There is a certain irony in the fact that the best-selling album of Outlaw Country legend Willie Nelson isn’t a Country album at all: 1977’s Stardust is entirely a collection of covers from the Great American Songbook–old standbys first made famous by the likes of Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, The Righteous Brothers, Duke Ellington, Louie Armstrong, and George Gershwin–yet despite the lack of a single Country original on here and the middling reputation of covers albums more generally, Stardust went quadruple platinum within the U.S. alone. It was a huge, shoot-from-the-hip creative risk for Nelson in a career replete with them, one that nevertheless paid off handsomely for the Red-Headed Stranger.

Side B of the LP opens with the old Broadway tune “September Song.” The musical it first appeared on, 1938’s Knickerbocker Holiday, has otherwise been long forgotten; the song itself first achieved mainstream success when Frank Sinatra covered it in 1946–and again when he re-recorded it as the grand finale to his 1965 Grammy-winning LP September of My Years, for his 50th birthday. That latter album is better known today for yielding the hit single “It Was a Very Good Year” (later featured in a Simpsons parody), and has since gone on to be considered one of Frankie Blue-Eyes’ signature songs–certainly his most melancholy–this, despite the fact that lyrically, it’s really just about an old man reminiscing all the times he’s gotten laid (well, all three times, anyways). Sinatra, after all, is the same egomaniac who changed the lyrics to Gershwin’s “Someone To Watch Over Me” from the easy-rhyming “Though she may be be the girl some men think of as pretty/To my heart she carries the key,” to the much clumsier and more awkward, “Though I may not be the men some girls think of as handsome/To her heart I’ll carry the key…” because he clearly could not conceive of himself being with an unconventionally attractive woman (Willie Nelson, it is worth noting, keeps the original Gershwin lyrics intact when he closes out Stardust with the same song).

The entirety of Sinatra’s September of My Years plays the same double-hand, of presenting itself as the morose and melancholy reflections of a middle-aged man, all while lyrically the songs by and large engage in a sort of elderly triumphalism, humble-bragging about what a charmed life he’s actually had. This is an album for patting yourself on the back a little too hard as you age–to try and convince yourself that you, too, have done nothing but spend your life growing wiser and making love–not for contemplating the wreck of your regrets and failures. (This is not exactly a species of old man rock.)

The exception, however, is the aforementioned finale “September Song.” Lyrically, the song is, very simply, about how when the singer was young (that is, when it was “early in the Spring”), he could take all the time in the world to woo his lover:

“When I was a young man courting the girls 
I played me a waiting game 
If a maid refused me with tossing curls 
I’d let the old Earth take a couple of whirls 
While I plied her with tears in lieu of pearls 
And as time came around she came my way 
As time came around, she came…”

But now that he’s older (“But the days grow short/once you’ve reached September”), he doesn’t have that luxury anymore. In lieu of spending long days wooing his lover, he now only pleads, starkly and simply, “These precious days I’ll spend with you.” (In this, it is a sort of long-range sequel to Andrew Marvell’s 1650s poem “To His Coy Mistress“). The 1965 Sinatra version is all operatic and swelling strings, perhaps the only moment all album long when Frank Sinatra allows himself a rare moment of vulnerability, as he confronts the awful fact that he really is getting older, and that death itself is haunting him all the more closely. He belts out the closing chorus at the top of his lungs to perhaps stave it off just a little longer, even as he seems to intuit full well how much breath he wastes in doing so.

That Sinatra version was only a dozen years old (even if the song itself was nearly forty) when Willie Nelson decided to cover it, and wisely, he does not try to one-up Sinatra at all. Partly that is due to the fact that Willie Nelson, despite having a very distinctive and soulful voice of his own, did not have a particularly powerful one; he knew full well he could never compete with Sinatra. He also didn’t need to: his version of the song is much quieter, calmer, simpler, austere.

Moreover, Nelson did not find success till he was much older than Sinatra was–he was already sprouting grey hairs when he finally started topping the Country charts–so he had never been afflicted with the youthful arrogance and self-importance that dogged Sinatra throughout his mature years. Willie Nelson was always fully aware that death was haunting him; this fact never caught him off guard. Whereas Sinatra waited till he was 50 to finally acknowledge his age, Willie Nelson has seemed to be 50 years old damn near his entire life.

Which brings up another key difference between the Sinatra and Nelson versions: the original 1938 song and the 1965 Sinatra cover opens with that aforementioned little reflection on his youthful frivolity–about how happily the singer indulged in “a plentiful waste of time” wooing the girls—which is all upbeat, major chord and dainty, before suddenly shifting into a minor chord for the finale, where it abruptly becomes a brooding meditation on mortality. The contrast between the first half and the second is what’s supposed to give the arrangement its emotional heft. Nelson however cuts that opener entirely (he pulls the same trick with his cover of Nat King Cole‘s “Stardust,” by the way), opting instead to go straight for the throat by starting with the minor chord decent directly. He never raises his voice because he doesn’t have to; death never raises its voice either. Nelson’s quietness is all the more moving in its mildness. There has never been a moment when he has not been aware of his mortality, nor that every last moment alive is a precious gift.

We call ourselves Latter-day Saints; such would seem to indicate that we should continually have in the forefront of our minds the sheer fact of our own mortality, that now really is indeed the time to prepare to meet God, because that day is coming quicker than we imagine. Yet every time I visit Utah, I am struck by the sheer number of billboards for cosmetic surgery, or of recruiters for whatever the latest pyramid scheme is. There is this constant demi-urge in the local culture to refuse to acknowledge the blunt fact that we age, that we grow old, that the end is always far closer than we think; like the broader American culture at large, we seem to think we can elongate our youth and not think about how these are the Last Days after all. In this, I try to be charitable: this is a common human failing across all of America, maybe even all of humanity. The Atonement was made to account for all of these inevitable human failings.

Yet though I honestly enjoy both versions of this old song, I always find myself wishing that our private performances of this song’s sentiments would veer closer to the serene self-assurance of the Willie Nelson rendition than the shocked-and-anguished Frank Sinatra. These days are indeed precious, they do indeed grow short, and (to quote Moroni) I hope you spend them not on your lusts, but on your love, for of such is the kingdom of God.