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One by a Willie is produced and distributed by PRX

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with additional generous support from Toccova's Boots.

Hey there, I'm John Spong, and this is One by Willie, a podcast in which I talk

each week to one notable Willie Nelson fan about one Willie song that they really love.

This week, we talked to CNN political contributor Paul Begala,

who in addition to having been an architect of Bill Clinton's two successful presidential campaigns in the 1990s,

also happens to be a diehard Willie nerd going back to his college days in Austin in the late 1970s.

And he'll be a little bit of all three of those things when he talks about a deep cut off of Willie's 1993 masterpiece across the borderline, Heartland.

That song, a duet and co-write with Bob Dylan, was inspired by the American Farm Crisis of the 1980s,

tragic events that Bagala saw firsthand as he traveled the country on various campaigns,

and it gets him musing on what he considers one of the keys to Willie's life and music, empathy.

From there, he'll describe his 50 years of fandom,

a preternaturally kind turn that Willie did for his mom,

and something that Bagala, the Polysci professor, calls interactional synchrony, with brief cameos by Parliament Funkadelic, Kurt Vonnegut, and Nelson Mandela.

...