For his latest book, Geoffrey Himes, that longtime longbeard of the Baltimore music scene, took on the labor of chronicling and critiquing each of the 152 solo and collaborative albums from the long career of the legendary Willie Nelson.

The result is a 228-page compilation called “Willie Nelson: All The Albums” (Motorbooks) out next week.

Listening to so much Willie, giving his work context and writing concise opinions about each album on the publisher’s deadline would be daunting for anyone, even a veteran music critic like Himes.

But maybe less so when you personally own 80% of the recordings.

“When we agreed on a format for the book, I went through my shelves and found that I already owned 120 of the [Nelson albums],” says Himes, whose Willie collection includes vinyl and CDs dating back to the 1970s.

“Being a compulsive record collector pays off.”

It also helps that Himes had reviewed many of the albums during his own prolific career as a critic and feature writer for numerous newspapers – The Baltimore Sun back in the day, and The Washington Post for decades – and magazines, including Rolling Stone, DownBeat and Smithsonian.

With his Gandalfian beard, Geoffrey Himes has been a familiar figure on the Maryland music scene since he landed in Baltimore a half-century ago.

And not only as a critic and feature writer. He’s also a songwriter, performer and impresario.

In 1991, he established Roots Cafe Baltimore to promote a dance/concerts series inside St. John’s United Methodist Church in Charles Village. In 2008, Himes shifted focus to a full singer-songwriter series at the bygone El Rancho Grande in Hampden. A few years later, Roots Cafe became a regular feature of the live performances (in person and streaming) at An Die Musik on North Charles Street.

Just recently, Himes and fellow musician Seth Kibel performed “I’m A Poe Boy in a Poe Town,” original songs and instrumentals in a tribute to Edgar Alan Poe, at An Die Musik.

Marriage, Examined

The Willie Nelson project took seven months to finish.

“All The Albums” is far from the first book about the 92-year-old singer, who recently performed at Merriweather Post Pavillion in Columbia on the “Outlaw Music Festival” tour with Bob Dylan and Sheryl Crow.

There’s a whole library shelf of Willie books – “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” is one – and that includes a 2008 biography, “An Epic Life,” by a Himes’ friend, Joe Nick Patoski.

Willie contributed to two autobiographies, and he’s been the subject of thousands of news and feature stories through his years as a performer and social activist.

Himes wanted “All The Albums” to be the definitive biography of his music.

The book is smartly organized and artistically designed, following Willie’s career as a solo performer from his clean-cut country days to his “outlaw” years and into his collaborations with Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, Dolly Parton, Merle Haggard, Ray Charles and Nora Jones.

The Baltimore-based critic, songwriter and performer follows Nelson’s career from his clean-cut country days to his outlaw years.

Each album gets Himes’ review and his grade.

He gives an A-plus to eight of Willie’s 132 stand-alone albums, starting with “Phases and Stages” (1974), which “contains Nelson’s finest writing about country music’s most ubiquitous theme: marriage.”

Six of the songs are from a wife’s perspective, six from a husband’s. “Songs such as ‘Pick Up The Tempo,’ ‘Bloody Mary Morning,’ and ‘It’s Not Supposed To Be This Way’ have become standards,” Himes notes, “because they capture the sound of spouses under stress with such unerring accuracy.”

Himes’ previous book, published just last year, addressed an unchartered aspect of the marriage theme in country music.

“In-Law Country: How Emmylou Harris, Rosanne Cash and Their Circle Fashioned a New Kind of Country Music: 1968-1985,” examined musicians married to other performers or their producers and how their songs about relationships reflected a new age of “male/female equality rather than hierarchy.” The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum published the book.

Living with Loss

Willie Nelson, born in Texas in 1933, has been married four times and is the father of eight children. He had plenty of rough experiences to inform the many songs he wrote, especially in the 1970s when, with albums such as “Shotgun Willie,” “Red-Headed Stranger” and “Stardust,” he broke from Nashville and became an international sensation.

“Many of us are drawn to him for his charismatic persona: the dope-smoking Zen master who shrugs off industry formulas and legal troubles with equanimity,” Himes writes. “But you can find guys like that in bars and racetracks all over America. What makes us single out Nelson for attention is the music.”

The songs resonate with listeners on an intimate level, says Himes, by confirming – and comforting us – that life’s trials are commonly experienced.

“You can find guys like that in bars and racetracks all over America. What makes us single out Nelson is the music.”

“A lot of the songs are basically variations on the same theme, that is how do you survive loss – usually romantic loss, or it could be the death of somebody, or, you know, career setbacks,” Himes says at his home in Baltimore.

“And he cooks up all these different scenarios to describe it, but it’s always the same thing: You have to acknowledge how painful it is, but you have to sort of retain your dignity and move on,” Himes continues. “Once I started thinking about it that way, it was amazing how many songs sort of fit that template.”

“That’s one of the neatest tricks in pop music, to be able to sound vulnerable and dignified at the same time,” he adds. “You can be honest about your emotions without whining.”

Superb Albums

The other A-plus albums on Himes’ list range across more than 40 years, from “Phases and Stages” in 1974 to “Last Man Standing,” released in 2018, when Willie was 85.

Of the latter, Himes writes: “In these songs about old age and death, the musicians help Nelson reach the best singing of his – or anyone’s – post-eighty-year-old career.”

Himes’ review of an all-instrumental Willie album from 1999, “Night and Day,” notes his skills with a guitar and his long history of indulging in different musical styles.

“He’s always had this jazz side to him, and it’s an old fashioned kind of jazz,” Himes says. “It’s all Frank Sinatra and Count Basie and that kind of stuff. He’s done a lot of American songbook stuff as well.

“When I interviewed him once, he said, ‘Yeah, my favorite singer is Frank Sinatra.’”

“When I interviewed him once, he said, ‘Yeah, my favorite singer is Frank Sinatra.’ Makes a lot of sense when you think about it. There’s always been that swing in his guitar playing, and his vocal phrasing, of course, is very unorthodox.

“I think that’s one point of the book: The genius of him is that he has a strong jazz influence, but it’s always in the background. The foreground is sort of this country song that you can get the gist of, and then in the solos and the phrasing, there’s this sort of jazz flavoring that makes it seem unusual without putting people off. It makes it accessible to his regular audience.”

Himes gives “Night and Day” a B-plus. There are many such grades throughout his review of the Nelson canon, and a bunch of A-minuses, too.

And Some Cheesy Fails

There are also some Ds, and three Fs, including one for Willie’s 2005 album, “Countryman,” an attempt at reggae that Himes deems a fiasco.

“You have to salute him for trying it,” he writes, “but the cheesy arrangements, the half-hearted transformations of Nelson, Johnny Cash and Jimmy Cliff songs; the stiff approximations of a reggae beat; and the uneasy mix of musicians from Jamaica, Texas and Michigan make this one barely listenable.”

But, of course, the vast majority of recordings are eminently listenable, including music from “Songwriter,” one of 30 movies in which Willie appeared.

In June, Geoffrey Himes moved into podcasting about Americana music with “Hard Rain & Pink Cadillacs” cohosted on Substack with Mark Finkelpearl, a fellow music journalist.

He also collaborated on “Fables from Italy and Beyond,” a book of poems with Grace Cavalieri, appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland in 2019.

His next music will take Himes into a genre not altogether distant from outlaw country: Punk.