The story goes that Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard were making an album in Nelson’s home studio outside Austin, Texas, when Nelson got a call from his daughter Lana. She told him he really needed to hear this song called “Pancho & Lefty,” by a somewhat obscure Austin writer named Townes Van Zandt. Nelson obliged, and found the story of a complex friendship between two elusive men so fitting to him and Haggard, that he walked outside to the bus where Haggard was sleeping, and told him to get up so they could sing it. Haggard’s response: It’s a good song—but it can wait until morning. But the band’s already in the studio, Nelson said. They’re rehearsing. In the finished track, you can hear the hard-bitten machismo that fueled the cowboy myth, as well as a tenderness—between two men, no less—that felt both reflective and unresolved. The singers had always been foils for each other, at least when it came to temperament: Haggard was flippant when he wasn’t being deeply, sometimes melodramatically sincere, while Nelson tended to be mellower but also more averse to conflict. Nelson was the lover; Haggard, the fighter. But they were both heading toward their fifties, with plenty of life experience behind them. As a result, the 1983 album Pancho & Lefty—produced with some airy touches by Chips Moman, during what were effectively the same sessions as Nelson’s Always on My Mind—is partly a look at what it might feel like to be an American man firmly in middle age. Throughout the album, the duo are cranky but responsible (“Reasons to Quit” is followed by “No Reason to Quit”), entitled to the point of self-pity (“All the Soft Places to Fall,” “Opportunity to Cry”), and sentimental without giving in to the false sense of wisdom, or sense of conclusion, that might’ve seduced them in the past (“Pancho and Lefty”). Calling this album a bromance is too flip, while describing it as a buddy comedy would be too disrespectful, given the album’s mystery. It’s simply the sound of two men singing as friends, with all the complexity the word ultimately implies.