We can readily tag “The Border” as Willie Nelson’s latest, but is it possible to identify what album number it might be in what is, by any measure, a prodigious oeuvre? Texas Monthly has his total at 152 albums; Billboard says 75; another source, 165. Do you think Mr. Nelson could tell us? My guess is that he doesn’t much care: At 91 years of age, he’s likely less concerned with doing inventory than in finding another song upon which he can leave his distinctive stamp.

Have you been following Mr. Nelson’s output in recent years? As an octogenarian, he’s kept himself busy. Over the past decade, there have been 17 albums, some of which are marginal (a Sinatra tribute, “That’s Life”), a few of which are masterful (“Last Man Standing” and “A Beautiful Time”), and all of which exhibit the wry, deceivingly offhand humanism that has been his stock-in-trade since his salad days as a songwriter back in the 1960s.

“Crazy” by Patsy Cline, you know about; same with “Funny How Time Slips Away”; but you may not be familiar with “One Day at a Time” or “I Gotta Get Drunk,” with its immortal refrain: “There’s a lot of doctors that tell me/I’d better start slowing it down/But there’s more old drunks than there are old doctors/So I guess we better have another round.” The last track on the new album, “How Much Does It Cost,” co-written with longtime cohort Buddy Cannon, offers a typical Nelsonian epigram: “There are three sides to every story/You got yours, mine, and the truth.”

What might the truth be about Mr. Nelson? The new album’s title song was written by country musician Rodney Crowell in 2019. Given current events at the southern border of the United States, the timing of Mr. Nelson’s cover seems pointed. Yet things are never what they appear. Here is an artist who simultaneously underlined the macho underpinnings of cowpoke culture in “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly in Love With Each Other” and made a proud claim for his heterosexuality on “Ain’t Goin’ Down on Brokeback Mountain.” If a person contains multitudes, it’s a blessing to be funny about them.

In “The Border,” Mr. Nelson sings in the guise of a patrol guard who has a sober take on his duties: “I work on the border/I see what I see.” It is a pensive reverie about the accommodations each of us has to make on a daily basis. Mr. Nelson chose the song, Mr. Cannon avers, because “it’s a story about guys working their ass off to make a living, and it happens to be in the middle of hell.” The crags in the singer’s voice add additional layers of gravitas and vulnerability.

Mr. Cannon, who is no mean example of spry at age 77, brings a musical fullness to the production, making space for telling apercus, fluid glissandos, and, alas, fewer jokes than a fan could hope for. On previous albums, Mr. Nelson has looked mortality in the eye and responded with the kind of pithy insights for which country music was born-and-bred. “The Border” finds him in a more ruminative frame of mind — paying homage to his mentors, elaborating on a husband’s gratitude, and weighing the implacability of history. 

Each of us has memories we can’t outrun. It’s Mr. Nelson’s gift to cull a sense of ease and balance from this often painful fact. He’s in fine fettle on “The Border.” Can’t wait to hear what he brings us next.