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Charted: March 20, 1982

Rating: 3.342 (average of 6 ratings)

Genre: rock > country

Quotable: --

Album Tracks:

  1. Do Right Woman, Do Right Man
  2. Always on My Mind
  3. A Whiter Shade of Pale
  4. Let It Be Me
  5. Staring Each Other Down
  6. Bridger Over Troubled Water
  7. Old Fords and a Natural Stone
  8. Permanently Lonely
  9. Last Thing I Needed First Thing This Morning
  10. The Party’s Over

Sales:

sales in U.S. only 4 million
sales in U.K. only - estimated --
sales in all of Europe as determined by IFPI – click here to go to their site. --
sales worldwide - estimated 4 million

Peak:

peak on U.S. Billboard album chart 2
peak on U.K. album chart --

Singles/Hit Songs:

  • Always on My Mind (3/6/82) #5 US, #49 UK, #1 CW, #2 AC. Sales: 2 million. Airplay: 5 million
  • Let It Be Me (8/14/82) #40 US, #2 CW, #11 AC
  • Last Thing I Need First Thing This Morning (12/4/82) #2 CW

Awards:

American Music Awards – Album of the Year, pop/rock and country awards. Click to go to awards page. Country Music Association award for Album of the Year. Click to go to CMA site.

Always on My Mind
Willie Nelson
Review:
“Whether intentionally or not, the first album after a greatest-hits collection always raises the curtain on a new era, and in Willie Nelson’s case, the difference between the era recapped on 1981’s Greatest Hits (& Some That Will Be) and the one started with 1982’s Always on My Mind is startling. Throughout the late ‘70s, Nelson's freewheeling, organically eclectic music was not just the biggest thing in country, it was also some of its best, most adventurous music. Sometimes, it could fall a little flat, particularly when he kept replicating Stardust, but that was part of the charm of Nelson’s unpredictability” (Erlewine).

“With Always on My Mind, he teams with producer Chips Moman and embarks on a period of pernicious predictability, giving himself completely over to Moman, who moves him toward rock covers and adult contemporary pop with this record. At the time, it was a huge, huge hit – his biggest ever, actually, spending 22 weeks at the top of the country charts, selling over four million copies…and winning the CMA’s Album of the Year award” (Erlewine).

“Listening to it now, all that success seems undeserved since the album not only plays as the country-pop record Willie avoided making all these years, but by consisting primarily of familiar rock covers, it also plays as pandering to the mass audience he’s achieved. This is uniformly pleasant, but it's also rather straight-jacketed, hemmed in by Moman’s sterile, synth-heavy productions. With Always on My Mind and, to a lesser extent, Let It Be Me, it works because his production style suits the songs and Nelson sings well, but Do Right Woman, Do Right Man, A Whiter Shade of Pale (complete with vocals from Waylon Jennings), and Bridge Over Troubled Water are all flat readings, never showing the spark in either delivery or arrangement that marks Nelson as one of popular music’s great interpretive singers. Here, he sounds as he’s sleepwalking and turning out product for the first time in his career (at least the early Liberty recordings were a hungry attempt at hits). It may have been a hit, but years later, it clearly sounds like one of his worst records” (Erlewine).

Review Source(s):

Last updated November 20, 2008.