About the Song
Released in 1979 on his album What Goes Around Comes Around, “Out Among the Stars” is one of Waylon Jennings’ most poignant and overlooked recordings—a tender, heart-wrenching ballad that cuts through the noise with quiet empathy. Far from the swagger and defiance of his outlaw image, this song reveals the voice of a man who sees the forgotten souls in the corners of life—and gives them a voice.
The song tells the story of a troubled young man who finds himself on a collision course with fate. Arrested in a drugstore robbery, broken by life before it really began, he becomes just another nameless figure in a cold, indifferent world. But Waylon, ever the storyteller, doesn’t judge him. Instead, he sings with compassion—offering not answers, but understanding. “Somebody said he came from New Orleans / where he got in trouble with the law…” —and just like that, you’re inside the boy’s world, if only for a moment.
Waylon Jennings’ voice is perfectly suited to this kind of narrative. He doesn’t dramatize it. He doesn’t beg for tears. He just tells the story—low, steady, and sincere. And that’s what makes it so devastating. It feels real. Because it is. The characters in “Out Among the Stars” aren’t fiction—they’re the ones who never made the headlines, whose lives went unnoticed until it was too late.
Though it was never released as a major single, the song has taken on a second life over the years, especially after it was posthumously recorded by Johnny Cash in the early 1980s and released after his death. But Waylon’s version came first—and in many ways, his original performance feels like a quiet ancestor to Cash’s later interpretation: more intimate, more grounded, and just as haunted.
As part of What Goes Around Comes Around, the track reflects the reflective tone that crept into Waylon’s music in the late ’70s. Still rebellious, still proud—but more aware of life’s fragility, and more willing to sing about the ones the world forgets.
“Out Among the Stars” isn’t just a song. It’s a prayer for the lost. A ballad for the boy who never got a second chance. And a reminder that behind every outlaw anthem, Waylon Jennings carried the heart of a poet.