Songfacts®:

• "Sing To Me Willie" is a tribute to Willie Nelson that also features Willie Nelson. While Edie Brickell sings about what Willie and her music means to her, Nelson pays tribute to Texas, where both singers are from. Brickell grew up listening to Nelson because her father was a huge fan. In the first verse, she recounts how his music was played at her dad's funeral, leading the pastor to say, "It's hard to follow 'Whiskey River.'"
• Members of Brickell's band, New Bohemians, played on this song, including Matt Hubbard on keyboards. Hubbard is the connection to Willie Nelson: he's married to Nelson's granddaughter, Martha Fowler. Nelson's son, Micah Nelson, directed the video for the 2020 Edie Brickell & New Bohemians song "My Power" along with his wife, Alex Dascalu.
• Nelson suggested the collaboration with Brickell when they talked on Christmas Day, 2018. When they got down to business, Brickell brought in a reworked version of "The Horse's Mouth," a song she released with her band the Gaddabouts in 2012. Nelson loved the chorus:
  
  If you don't hear it from the horse's mouth
  You're hearing it from a horse's ass
  
  But they ultimately decided to do "Sing To Me, Willie" instead. The new version of "The Horse's Mouth" she recorded with New Bohemians for their 2021 album Hunter And The Dog Star.
• This was released on April 29, 2020, Nelson's 87th birthday. A week later, a music video with lots of Texas footage appeared.
• Proceeds from the song went to the MusiCares' COVID-19 Relief Fund.
• Brickell credits Nelson for helping her integrate guitar into her songwriting. "I realized a little bit late how important that is in expressing an individual sound," she told Songfacts. "But Willie Nelson has taught me a lot about that because I adore the way he plays guitar. So, I'm trying harder and harder to become a better musician. I can play well enough to write, and I have for a long time. Now, I want to play well enough to express that other soulful feeling that I can hear, that I haven't tried that much to play, with the exception of riffs and making riffs."