IIn 2009, actor Ethan Hawke wrote a profile of Kris Kristofferson for Rolling Stone magazine. Ranging from the Grand Ole Opry to Heaven’s Gate, it’s an intimate, insightful interview spanning several thousand words. In reality, it could be summed up in a single sentence: “Kris Kristofferson is cut from a thicker, more complicated cloth than most celebrities today.”

Kristofferson’s life was quite remarkable: an Oxford-educated Army captain who left his military career to pursue music in Nashville, he would win four Grammys, bypass acting, collaborate with Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese and score a Golden Globe. His songs would be performed by everyone from Johnny Cash to Janis Joplin, Al Green to Gladys Knight. In his 40s, he would form an outlaw country supergroup alongside Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson that stormed the charts. He would continue recording and performing into his eighties.

Gradually he would come to represent a certain kind of American masculinity; Bohemian and intellectual, unmistakable, but also tough and challenging. A soldier who studied English literature; a fan of Hank Williams and William Blake; a songwriter who can come up with the lyrics to Me and Bobby McGee while sitting on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana. “Something inside me made me want to do the hard things,” he once said. “Part of it was that I wanted to be a writer, and I thought I had to get out and live.”

Certainly, things would have been a lot easier for Kristofferson if he had taken the job as an Army teacher instead of chasing his Nashville dream. For years, the closest he came to a music career was working as a janitor at Columbia Studios. On weekends he made some money flying helicopters for oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

He was determined to become a songwriter; failing that, a novelist. But these desires were often at odds with the responsibilities to a wife and a young family. He drank heavily, dressed shabbily, and after a while his parents—prominent military types who cared little for country music—chose to disown him by letter. “Nobody over the age of fourteen listens to that kind of music,” his mother wrote, “and if they did, they wouldn’t be someone we would want to know.”

He was divorced in 1969 and his drinking had caused him to lose his job on the oil rigs. But after some time spent deep within himself, Kristofferson’s life took a turn for the better: three of his songs were laid by rising country star Roger Miller, in addition to covers by Bobby Bare, Sammi Smith, Ray Price and others.

Later that year, after much trying, Kristofferson finally caught the attention of his hero Johnny Cash by landing a helicopter in the star’s courtyard and emerging from the pilot’s seat with a demo tape in one hand, and (Cash claimed) a beer in the other. The tape contained a recording of the song Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down. Cash was hit. The song went to No. 1 and won the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year.

The first song Kristofferson ever wrote was a pro-Vietnam tune that he later regretted. Throughout his career, he has atoned for the missteps in a host of activist songs, including Bobby Bare’s 1969 recording, The Law is for the Protection of the People, 1986’s What About Me, which explored right-wing military hostility in Central -America was questioned, and the anti-warfare of 2006. -war song in the news.

At times, and in certain quarters, political attitudes made the slope of his career a little steeper. “I discovered a significant lack of work after giving concerts for the Palestinian children… and if it has to be that way, then it has to be that way,” he once said. “If you support human rights, you should support them everywhere.” In 1992, he famously stood in solidarity with singer Sinéad O’Connor, who left the Saturday Night Live audience stunned when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II in protest against the Catholic Church. Kristofferson stepped onstage shortly afterward at a Bob Dylan anniversary concert in New York City and put an arm around her as the audience booed, “Don’t let the motherfuckers get you down,” he told her.

The Rolling Stone profile also begins with a political sparring match. Hawke remembers standing next to Kristofferson during a tribute to Willie Nelson, where a major country music star warns the singer to steer clear of the “lefty shit” this evening. Kristofferson holds the bridle and calls for the upstart. “Have you ever served your country?” he asks him. “The answer is no, you don’t. Have you ever killed another man? Hey? Have you ever taken another person’s life and then cashed the check your country gave you for it? No, you haven’t. So shut up!”

As much as his staunch political stances boosted Kristofferson’s outlaw reputation, they also fueled his songwriting, establishing his guiding themes of honesty, freedom and desire, and placing something at its core that was steadfast and unwavering and that in one respect would be tough on can seem. and in another case it might seem something like hope. His first publisher, Marijohn Wilkin, noted in a 2003 interview with Nashville Scene that Kristofferson’s songs were initially too long and too perfect, limited by a neatness of grammar. He had to work to find their grain.

What he developed was a songwriting style that is based on the tension between that toughness and a deep sensuality. It’s in the loose hair ribbon of Help Me Make It Through the Night, and in the fried chicken of Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down, in the quiet, human desolation that runs through so many of his lyrics.

Play Kristofferson’s version of Me and Bobby McGee, and you’ll hear it there too: how it becomes a song that doesn’t rely so much on the voice but on the verses, in his version played slower and more flowing and sung with one voice. gentle resignation. “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose,” he sings, like someone who knows the taste of both; in his hands the song somehow became thicker and more complex.