The room › Artists › Willie Nelson
Where to start with Willie Nelson
Start with Blue Skies — Stardust, 1978. That is the track sitting closest to the centre of all 12 Willie Nelson tracks in Zubissou Sounds — a listening room of 15,847 tracks placed one at a time by hand, not an algorithm.
This page is not a discography and not a ranking. It describes exactly one thing: the 12 Willie Nelson tracks that one person put in one room, and where they sit relative to each other. The starting point above is chosen by a rule you can check — of the 12 tracks, it is the one nearest the average position on the four knobs the room runs on, and where two sit equally close the one on a named record wins. Nothing here calls any record better than any other.
The collection leans hard on one record: 10 of the 12 tracks come from Stardust alone.
The years need a caveat: 12 of 12 dated tracks land in the 1970s and come from 2 records, while the rest come from elsewhere — the mark of a reissue carrying its own date rather than the music's. Read the year column below as the date on the copy in this room, not the date the music arrived in the world.
The mood knob swings 51 points across these tracks, the widest of the four — it is the axis this artist actually travels along in this room.
Three ways in
The one track, if you only play one
Blue Skies — Stardust, 1978. Of the 12 Willie Nelson tracks here, this one sits closest to the average of all of them across the four knobs the room runs on. It is the least surprising thing in the collection, which is exactly what an entry point should be.
If you want the melancholy end
Georgia On My Mind — Stardust, 1978. The lowest mood reading of any Willie Nelson track in the room (11 out of 100). This is as far towards melancholy as the collection goes.
If you want the euphoric end
Stardust — Stardust, 1978. The highest mood reading here, at 62 out of 100 — a 51-point swing across the collection towards euphoric.
Where Willie Nelson sits in the room
Zubissou Sounds does not have playlists or genres you click. It has knobs. Every track carries a position on each one, set by hand when the track was added, and you find music by setting the room to a state rather than by searching for a name. These are Willie Nelson's average coordinates and the range they cover.
All four run 0–100. They are placed by a person, not derived from audio analysis or from any streaming service's feature data.
What is here, record by record
| Album | Year | Tracks |
|---|---|---|
| Stardust | 1978 | 10 |
| Shotgun Willie | 1973 | 2 |
Every Willie Nelson track in the room
| Track | Album | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Local Memory | Shotgun Willie | 1973 |
| Whiskey River | Shotgun Willie | 1973 |
| All of Me | Stardust | 1978 |
| Blue Skies | Stardust | 1978 |
| Don't Get Around Much Anymore | Stardust | 1978 |
| Georgia On My Mind | Stardust | 1978 |
| Moonlight In Vermont | Stardust | 1978 |
| On the Sunny Side of the Street | Stardust | 1978 |
| September Song | Stardust | 1978 |
| Someone to Watch Over Me | Stardust | 1978 |
| Stardust | Stardust | 1978 |
| Unchained Melody | Stardust | 1978 |
Near neighbours in this room
These are the artists whose average knob position sits nearest to Willie Nelson's in this room. It is a coordinate match, not a claim that they sound alike.
- Where to start with Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes — jazz, 14 tracks
- Where to start with Gregory Uhlmann, Josh Johnson, Sam Wilkes — jazz, 11 tracks
- Where to start with Keith Jarrett — jazz, 13 tracks
What the open databases say
MusicBrainz lists Willie Nelson as a solo artist, from Abbott, the United States and born in 1933. Its contributors tag the artist country, outlaw country, country pop, blues and singer-songwriter. These are the open database's facts, not mine — you can check them against the MusicBrainz entry.
Questions
How many Willie Nelson tracks are in Zubissou Sounds?
There are 12, across 2 albums. 12 of them carry a date, running from 1973 to 1978. That is the whole of what this room holds — it is one person's collection, not a discography.
Is this a best-of, or a ranking?
No. Nothing here is ranked and no track is called better than another. The starting point is picked by arithmetic — the track closest to the centre of all the others on four measured axes — and the rule is printed above so you can disagree with it.
Where do the knob numbers come from?
They are set by hand, one track at a time, by the person who added the track. They are not audio analysis and not a Spotify feature. Mood, energy, density and the head/body balance each run 0 to 100. All 12 of these tracks have been read individually — nothing on this page is running on a default.
Can I listen to these here?
Not yet from this page. Zubissou Sounds is in private beta — the room itself plays through Spotify, and 12 of these 12 tracks are matched to a Spotify ID and ready to play the moment you are in. The waitlist form is at the bottom of this page.