Bruce Robison on What Willie Nelson’s Saddest Songs Taught Him About Songwriting, Love, and Life

Texas singer-songwriter Bruce Robison is famous for writing highly intelligent, richly detailed country songs—that happen also to be incredibly sad, like “Angry All the Time,” which was a number one hit for Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and “Travelin’ Soldier,” which scaled the same heights for the Chicks. He has always given credit for that tendency in his taste to his early immersion in Willie’s music, and one of the key records in that evolution was Willie’s 1974 concept album about the dissolution of a marriage, Phases and Stages.Bruce was an eight-year-old growing up in the rural, Hill Country town of Bandera when his parents brought Phases home, and the album—or specifically, the eight-track—quickly went into heavy rotation. For Bruce, whose mom and dad would…

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