www.variety.com
by: Chris Willman
Forty-five years after “Honeysuckle Rose,” Amy Irving is set to release an album of her interpretations of 10 Willie Nelson songs — all picks suggested to her by Nelson, who also contributes a guitar solo to a song plucked from that film, “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.”
The forthcoming album, “Always Will Be,” is teased today with a title track that features a guest appearance by Amy Helm, a singer-songwriter in her own right and the daughter of Levon Helm. (Listen below.) Steve Earle is among the other featured artists on the album, due out April 25 on Queen of the Castle/Missing Piece Records. Irving will promote the new record with a handful of gigs, starting with a show May 4 at City Winery in New York City and another at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, NY on May 31.
“Always Will Be” is the second musical effort from Irving, known for her performances in films like “Crossing Delancey,” “Micki and Maude,” “The Fury” and “Carrie” as well as “Honeysuckle Rose.” It follows on the heels of the actor’s musical debut, 2023’s “Born in a Trunk.” She tells Variety what led her into the realm of music as well as the specifics of her salute to Nelson’s material, which includes songs from some of the lesser-covered corners of the country legend’s catalog.
“We stayed friends all these decades,” Irving says of Nelson. “We’ve been in each other’s life all this time. He’s one of my favorite people, one of my best friends. We are pretty much in communication now daily.” (Testament to that is a voice mail from Nelson that Irving threw into the title track.) Nelson sang on a track on her debut album two years ago, and following that collaboration, “Willie sent me a bunch of songs that he thought I should sing, and I chose the 10 that I wanted to sing.” In the tradition of Nelson’s concept albums of the 1970s, Irving shaped the material into what she considers a narrative sequence. “I kind of wanted a trajectory: You first meet someone, you go through life together, you lose them — I just thought I could tell that story with his songs.”
(In a press announcement, Nelson is quoted as saying, by way of explaining his instigation of the project, “I knew she’d probably do a lot of my songs and I knew they’d be good. You know, I’m just an old hustler.”)
Irving tells Variety that music is her focus right now — and perhaps it always will be, though she doesn’t have a trajectory laid out. “I’m thinking right now that unless something irresistible were to come along, which doesn’t seem to happen a lot for women of my age in the world of film, I think I like focusing on the music right now.,” she says. “And I’ll see where it takes me. I’m not sure there’ll be anything after this second album. The thing is, I don’t present myself as someone who says, ‘You must come here, listen to me sing!’”
Her son, Gabriel Barreto, produced the album and serves as her manager as well, and she credits him with introducing her to some of the Americana artists who are featured on the album. Another key collaborator whose contributions have invigorated her is her arranger and band leader, Jules David Bartkowski, a.k.a. Goolis. “What he does with songs that I present to him takes it to a different place,” Irving says. “And that’s what’s really been fascinating to me, to see how a country song could become a punk song — just watching the process. …
“I don’t have the ego necessary, I think, to sell myself as a singer. But I enjoy it, and, I know I can carry a tune, and I like to be able to use my acting chops to tell the stories. Getting up and singing in tune is not enough: I think you have to drop the whole song into your body and spit it out, having been processed through every element you have of your whole life experience. As an actor, that’s what you do with roles, and now I’m doing it with songs. It’s very gratifying and I feel I have something to offer in that way.”
As for the choice of Nelson material, “Some of the songs were personal to me,” Irving says. “For instance, ‘Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground’ was written for my character in ‘Honeysuckle Rose.’ And ‘If You Want Me to Love You I Will,’ he wrote for me to sing to him in the movie. That’s the one we’ve turned into a punk song! He wrote some songs when I was hanging with him, and then some of them are from his past. And I just chose the ones that I could relate to, and that I could drop into my body and spew it out a little differently, with the help of Goolis’ arrangements. For ‘I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes,’ Goolis (her band leader) said, ‘Let’s think of it as a French pop song.’ You just approach things a little differently, and the whole tone changes. I mean, Willie sings a lot of these songs a little bit more romantically, whereas we’ve gone to Brazilian carnival in one, we’ve gone to New Orleans for another. We’re kind of taking it and playing, and it’s a very interesting playground for me to be in.”
There’s lot’s more!