Willie Nelson & Ray Price

Willie Nelson & Ray Price

Run That by Me One More Time (Lost Highway) Like the saying goes, the older the fiddle, the sweeter the music, and these two old fiddles are as finely tuned as ever. Ray Price and his former bassist Willie Nelson return to the scene of 1980's San Antonio Rose to trade more meandering verses about the Alamo City, undying love, and what happens when angels cry. Imagine Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin settling in at the bar of some hazy Vegas VIP lounge for a long, whiskey-soaked nightcap, except with more fiddles and steel guitar. The subject matter, as might be expected, deals largely with matters of the heart and the breaking thereof: "I'm So Ashamed," "I've Just Destroyed the World I'm Living In," and two San Antonio Rose holdovers, "Deep Water" and the recently passed Floyd Tillman's "This Cold War With You." The title track glides on a frisky bit of Bobby Floores' fiddle that should fill a few dance floors, but overall it's much more of a gazing-into-the-glass affair, typified by late-night laments such as "Soft Rain" and "I'm Still Not Over You." Even in the face of all that despair, Run That by Me One More Time actually contains more than a modicum of hope. When voices as distinguished as Nelson's and Price's can deliver lines like,"Fools in love are taught by fate, we never learn 'til it's too late," with such unflappable serenity and poise, it's like they've peered into the abyss, shrugged, and headed back to the bandstand to drown their sorrows in some more Western swing.