Review: Willie Nile Battles the Pandemic Blues With Garage Rock Bravado on 'The Day the Earth Stood Still

There aren't too many artists that scream “New York” like Willie Nile. Always an underground artist, never mainstream popular but retaining a core of fans throughout his career as well as finding some high profile supporters like Bruce Springsteen (who has invited Nile onstage multiple times) and Pete Townshend. Musically, he's always embodied the best of New York's music scene; the proto-punk of CBGB's, the Greenwich Village folk of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, and the blue collar rock and roll of countless garage rockers across the city. So, needless to say, the pandemic was a shock for Nile. Suddenly the “City That Never Sleeps”... slept. Streets were empty; sidewalks were quiet; and Nile did what he has always done in the face of adversity; he wrote. On his new album The Day the Earth Stood Still, he touches on that and other subjects topical and comical.

While its title was taken from the landmark 1951 Michael Renne sci-fi film, the title track is all about Nile's experiences during the early days of COVID lockdowns, when it truly did seem the Earth “stood still.” Wrapped up in a blue collar rock and roll beat, Nile notes “when the ABCs of logic, meet the CEOs of greed, and the SROs of loneliness cry out and start to bleed, there comes a time for judgment, a time to pay the bills.”

Nile also has a few things to say about political opportunists in the power chord anthem “Blood on Your Hands”, a duet with Steve Earle, another artist never afraid to put his opinions out there. Earle's voice counterbalances Nile's perfectly on lines like “there will be a time when the whip comes down. The pauper will be king and the king will be a clown.”

Another topical song is gentler in its approach, taking an almost Arlo Guthrie folk delivery. “The Justice Bell (Hear It Ring)” was inspired by Nile's meeting with civil rights leader John Lewis, an experience that moved the always socially conscious artist. “Let freedom bloom across the land like winter into spring” is the kind of invitation to universal brotherhood that Lewis himself would have happily endorsed.

But it's not all seriousness and political anthems. Willie Nile has always been possessed of a wicked sense of humor and he unleashes it on two songs. The first is “Where There's a Willie There's a Way.” A co-write with fellow protopunk innovator Michael Des Barres, Nile pokes fun at his own reputation as a musical raconteur. I have to say as a fairly ravenous consumer of Britcoms, where “willy” has a different meaning, this song was probably funnier to me than it should have been.

The second moment of true hilarity is also the album's best track. “Off My Medication” is a song that could have been the b-side to “I Wanna Be Sedated”, with Nile slipping into his punk persona as easily as one might into a pair of well-worn jeans. Like The Ramones, Nile's brand of punk isn't the snarling rejection of social norms of acts like The Sex Pistols but simply a rejection of any perceived obligation to make any sense whatsoever in the song. The cadence and delivery are more important than the words, which is probably why lyrics like “there was a time when I was normal, steady as a rock, but now I'm running naked with a Bible 'round the block.”

If you already know Willie Nile, you probably already have this album as you read this. If you don't, or if you're one of the 2-3 casual fans among his throngs of hardcore admirers, The Day the Earth Stood Still is worth the buy. It's slapdash, sometimes schizophrenic on what genre it wants to be, produced in a way that makes no effort to sand out the rough spots, and bloody brilliant, not in spite of those things but because of them. Willie Nile is one of a kind, a rarity in a business where it's all been done before.