Spin Magazine - November 2001
#8 VARIOUS ARTISTS
Timeless

For most anyone raised on rock, country comes down as received religion-more a legend than a band, as the Flatlanders used to say. Even more than they gravitate to the genre's emotional directness, rockers fetishize the thrills, spills, and pills of one of pop's seminal outlaw images.

Hank Williams set the pace for hard luck and harder drinking in the early '50s, predicting "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive" while codifying country's mix of personal tragedy and communal spirituality. Williams' songs have lived full lives of their own by now, and the best contributions to Timeless heed the music as well as the myth. The highlights are a version of "I Can't Get You Off My Mind" by Bob Dylan, who sounds like he's been living as hard as Hank, and Beck's uncharacteristically direct take on "Your Cheatin' Heart," which forgoes irony (and engrams) for the spooky weirdness he tapped into before he started wearing suits. Sheryl Crow and Lucinda Williams are ill-advised trying to out-emote the master, but the only clunker comes from Hank III, whose blood seems to run thinner than Sean Lennon's.

Like Williams, Texas oil money heir Townes Van Zandt drank copiously, wrote clairvoyantly (releasing The Late Great Townes Van Zandt shy of his thirtieth birthday), and died tragically - 44 years to the New Year's Day after Williams. Gulp. Unlike Hank, Van Zandt wrote songs for others to sing; classics like "Pancho and Lefty" are as unforgiving as the Texas plains, as though he's waiting for a more sentimental type to soften his hard truths with a sweeter voice. That frees most of the performers on Poet to flesh out his words instead of trying to inhabit his despondency, so Robert Earl Keen fills "Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold" with knowing sadness, and Steve Earle even gives "Two Girls" some sass. But it's Emmylou Harris who comes closest to Van Zandt's vision, filling the spaces on "Snake Song" with an echoing emptiness all her own. Just the way he liked it.
ROBERT LEVINE