‘One By Willie’ podcast debuts seventh season with another star-studded lineup of guests

What is it about Willie Nelson? Six seasons into his hit podcast, award-winning music journalist John Spong is still finding new answers.

John’s show, One By Willie, has done something almost unheard of elsewhere: Convincing an amazing range of artists and pop culture icons to sit down and talk about a single Willie Nelson song that changed them or affected them somehow.

Norah Jones, Whoopi Goldberg, Bonnie Raitt, Brene Brown… All of them have been drawn in by one man’s music and joined the show. Season seven kicks off today with Kenny Chesney.

Spong joined the Standard to talk about the new season. Listen to the interview in the player above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Seems like every time there’s a Willie story, we’re giving you a call, John. What is your fascination with Willie Nelson? Where does that come from?

John Spong: I grew up in Austin. I grew on the music. I genuinely remember the first time. It’s when Willie breaks with “Red Headed Stranger” in ’75.

I’m not paying attention, I’m eight years old, but I remember the way my dad talked — who had never been a Willie fan, he wasn’t from Texas — the way he talked about “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and the way that song affected him when I was a kid, and it’s like, oh, this is something I’m gonna need to pay attention to going forward.

And so going forward, growing up in Austin, was at the Opry House all the time when Willie was playing shows there and just seeing lots of Willie there, seeing them at Austin City Limits tapings when it was real easy to get a ticket back in the good old days. And the music always mattered to me a lot.

But then what happened when I was at Texas Monthly is I started being asked to write about it.

Yeah, you became the de-facto Willie Nelson correspondent, I guess.

Daniel Vaughn is the barbecue editor and they called me the Willie Nelson editor, and that was a real point of pride.

Yeah, I would imagine it would be for just about anyone.

But the cool thing was, when I started doing all the research, there’s so many Willie records that you are completely excused to quit paying attention. If someone says, “I feel like I have all the Willie I need,” they are probably accurate.

But what I found was when you did the digging, every single one of those records — he’s at 155 albums now — every one of these records has a genuinely wonderful story about it, almost always about a relationship, people that matter to him.

And so as that happened, it’s not even a matter of being a super fan or a stan or anything like that. It’s really great stories to get to tell and it informs every lesson for me.

So where did this podcast idea come from?

At Texas Monthly, in the fall of 2019, I was asked to head up two huge Willie projects. We did an online ranking and review of all of his albums. And so the first step was to find them all. And at that point he was at 143. And so we put that together.

And then the other thing was to do a special issue of all the great archival stuff that we had done, because Texas Monthly kind of started right about the time Willie got to Austin. A lot of those stories were in there, but plus a bunch of new stuff we did.

And then, of course, that’s like, what if we do a podcast? Dolly Parton’s America was such a huge deal at that point. We wanted to do something like that, but Willie was working on a documentary about his own life with some people. And so we decided, instead of going that route, we would do this thing: One fan — one notable fan, didn’t have to be a musician — one song that meant a lot to them and then just follow them wherever the conversation went.

Love that. And, in fact, it’s interesting that the way this is set up, yeah, sure, you learn a lot about Willie Nelson and you can come for the Willie but you stick around and you’re really learning about the person you’re talking to.

Yeah, and you mentioned Whoopi a second ago, and so one slight correction there, you said something about how I’ve been able to get these people to come on the show. No, it’s Willie, man. You tell them we’re doing something to celebrate Willie, and they line up.

And so, in fact, what happened was Nick Offerman’s publicist reached out and said, “can Nick please be on the show?” And I was like, uh-huh. She knows everybody, especially in that comedy world, so I was like… Do you by chance have an email address on Whoopi Goldberg?” And she said, “uh-huh.” But where it gets wonderful is I don’t know what I’m going to talk to Whoopi Goldberg about having to do with Willie.

But you just let the spirit move y’all.

Well, and she talked about how her mom played standards in the house growing up. It’s that thing, it always gets to relationships and it gets to families. And so when Whoopi is a little girl, her mom is singing “Stardust” in the house.

And so she said two things that really killed me. One, she said she was a single mom in San Diego before anybody knew who she was, and she was working in the house doing something, and she heard this version of “Stardust” coming through the window that she had never heard before, and so she went next door and knocked on the door, and I said, “wait a minute, what do you mean?”

She said, “well the windows are open, it’s San Diego, it’s nice weather year-around. So I was hearing it from the house next door.”

I said “so you just went and knocked?” She said “yeah.” I said “did you know that person?”

That’s amazing.

And she said, “what are we listening to?” They said, this is “Willie Nelson’s version of ‘Stardust.'”

And she says, “can I come in and listen with you?”

But then she finishes saying that “when I hear that now, my mother and my brother are both dead. But when I heard that song, I feel like I’m sitting in a cloud with them listening to Willie records.”

That’s beautiful.

It’s like that every time. It’s so great.

I was taking a look at the lineup for this season. You’ve got Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, country legend Bill Anderson, of course. But the debut episode for this year, Kenny Chesney, I want to hear him talking here on the podcast. This is Kenny Chesney talking about the secret sauce that makes Willie’s music so special, let’s listen.

Kenny Chesney [in recording]: I’ve been making records now for 30-some-odd years, right? Simplicity is the hardest thing to do in the studio. When you listen to that, the track is really simple, but wow, I mean, it’s great. Willie’s voice is the secret sauce to all of that because Willie’s voice led the track. The track didn’t lead the voice.

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That’s a really interesting observation.

With the music theory, I don’t understand it. I didn’t have any classes on it, but when these people can talk to me about it, like when we did one with Nora Jones and she was sitting at a keyboard and explained why this chord that Willie chose was such a surprise in 1962 with the way country music sounded back then, that’s amazing.

We did one Chris Shiflett, the guitarist from Foo Fighters. And he was explaining this guitar stuff to me, or attempting to, and I just kind of went, “you don’t have a guitar in the room with you, do you?” And so “of course I do.” And he pulled it up and suddenly he explained to me what an ascending chromatic walk-up was.

And what it is, is what Willie does on the way in and out of every guitar solo. And so to learn that stuff is just wonderful.

To be honest, again, it’s all about relationships. My dad was an Episcopal priest and he spent a lot of time in his Sunday school lessons in the pulpit talking about music and talking about Bruce Springsteen and John Coltrane and taking these spiritual messages from those places, and so it feels a little bit like doing that. It’s talking about the way these Willie songs and Willie’s example changed these people’s lives, you know?

And so it’s a little that too. It feels a bit like a way we with the show can make the world a better place.

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