Step inside the bus, take a deep breath, and settle back as Willie Nelson ruminates on aging, creativity, the power of breathing, the wonder of love, and the vitality of songwriting in The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity—and My Longest Love Affair. Affectionate, cantankerous, and filled with Nelson’s sly wit—you can feel him grinning sometimes through the words of the stories—these short chapters capture Nelson’s indomitable spirit, his unquenchable thirst to keep moving forward, his energetic devotion to writing, and profound reflections on loss ((especially the deaths of his friends Ray Charles, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, and Leon Russell). As he writes, “Looking to the future as I look to the past, I stay in the present.”
Life on the road can be grueling, but Nelson welcomes his audiences into his performances. Reflecting on Russell’s death in 2016, he recalls the time in 1979 when he went out to Russell’s studio and the two sat playing songs for twelve, maybe sixteen hours a day. They’d play one song after another: “we sang 126 songs in five days!” exclaims Nelson. He “shivers with the memory” of the night at the Beacon Theater in New York when he, Russell, and Charles sang Russell’s “A Song for You.” “Leon was a healer. Music is a uniter. We don’t often know the person next to us or their ideology, but at a concert we are all in the same place—and ideology goes out the window,” Nelson writes. “So going back to Leon: If you’re listening to him singing ‘Delta Lady’ or ‘Hummingbird’ or ‘Tight Rope,’ you’re feeling his soul, you’re part of the songs. You’re part of the performance . . . if you’re there to hear me sing a song, I care. I become part of you, and you become part of me.”
