Spiritual Stocktaking

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PERFORMER: WILLIE NELSON

ALBUM: ACROSS THE BORDERLINE

LABEL: COLUMBIA

THE BOTTOM LINE: A sort of musical road movie chronicles the new coming of age of a middle-aged crazy.

Don't be so surprised. Willie Nelson's gone and grown up -- but he's done that before. From Nashville tunesmith to Austin outlaw, country singer to pop star, counterculture plaything to movie personality, conscience of Farm Aid to IRS whipping boy, he's remained a maverick without portfolio or apology. The only consistent quality about him has been his unpredictability.

You couldn't even count on his music to be congruous with much he'd done before, either in tone or quality. He reveled in irresolution, letting himself drift with the fates -- or so it seemed. One of the many wonders of Across the Borderline is Nelson's paean to entropy, Still Is Still Moving to Me, which begins, "I swim like a fish in the sea all the time/ But if that's what it takes to be free I don't mind/ Still is still moving to me." But, as this album demonstrates, what might be running in place for anyone else is, on the Nelson speedometer, past the red line and nearly off the scale. With the careful attention of producer Don Was, he has made a record in the time-honed cool heroic style: with no apparent effort or ambition. A great album? Sure, partner. No sweat.

What Nelson and Was have done is pick 14 splendid songs by some peerless songwriters -- including Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon and Willie himself -- and weave them into a subtly colored spiritual stocktaking, a sort of internal monologue that's like a road movie set to music. It's one measure of their singular achievement that disparate as their sources may be, they all focus finely on Nelson's restless spirit. Across the Borderline is as achingly, bracingly personal as any record he's made since the seminal Red Headed Stranger.

Stranger was an evocation of the outlaw tradition, a challenge to the sappy sentiment and popular mechanics of conventional country music. Across the Borderline breaks similar ground, only the raw material it uses is not myth. Nelson's version of the title track is a characteristic redrafting: a song about illegal refugees widens into a memorable evocation of rootlessness, helplessness and drift. Written by Ry Cooder, John Hiatt and James Dickinson for a film sound track, Across the Borderline has become a contemporary classic, sung by, among others, Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. But no one has caught so well as Nelson the melancholy and desperation at the heart of the song, or conveyed it with such glancing delicacy.

The album is full of such congenial collaborations and astonishments: Nelson with Sinead O'Connor on Peter Gabriel's anthem of tentative renewal, Don't Give Up; Nelson and Bonnie Raitt making Getting Over You into a dialogue of broken hearts; Dylan co-writing and singing with Nelson on a fine new song, Heartland, which has the aura and impact of a Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl ballad; Nelson singing on his own, cutting loose on a joyous Willie Dixon blues and having a great time visiting Simon's Graceland.