That's the Way Love Goes (Merle Haggard album)
| That's the Way Love Goes | ||||
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| Studio album by Merle Haggard | ||||
| Released | August 1983 | |||
| Recorded | January/March 1983 at Woodland Sound Studio and Eleven Sound Studio, Nashville, TN | |||
| Genre | Country | |||
| Length | 32:00 | |||
| Label | Epic | |||
| Producer | Merle Haggard, Ray Baker | |||
| Merle Haggard chronology | ||||
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| Allmusic |   |
That's the Way Love Goes is the 38th studio album by American country singer Merle Haggard, released in 1983.
Haggard had loved Lefty Frizzell's "That's the Way Love Goes" since he first heard the song took a stab at recording it towards the end of his tenure with Capitol Records in the mid-seventies with unsatisfactory results. That version, which can be found on the box set Hag: The Studio Recordings 1969-1976, is more lighthearted and whimsical than the one Haggard would record in 1983, which possesses a delicate melancholy that somehow becomes uplifting mainly because of Haggard's masterful delivery of the words. The song topped the Billboard country singles chart, as did "Someday When Things Are Good," a song co-authored by Haggard and his wife Leona Williams. It also proved to be prophetic, as the couple would divorce that year. Williams had also written Haggard's recent hit "You Take Me For Granted," but Williams, who replaced Haggard's previous wife Bonnie Owens in the Strangers, had creative aspirations of her own that were not always appreciated by her husband. As Haggard wrote in his 1981 autobiography Sing Me Back Home, "I'd reached the point in my career where I felt in charge of my music...When Leona tried to make a suggestion, I resented it. She resented my resentment. So it went. She kept saying she felt like an outsider...I couldn't understand why she got so upset by the press leaning toward good ol' Bonnie and the snide remarks about Leona coming in and breaking up my 'happy home.'" The divorce would instigate a personal landslide for Haggard, who would spend the rest of the decade losing himself in a fog of alcohol and drugs, although initially it did not prevent him from scoring #1 hits. In fact, That's The Way Love Goes was his third hit LP for Epic in two years, not counting two separate duet albums with George Jones and Willie Nelson. While discussing his own song "Bad Boy" in the liner notes to Great Days: The John Prine Anthology, John Prine admitted, "Around that time, I fell under the spell of Merle Haggard's songwriting. There was a period there when he just seemed to be churning out some really great stuff. He was bringing out great albums every six or eight months, and I considered 'Bad Boy' sort of in the vein of what he was doing."
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