In some ways, Willie Nelson’s 1998 album Teatro is a companion to his previous effort, 1996’s Spirit. The two records don’t sound alike: Spirit is dry and direct, while Teatro is colorful and atmospheric. But there’s a stateliness to both of them that speaks to where Nelson was at in his mid-sixties. Anyone who imagined Nelson as some kind of purist whose best music was his simplest was laboring under a fantasy of what “simplicity” in recorded music means—or, at the every least, ignoring all the little instrumental interventions and structural trapdoors Nelson had built into landmark albums like Red Headed Stranger. Nelson’s music was minimal—but it was by no means simple. So while the most immediate aspect of Teatro is the heavy percussion, as well as the evocative, almost cinematic feel of Daniel Lanois’ production, the songs themselves could only have been written by Nelson. While listening, you might find yourself imagining lonesome afternoons on the ranch (“My Own Particular Way”), or catching stolen glances at a dusty borderlands bar (the Afro-Cuban-ish “I Never Cared For You”), or witnessing any variety of ghostly American scenes. Like Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind and Emmylou Harris’ Wrecking Ball—both produced by Lanois—the sound on Teatro feels retro but also fantastical, as saturated as a comic book or pulp Western. If Spirit played like a dreamlike look at the traditions that informed Nelson’s writing, Teatro did the same for his sound. He’d always been ambivalent about being called a country singer. And in a way, here was proof that he wasn’t—or at least that he was something else altogether: a singular, impossible-to-predict artist who could conjure a mood without a word.