Like most people who weren’t hardcore fans, I first heard “Me and Paul” on the Wanted: The Outlaws compilation. That’s also where I first heard “Honky Tonk Heroes,” and became a lifelong Waylon Jennings fan — I enjoyed Willie, but only bought a couple of his albums, while I got a stack of Waylon’s… but albums aren’t the whole story, by a long shot.

I know a bunch of Willie’s songs — “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” “Hello Walls” — and appreciate the odd ways he makes words fit together, and fits them into tunes, and the one time I saw him live in a relatively small club was one of my all-time favorite concerts. It was his usual group, with his sister Bobbie on piano, Mickey Raphael on harmonica, and Paul English on drums, and they played a long set, following a great opening set by Billy Joe Shaver, which also had Raphael and maybe English, and all that was great, so we called Willie back for an encore… and he played for another forty minutes. The other players looked exhausted, and you could see them exchanging looks as he’d finish one song and go into yet another, but he was having fun, taking long, imaginative guitar solos, totally into being up there playing music, looking like he’d happily keep going all night.

That’s the feeling I get from this song. It’s not about any of the things songs are usually about; it’s just about being out on the road playing music with friends, and not even celebratory about that, like “On the Road Again.” It’s just about taking the ride, ups and downs included, and looking back on both with wry enjoyment. Who ever wrote a better line than “After taking several readings, I’m surprised to find my mind still fairly sound”? Perfectly formed, with alliteration, assonance, that internal rhyme… and smart, and odd, and personal.

Paul, in case anyone doesn’t know, was Paul English, Willie’s drummer for virtually his entire career, and bookkeeper, paymaster, and, in the early days, sometime enforcer. English actually drummed for the first time backing Willie on the radio, having never done it before, and never did anything fancy — he typically just played a single snare, and kept the beat, and that was it. He looked like Waylon, or, according to some reports, Waylon looked like him, adopting his outlaw black hat and clothing, and his Satanic beard and mustache.

The lyric is about their life on the road, all of it apparently based on real events, back when smoking dope and looking like hippies was a bigger deal and could get you in trouble, and a country music package show could still include Kitty Wells, and Willie and Paul were among the tiny handful of people who overlapped those worlds.

And finally I’d just note that looking like a hippie no long means what it used to, and a lot of people who look like Willie and Paul are backing Trump and all kinds of conservative bullshit, but Willie has been pretty consistently on the side of the underdogs, speaking up for immigrants, cutting a duet of the gay-friendly “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other” (with a wonderful video), and generally standing up and out. He’s in his nineties and still on the road, still doing fine shows, still one of the good guys.