This came out in 2004 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
Over the past few years, Willie Nelson has made a blues album, a kids’ album, and umpteen self-congratulatory live, duet and tribute discs with an endless string of guests. With It Always Will Be, though, he’s made another kind of album — one you might want to hear more than once.
On this refreshing 14-song outing, the Red-Headed Stranger returns to familiar form, assembling and delivering a strong slate of original songs and a few covers. Willie dishes up some honky-tonk frivolity on I Didn’t Come Here (And I Ain’t Leavin’), gently unwraps the simply pretty balladry of the title cut, claims Tom Waits’ Picture In A Frame as his own, gets jazzy on a couple of cuts (including a duet with Norah Jones), shares a slice of bittersweet heartache with Lucinda Williams and even makes a Toby Keith song sound good.
And by the end of it, he’s made his strongest, least forced album since 1998’s Teatro. Not that that’s not saying much, of course.
