
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich looks at the other big hit off Willie and Merle Haggard’s classic 1983 Pancho & Lefty album, “Reasons to Quit.” It’s a classic Haggard drinking song, but a little more pensive than most, and Amanda reframes it—and really, all of Pancho & Lefty—as an example of what she calls the Outlaw’s Conundrum, i.e. what’s an old rebel to do when the time comes to settle down? Then we get into the all-star band that backed Willie and Merle on the record and, in a particularly insightful interlude, the specific ways sad songs can help people when life feels like too much to bear.
By John Spong4.6
875875 ratings
New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich looks at the other big hit off Willie and Merle Haggard’s classic 1983 Pancho & Lefty album, “Reasons to Quit.” It’s a classic Haggard drinking song, but a little more pensive than most, and Amanda reframes it—and really, all of Pancho & Lefty—as an example of what she calls the Outlaw’s Conundrum, i.e. what’s an old rebel to do when the time comes to settle down? Then we get into the all-star band that backed Willie and Merle on the record and, in a particularly insightful interlude, the specific ways sad songs can help people when life feels like too much to bear.

38,430 Listeners

6,881 Listeners

28,974 Listeners

8,127 Listeners

1,973 Listeners

113,121 Listeners

4,120 Listeners

140 Listeners

52 Listeners

112 Listeners

3,198 Listeners

351 Listeners

15 Listeners

15 Listeners

393 Listeners

218 Listeners

58,365 Listeners

6,547 Listeners

16,525 Listeners

1,600 Listeners

532 Listeners

602 Listeners