs that he felt would tell the preacher’s story such as Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” “I thought the music reflected what I was feeling at the time, what I was feeling people wanted to hear,” he told the Library of Congress in 2016. “I had been doing some of the [album’s] material at my shows and I knew the reaction I was getting to it.”…