Amy Irving to Release Willie Nelson Tribute Album, ‘Always Will Be’

Forty-five years after “Honeysuckle Rose,” Amy Irving is set to release an album of her interpretations of 10 Willie Nelson songs — all picks suggested to her by Nelson, who also contributes a guitar solo to a song plucked from that film, “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.”

The forthcoming album, “Always Will Be,” is teased today with a title track that features a guest appearance by Amy Helm, a singer-songwriter in her own right and the daughter of Levon Helm. (Listen below.) Steve Earle is among the other featured artists on the album, due out April 25 on Queen of the Castle/Missing Piece Records. Irving will promote the new record with a handful of gigs, starting with a show May 5 at City Winery in New York City and another at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock, NY on May 31.

“Always Will Be” is the second musical effort from Irving, known for her performances in films like “Crossing Delancey,” “Micki and Maude,” “The Fury” and “Carrie” as well as “Honeysuckle Rose.” It follows on the heels of the actor’s musical debut, 2023’s “Born in a Trunk.” She tells Variety what led her into the realm of music as well as the specifics of her salute to Nelson’s material, which includes songs from some of the lesser-covered corners of the country legend’s catalog.

“We stayed friends all these decades,” Irving says of Nelson. “We’ve been in each other’s life all this time. He’s one of my favorite people, one of my best friends. We are pretty much in communication now daily.” (Testament to that is a voice mail from Nelson that Irving threw into the title track.) Nelson sang on a track on her debut album two years ago, and following that collaboration, “Willie sent me a bunch of songs that he thought I should sing, and I chose the 10 that I wanted to sing.” In the tradition of Nelson’s concept albums of the 1970s, Irving shaped the material into what she considers a narrative sequence. “I kind of wanted a trajectory: You first meet someone, you go through life together, you lose them — I just thought I could tell that story with his songs.”

(In a press announcement, Nelson is quoted as saying, by way of explaining his instigation of the project, “I knew she’d probably do a lot of my songs and I knew they’d be good. You know, I’m just an old hustler.”)

Irving tells Variety that music is her focus right now — and perhaps it always will be, though she doesn’t have a trajectory laid out. “I’m thinking right now that unless something irresistible were to come along, which doesn’t seem to happen a lot for women of my age in the world of film, I think I like focusing on the music right now.,” she says. “And I’ll see where it takes me. I’m not sure there’ll be anything after this second album. The thing is, I don’t present myself as someone who says, ‘You must come here, listen to me sing!’”

Rather, she says, “It’s that I really have been excited by the collaboration with Jules David Bartkowski, a.k.a. Goolis.” (Goolis is her band leader; her son, Gabriel Baretto, produced the album and serves as her manager as well.) “What he does with songs that I present to him takes it to a different place. And that’s what’s really been fascinating to me, to see how a country song could become a punk song — just watching the process. … I don’t have the ego necessary, I think, to sell myself as a singer. But I enjoy it, and, I know I can carry a tune, and I like to be able to use my acting chops to tell the stories. Getting up and singing in tune is not enough: I think you have to drop the whole song into your body and spit it out, having been processed through every element you have of your whole life experience. As an actor, that’s what you do with roles, and now I’m doing it with songs. It’s very gratifying and I feel I have something to offer in that way.”

As for the choice of Nelson material, “Some of the songs were personal to me,” Irving says. “For instance, ‘Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground’ was written for my character in ‘Honeysuckle Rose.’ And ‘If You Want Me to Love You I Will,’ he wrote for me to sing to him in the movie. That’s the one we’ve turned into a punk song! He wrote some songs when I was hanging with him, and then some of them are from his past. And I just chose the ones that I could relate to, and that I could drop into my body and spew it out a little differently, with the help of Goolis’ arrangements. For ‘I Guess I’ve Come to Live Here in Your Eyes,’ Goolis (her band leader) said, ‘Let’s think of it as a French pop song.’ You just approach things a little differently, and the whole tone changes. I mean, Willie sings a lot of these songs a little bit more romantically, whereas we’ve gone to Brazilian carnival in one, we’ve gone to New Orleans for another. We’re kind of taking it and playing, and it’s a very interesting playground for me to be in.”

Irving has sung publicly before making her album debut in 2023, and not just in “Honeysuckle Rose.” “I’ve always loved to sing and occasionally I’ve taken some singing lessons, and as a teenager I played the guitar and did a little busking on the street here and there, singing my Joni Mitchell songs. And then, I grew up in my dad’s company, which would do children’s theater, and we’d all sing in those shows. So I was always doing something. The most professional thing I ever did singing was when I was invited to the St. Louis Opera, and Isaac Mizrahi directed and designed a production of ‘A Little Night Music,’ which I starred in with opera singers and a 50-piece orchestra, the St. Louis Symphony. That was terrifying and thrilling.”

Doing these two new albums “suddenly took me places with my voice that I never knew I could do,” she notes. “I’ve been acting on the stage and in film since I was 9 months old. You know, I don’t necessarily get excited about it — and granted, I don’t get the same roles anymore, but I wasn’t having fun doing it. And this has just been a blast, learning this new world and people taking me by the hand. I don’t have to know everything. It’s really nice that I get to be the little green one in the room and they all have to teach me, and it’s like getting lessons every day. Plus, I live in a barn, and I set a whole area up with microphones and amplifiers and playback, and I can practice all day long and I’ve just been rocking out. My dogs really are sick of some of the songs, I’ve gotta say. But it’s a new energy, and a new lease on life, where singing just makes you feel so alive. It makes you happy because all the oxygen going through your brain and your body just wakes everything up.”

“Always Will Be” track list: