Down near the bottom of the track list of Willie Nelson’s latest album, his 152nd, is a new song that should join what I think of as his personal canon. These songs are not necessarily his biggest hits nor his best-sellers, though entries like “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” which he wrote, and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” which he did not, certainly qualify as such. Rather, these are the songs that have come to matter most to his fans. They’re the ones that get played widely at weddings and funerals, in the quiet moments when life becomes too much to bear, when a body needs to hear just the right song—one that will express something they can’t find words for or will somehow make them feel less alone. They are the songs that define Willie and what he means to people. “Healing Hands of Time,” which he first cut in 1965, is one of those songs, as is “Something You Get Through,” which he released in 2018. And so is track nine on The Border (out from Legacy on May 31), “Nobody Knows Me Like You.”

It was written by legendary Nashville songwriter Mike Reid, a nicely crafted little love song with a simple, feather-light melody that he wrote for his wife, Susie. Reid’s best known for having cowritten Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” which is considered one of the greatest pop songs ever penned. But before that, he was an All-Pro defensive tackle for the Cincinnati Bengals, a first-round NFL draft pick in 1970 who quit football four years later because he wanted to write songs. Susie stood by him in that decision; through the bare years, before he started getting his songs cut; and through all the ups and downs that came with 45 subsequent years of marriage. “Any long-term relationship is like inviting a witness to the discovery of yourself,” says Reid. “The character in that song, he’s realized what authentic intimacy is. I mean, Susie knows where all the broken parts of me are.” So last year, after carrying the song title around for longer than he can remember, Reid wrote “Nobody Knows Me Like You” as a thank-you to her. He never intended to pitch it to anyone.

Then, last August, Reid and his cowriter on “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” Allen Shamblin, wound up at a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame luncheon with Willie’s producer and cowriter, fellow enshrinee Buddy Cannon. If that sounds like a fancy to-do, it was not. Those luncheons are semiregular and informal, more like a dozen or so old farts getting together for coffee on Thursday mornings to reminisce, with maybe a touch of shoptalk. “I mentioned to Mike I was getting ready to do this record with Willie and asked him if he had anything,” says Cannon. “I said, ‘Just send something over.’ ”

It was a fortuitous ask. Using their well-established practice of text-thread cocomposing, Cannon and Willie had already written four songs that would show up on The Border, two of which ended up being standouts. “What If I’m Out of My Mind” is a jaunty, jokey look at new love, the wink coming when Willie, who just turned 91, acknowledges that the object of his affection may very well be a figment of his imagination. And “Once Upon a Yesterday” is in the long tradition of country songs that tip their hats to older songs and singers—in this case, three of Willie’s early heroes, Roy Acuff, Kitty Wells, and Hank Williams—but with a sprinkle of Willie wisdom to set it apart. “I texted him what I had,” says Cannon, “and he sent back that bridge, ‘For a lot of what we know of love and truth, we have them to thank.’ That’s too deep for me to have written. Not for Willie.”

But the heart of the album is three songs that came in the wake of Reid and Shamblin’s lunch with Cannon. Shamblin sent in “The Border,” a song he wrote with Rodney Crowell that became Willie’s favorite on the record, the one he insisted be the lead single and the title cut. It’s written from the point of view of a U.S. Border Patrol officer, a man with no say in policy but who’s tasked with risking his life to enforce it. Notably, Crowell and Shamblin wrote the song in 2004, when tragedies along the Southern border grew out of cartel activity and graft, rather than separated families and rolls of razor wire. Crowell has said in interviews that if he wrote “The Border” now, it’d be a completely different song, calling the current crisis an “atrocity.” Willie’s word for it has been “unforgivable.” Still, Willie saw a relevance in Crowell’s depiction of the humanity of the lawman. “I don’t think there’s a political statement in there at all,” says Cannon. “It’s a story about guys working their ass off to make a living, and it happens to be in the middle of hell.”

Another Crowell song, “Many a Long and Lonesome Highway,” occurred to Willie’s manager of nearly fifty years, Mark Rothbaum, when he saw Crowell’s name in the composing credits for “The Border.” A number three hit for Crowell in 1989, it’s a song neither Buddy nor Willie remembered at first, a testament to the life-giving nature of perpetual motion and hitting the road. It’s perfect for this phase of Willie’s career, and its recording—as with the whole of The Border—finds Willie in better voice and more active on Trigger than he’s been since 2018’s Last Man Standing. Plus, Rodney Crowell wrote it.

“Miles used to have a tailor on Fifty-seventh Street in New York,” says Rothbaum, whose other client, once upon a time, was Miles Davis. “Whenever Miles saw a suit he liked, in a magazine or wherever, he’d send a photo to his tailor and tell him, ‘Make me that suit.’ The guy would create those suits, and they would fit Miles’s body perfectly, every inch. That’s the way Rodney’s songs fit Willie.”

Which gets us to “Nobody Knows Me Like You.” Cannon set it in a clean, roomy arrangement—gently picked acoustic guitar, floating steel, snare drum snaps at the end of each line, the tiniest bit of Mickey Raphael’s harmonica—that left plenty of space for Willie, with Trigger, to express his own emotions, which is the key to Willie’s cover: whatever Mike Reid meant when he wrote it, Willie is singing this song to his wife, Annie. He joked to People magazine last year that she’s equal parts lover, nurse, doctor, and bodyguard, summing her up as his “pet rattler.” Fans know the fuller story, though—that she saw him through the IRS mess in the late eighties and the death of his son Billy in 1991. That she raised their two boys, Lukas and Micah, at home and on the road. That she’s tended to Willie through the vagaries of aging and kept him alive during COVID.

That’s the context in which Willie sings Reid’s lyrics, lines like “The things I wish I’d never done / The memories I can’t outrun,” and “When my heart turned to stone / The loneliness you must have known.” When he gets to the guitar solo, instead of sending Trigger soaring above the melody in celebration, he climbs upward for a moment, then drops down an octave, like he’s plumbing depths that the light of only real love can reach. Then his voice comes back to the chorus, which is remarkable in its humility. “But something only you can see / Saves the broken fool in me / With a love that’s known to very few.”

It’s Willie’s big thank-you to Annie. And when you think about it, it’s for a debt the whole world owes her.