Willie Nelson’s “Something You Get Through,” the quiet waltz at the heart of his 2018 album Last Man Standing, began in a few seconds, with one sentence he said to a grieving woman on his tour bus in Austin. The only reason it became a song is that his producer, Buddy Cannon, happened to be sitting a few feet away.
Buddy has told the story more than once, first in the press materials for the album and later, in more detail, on Texas Monthly‘s podcast One by Willie in June 2022. The details line up, and they place the moment before one of Willie’s New Year’s Eve shows at the Austin City Limits theater, the venue on the stretch of Second Street that also carries the name Willie Nelson Boulevard.
The woman who came aboard
As Buddy remembered it, the evening started the way evenings on Willie’s bus usually do. People came and went. Buddy was sitting at the table across from Willie when one of the bus drivers brought a woman aboard.
Buddy had never seen her before. But Willie stood up the moment she came in, and Willie’s wife Annie was there too. The way the two of them welcomed her told Buddy she was someone very close to them, an old and dear friend. Buddy got up, moved over to the couch, and gave her his seat at the table.
She began to pour her heart out. It soon became clear she had lost someone very recently. From the conversation, Buddy guessed it was her husband, though he never learned her name or exactly whom she had lost. Willie listened closely, with what Buddy called his steel eye contact.
Then she told Willie she did not know how she was ever going to get over it. Willie kept his eyes on her and answered:
“It’s not something you get over, but it’s something you’ll get through.”
Buddy said later that a light came on in his head the moment he heard it.
A line that would not go away
Buddy did not write anything that night. He carried the sentence around for two or three years, and he said it simply would not leave him. He knew there was a song in it. Finally he wrote down a few lines and sent them to Willie, along with a reminder of where the idea had come from: Willie’s own words, on his own bus, to his own friend.
From there, Buddy said, the song came together almost by itself. They wrote a verse and a chorus, and that was the whole song. Looking back on it in 2022, he put it plainly:
“It was a gift. It wasn’t work.”
Written by text, finished at the microphone
The way it was written is a story of its own. Willie and Buddy first worked together in 2008, and during the making of the 2012 album Heroes they started writing songs together. They never did it face to face. Willie would text a verse or a chorus, Buddy would text back whatever came to mind, and the lyric grew between two phones. By 2022, Buddy counted about 55 recorded songs written that way, without the two men ever sitting across a table to work on one.
For “Something You Get Through,” Buddy sketched the melody first, humming it and playing along on guitar, and sent it down to Willie. But he has said that a melody is never final until Willie is in front of the microphone. Willie reshapes it as he sings, and by the time he finished this one, Buddy said, it had become a Willie melody.
The recording became one of the eleven Nelson and Cannon originals on Last Man Standing, released by Legacy Recordings on April 27, 2018, two days before Willie’s 85th birthday. Its video, released that April, shows Willie and his band playing the song in the studio in sepia tones, with Mickey Raphael’s harmonica answering the vocal.
Where Willie first heard it
There is one more layer to the story, and it comes from Willie himself. In a 2018 interview on the public radio show World Cafe, recorded on his bus, he said the thought was not entirely his. He had been close friends with a Baptist minister in Austin, and had even recorded an audio version of the minister’s book. One day on the golf course, while they talked about divorce and death, the minister told him there are some things you won’t get over, but you will get through.
Willie, being Willie, did not dress it up:
“So I ripped him off, and I wrote a song.”
Willie did not name the minister in that interview. But the two accounts fit together. The comfort Willie offered his grieving friend that night was a sentence someone had once offered him.
The people who found it
Buddy has pointed out that new Willie Nelson songs get little radio play anymore. This one found its listeners anyway. By 2022, he said, the Facebook video of Willie singing it had been viewed about 38.4 million times, and so many singers and listeners had come up to tell him what it meant to them.
At least half a dozen recording artists, he said, told him how great the song was. He told each of them to go record it. As of that 2022 conversation, none of them had.
For Buddy, the measure was simpler. If the song brought comfort to somebody, he said, then it was a success, and it seemed to have brought comfort to a great many people. He also said he believed songs come from somewhere else, and that hearing the woman say those words on Willie’s bus was simply the moment the idea was delivered to the two of them to finish.