Just blowin’ smoke.
Kacey Musgraves and Willie Nelson go way back, and around 2015, she went on tour with the living legend (one of her first… not too shabby). And in an appearance on The Howard Stern Show in promotion of her recent fifth studio album Deeper Well this week, Kacey told some great stories about her friend and country music icon.
She explained that she actually has a framed joint that he rolled for her on one of her first tours, which she smoked half of and (smartly) decided to keep it as a token of accomplishment for getting to be on tour with her musical hero:
“That’s in my house, on a shelf. He like twisted one up for us, he was like, ‘Now you kids enjoy this on the road.’ And so we all smoked half of it with him, and we kinda put it out and I was like I’m saving that…
I’ve smoked with Willie a lot. We were on tour together, and actually, it was early on, it was such an insane tour. It was me, and then Alison Krauss and Willie Nelson. Insane line-up, it was so cool.
It was all outdoor wineries and amphitheater and stuff back then, it was one of my first tours. I was like, this is crazy. He’s very generous with his stash.”
Kacey also went on to talk about how she ended up recording “Are You Sure” with Willie, which is a song originally written by Willie and Buddy Emmons and first released by Ray Price in 1963. He and Kacey turned it into a duet for her iconic 2015 Pageant Material album.
Kacey says she was so high that she “broke through the space fabric,” which I think definitely helped her work up the courage to even bring the song up to him to begin with (not that she was expecting anything more than just to talk about how much she loved it).
It’s definitely a deep cut, but Kacey didn’t even half to ask Willie to record it with her… he offered. What a legend:
“We went up to the bus, I was like so high I broke through the space fabric. I was like, I’m bot even here anymore. Alison Krauss was on the bus, Dan Tyminski, all these amazing players. And I was like ‘Hey, Willie, do you ever do that song ‘Are You Sure?’
And he goes, ‘Are you sure this is where you wanna be?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, that song.’ He’s like, ‘Do you wanna record it? And I was like, ‘Uh, okay.’ And he’s like, ‘Alright, well I’ll sing ti with you.’
And I don’t know, out of a cloud of smoke, I don’t know where it came from, he just pulls his guitar out of nowhere and just starts strumming it. And I was geeking out so hard.”
They filmed the music video for “Are You Sure” in Austin, Texas, and as you can imagine, Kacey says it was “the coolest day ever”:
“But yeah, we ended up recording that one together. We got to film a video for that one, my little sister was one of the directors on that and we shot it in Austin, Texas.
And I’ll never forget it, we did a tequila shot, I got to pick out what he was wearing, he had his braids and fringe and rhinestone on and it was the coolest day ever.
I love Willie, his whole family they’re so incredible. He feels like a grandfather figure to me or something.”
To have been a fly on the wall for all of this… you can check out Kacey telling the story on Howard Stern below.
And if you’ve never heard their reworked version of the song, you’re sorely missing out and it’s high time (pun very much intended) to change that:
