come home last Saturday morning, I come home and found you gone." In the sad "I Still Can't Believe You're Gone", the man realizes the vast impact on his life of her leaving. "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way" reflects his inability to accept the situation and his grief, but still in a self-centered way. In "Heaven and Hell", the man expresses his ambivalence about living without his wife, with the lyric: "Sometimes it's heaven, sometimes it's hell, and sometimes I don't even know." The final track is "Phases and Stages/Pick Up the Tempo/Phases and Stages", in which the man reveals his inability to change his character, and accepts his nature and its consequences. Nelson called the subject of many of the songs "grief, grief, and more grief", while he also clarified that Phases and Stages was a fictional account: "The overall theme was not a reflection of my own life...I was simply making up a story. Sure, I’d gone through breakups and heartaches of my own. What human soul hasn’t? ". Nelson revealed that “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” was written for his daughter Susie, "a father talking to his daughter, saying to her what I was now saying to Susie. Instead of trying to give people advice, I am better at putting my feelings into a song." "I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone" was written about Paul English’s wife Carlene, who committed suicide, but, Nelson later suggested, “it has a lot of different meanings to a lot of different people who have no idea why I wrote it.” “Bloody Mary Morning” previously appeared on Nelson's 1970 LP Both Sides Now but “the sentiment fit the story” so he recut it at Muscle Shoals. Release and reception The album was released in March 1974. Initially, Nelson was concerned with the commercial performance of another concept album following the failure of "Yesterday's Wine. It peaked at number 34 in Billboards Top Country Albums and number 187 in Billboards Top LPs & Tapes. The single "Bloody Mary Morning" peaked at number 17, and its follow-up, "I Still Can't Believe You're Gone", peaked at number 51 in Billboards Country singles. Despite the moderate success of Nelson's singles, Atlantic Records' executives were unhappy with Nelson's style, and closed their Country Music division in September 1974. Wexler protested to Ahmet and Nesuhi Ertegun, arguing that Atlantic had Willie Nelson. The Ertegun