One of the most emotionally complex songs Beck has written is “Lost Cause,” which is sadder than your average breakup song because it’s more about resignation than remorse. The lyrics echo the adage that the divorce happens long before the divorce. Beck was 32 years old when the song came out two years after he discovered his fiancée was cheating on him (with a member of a band called Whiskey Biscuit), and he practically sighs every lyric: “I’m tired of fighting, fighting for a lost cause.”
Willie Nelson, age 91, sighs even deeper during his reading of the song as if to say, “Beck, you wanna hear about tired? I’ll tell you about ‘tired of fighting.’” His voice quivers, the acoustic guitars are nimble, and the cinematic strings shimmer like a diaphanous veil between earth and heaven. What is he fighting for anyway? On Nelson’s “Lost Cause,” which will appear on his upcoming, mortality-obsessed Last Leaf on the Tree album (out Nov. 1), the emotion culminates on the bridge: “No one laughin’ at your back now/No one standing at your door,” he sings to his betrayer. “Is that what you thought love was for?”
“This one’s really like a country song in a way,” Nelson’s son, Micah, who produced the album, said in a statement. “It’s this relationship gone south, and just reconciling with all that. It’s a very clear narrative country song, but it’s kind of psychedelic, too.”
“Willie’s songs have been my companions for most of my life,” Beck said. “I’ve been lucky to get to hang out and sing with him on several occasions over the years. There’s no one like him in music and it’s the greatest honor to have him record this song.”
Nelson’s “Lost Cause” feels profound as he breathes new life in a dying moment. The recording recalls the way Johnny Cash found new despair in Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” turning Trent Reznor’s heroin horror show into a profound statement on grief and feeling like the last man standing. But Nelson’s song comes with the knowledge that he is the last man standing, especially following the recent death of fellow Highwayman Kris Kristofferson. And that’s the point of the recording (which was made before Kristofferson’s death). Micah has said that the through-line throughout the album is “facing death with grace.”
This theme echoes throughout the other songs from the album that have come out so far: Tom Waits’ “Last Leaf” and Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” But “Lost Cause” cuts deeper. Who’s to say how some of the other covers, Nina Simone’s religious and elegiac “Come Ye” and Warren Zevon’s tender “Keep Me in Your Heart,” will feel when those come out next week.