Ethan Hawke on "Too Sick To Pray"
One by Willie
John Spong
4.6 • 898 Ratings
🗓️ 15 June 2022
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, four-time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke—who in addition to being an acclaimed actor, writer, and director happens also to be a hardcore Willie nerd—discusses “Too Sick to Pray,” a meditative hymn from Willie’s beautiful, pin-drop quiet 1996 album, Spirit. Ethan says the song and album were touchstones for him when he first became a father in the late 90s, before going on to describe the way Willie’s music connected him with his own dad as a kid, peppering his memories with digressions on Bob Dylan, Henri Matisse, Johnny Cash, Dead Poets Society...and earlobes. Oh and he also explains why he thinks a Willie Nelson biopic has to be set in the here and now.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Texas Monthly. |
| 0:07.0 | Hey there, I'm John Spong with Texas Monthly Magazine, and this is One by Willie, a podcast in which I talk each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie's song that they |
| 0:22.1 | really love. This week, we visit with four-time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawke, who will talk about |
| 0:27.9 | Willie's song Too Sick to Pray. You probably know Ethan as a movie star, stage actor, director, |
| 0:34.4 | and writer, but he also happens to be one of the most serious students of Willie Nelson |
| 0:38.8 | that I've ever talked to. So he's going to talk not just about how Willie songs tied him to his |
| 0:43.3 | dad when he was a kid, but how the deep spiritual undertones of Too Sick to Pray and the album |
| 0:49.1 | that it first appeared on, Spirit from 1996, shaped the way that Ethan has raised his own family. |
| 0:56.7 | And sprinkled in will be digressions on Bob Dylan, Matisse, Johnny Cash, the Dead Poets Society, |
| 1:03.8 | and earlobes. |
| 1:05.1 | Owen, he'll also describe how he'd make a Willie biopic and why he'd said it not during |
| 1:09.9 | Willie's struggles in Nashville in the 60s |
| 1:11.9 | or his breakthrough in Austin in the 70s, but in the right here and now. So let's do it. |
| 1:18.0 | It's hard. So tell me about Too Sick to Pray. |
| 1:42.1 | Well, the thing is about Too Sick to Pray is that whole album spirit. |
| 1:47.8 | I don't know. |
| 1:49.1 | It's right up there on the Willie Nelson top five as I'm concerned as far as the most |
| 1:55.4 | representative of the best that Willie Nelson has to offer. |
| 1:59.8 | I mean, nobody else in the world would make red-headed stranger, |
| 2:03.6 | Teatro, or Spirit. |
| 2:05.6 | I mean, they're just quintessentially something. |
| 2:09.6 | You know, one of my favorite Bob Dylan quotes is somebody asked him |
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