NEW YORK – Young musicians looking for longevity would be wise to follow the sensible word of Willie Nelson: Do what feels right, and if you're lucky enough to have a statue built in your honor in your city, remember that it is just something you've “got to go down and clean off the pigeon (expletive) every now and then."
On Friday, Nelson, who is 91, will release “Last Leaf on the Tree," his second studio album this year — also his 76th solo studio album and 153rd album overall, according to Texas Monthly's herculean ranking his prolific discography. So how many more does he have in him? Nelson laughs into the phone, “I don't know. I hope there’s a few more.” Maybe he'll hit 200? “Why not!”
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“Last Leaf on the Tree” is an album of firsts and familiarities; it is Nelson's first album produced entirely by his son Micah, which includes a few originals and covers from Nelson staples like Neil Young, Nina Simone and Tom Waits as well as some less-than-obvious inclusions, like reimaginations of the Flaming Lips' “Do You Realize??” and Beck's “Lost Cause.”
“He's a real artist,” Nelson says of his son. “He picked all the songs.”
Asked how he broke the news to his producer Buddy Cannon that Micah was taking over, Nelson jokes, “We just surprised him.”
Micah Nelson's artistic, alternative-rock sensibilities are present on the record, not only in its cover song selection by also in his delivery. For a cover of Young's “Are You Ready for the Country," for example, he used sticks and leaves for the percussion instead of traditional instrumentation. “I didn't notice anything different,” Nelson laughs.
His wife, Annie Nelson, who joins Willie for the interview, adds, “He says it all the time. It's great to play with your kid. And it’s even better if they’re good.”
After seven decades of songwriting, Nelson says the only way to identify a good one is simply, “You know it when you hear it. When you hear something and you go, ‘Damn, I wish I would’ve wrote that,' it's a good song.”
“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson once said of his Highwaymen bandmate at a 2009 award show tribute. Kristofferson, 88, died last month at his home on Maui, Hawaii.
“He was a great songwriter. He left a lot of fantastic songs around for the rest of us to sing, for as long as we’re here,” he reflects. “Kris was a great friend of mine. And, you know, we just kind of had a lot of fun together and made a lot of music together — videos, movies. I hated to lose him. That was a sad time.”
In a few ways, Nelson is the last of the Outlaw Country era — though he's always experimented across genre and style. The title “Last Leaf on the Tree,” taken from a cover of Waits' “Last Leaf,” resonates, in a way, when he considers his contemporaries. “If you just take the music part of it and go back to, you know, Waylon (Jennings) and Kris and John(ny Cash) and, you know, all of us working together, the Highwaymen. And then I am the only one left. And that’s just not funny.”
The album, too, considers love and death — topics he knows a thing or two about.
“Well, I’m 91 plus, so, you know, I’m not worried about it. I don’t feel bad. I don't hurt anywhere. I don’t have any reason to worry about dying. But I don’t know anybody who’s lived forever,” he says. “I take pretty good care of myself. And I feel like I’m in pretty good shape physically. Mentally? That’s another story,” he says, laughing.
As for what he hopes his legacy is, he's got an answer for that, too: “I had a good time. And I did what I came here to do: make music."
He'll continue to do just that, and more. He says he's already got another album completed, and in a few weeks, Willie and Annie Nelson will release “Willie and Annie Nelson’s Cannabis Cookbook,” an easy extension of the couple's long-held belief that both marijuana and food hold medicinal properties. Annie says the book was born out of necessity when Willie had pneumonia and couldn't smoke, so she started making edibles to relieve his night terrors.
“He was a great taste tester,” she says.
Without missing a beat, he jumps in, “Still am!”