Nothing personifies the seemingly-everlasting life of 91-year-old Willie Nelson more than this stanza - The autumn took the rest/ But it won’t take me/ I’m the last leaf on the tree - he delivers from a Tom Waits sad song “Last Leaf.” It is the very-appropriate title track to his 76th solo album and, indeed, his eighth release since 2020.
Appropriate because Last Leaf On The Tree - released on November 1 - came out just over a month since the death of his old friend and collaborator Kris Kristofferson. It leaves Nelson the only survivor - or last leaf - from the greatest country super-group, The Highwaymen, he formed with Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash in 1985.
“I’ve lost a lot of good friends,” he said in an NBC interview to promote the album. He paused, and then added with a smile: “And for some reason, I’m still here.” Nelson was quite frank in confronting grief: “We all have to go through it in various ways. And each time it is just as bad as the last time.”
Nelson is no stranger to confronting his mortality in song. Some of his best songs poke fun at his aging life. One of his most popular, “Roll Me Up And Smoke Me When I Die,” goes back to his 2012 classic Heroes – Just Keep the Music playing that’ll be as good as goodbye/Roll me up and smoke me when I die. And a few years later, there was “Still Not Dead” - I woke up still not dead again today/The Internet said I had passed away - from his 2017 album God’s Problem Child.
Willie’s son Micah also broached the subject when he described Last Leaf On The Tree as his father “facing death with grace.” And Micah - an artist in his own right like his brother Lucas – should know as he masterminded the album.
Willie said he very much enjoyed working with his 34-year-old son: “He produced it, picked all the songs, and he played all the instruments and made the video, did the artwork, animation.”
In fact, multi-instrumentalist Micah did even more. There are only two original songs on what is essentially an album of covers and he wrote them both – “Wheels” and “Color Of Sound,” a co-write with his father. There is another Willie song in the lineup, but it is a new version of his 1962 composition “The Ghost.”
Besides Waits, the other big song-writing names who see their compositions get an outing here include Neil Young, Beck, Nina Simone, Keith Richards and Warren Zevon . And just to add more class to this line-up are a couple of big names among the backing musicians – Daniel Lanois on pedal steel and Mickey Raphael on Harmonica. And you can add “Trigger” (Willie’s famous guitar) to this list.
Young gets the Willie-treatment on two of his songs. It is no surprise that Nelson tackles “Are You Ready for Country,” one of Neil’s more country-bluesy compositions from his classic 1972 Harvest album. It was also a song Waylon Jennings did in 1976. But Willie’s hootenanny treatment is more inventive. The other Young track “Broken Arrow” - a complex song he wrote while with Buffalo Springfield in the late ‘60’s - sees Willie at his interpretive best, nicely enhanced by some clever arrangement, and harmony, by Micah, who recently played guitar on tour with Young and his Crazy Horse band.
“Who would have thought that Willie would do ‘Broken Arrow’ and it’s such a trippy version,” said Young, commenting on what he thought was “a beautiful, beautiful” album. “And on ‘Are You Ready For The Country,’ the guitar playing by the both of them is so great, and they’re singing together. I love it.”
Despite Young’s more upbeat numbers, the album’s mortality theme is never far away, especially with blatant lines like Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die from the much-covered Flaming Lips 2002 hit “Do You Realize?? It was a song co-written by the psychedelic rock band’s lead vocalist Wayne Coyne with the death of his father in mind.
And while the song has been covered by various artists, Coyne is especially delighted by the latest. “Willie’s version of our song is just utter joy. There is no other meaning that he brings to it,” Coyne said in a video clip posted on Spotify. “It probably brings more meaning to it than we do.”
One songwriter not around to review Willie’s version of his song is the great Warren Zevon who wrote the reflective “Keep Me in Your Heart.” It would be the final track on the final album before his death in 2003. It has long been regarded as a deliberate farewell song, one he wrote immediately after learning of his cancer diagnosis. On reflection he would describe it as “a little bit of a ‘woe is me’ song.”
As might be expected, Willie – and Trigger – treat this beautiful lament with the utmost respect. The significance in choosing such a song of remembrance was not lost on Micah. “When I listened to my dad’s vocal on it, I just started bawling. I just cried my eyes out,” he said in the album’s essay.
One legendary songwriter who is still around – many may say surprisingly so – is Keith Richards. And, like Coyne, he too was thrilled that Willie chose to cover his somewhat tongue-in-check “Robbed Blind.”
”I’m particularly blown away because he has included a song of mine called ‘Robbed Blind’ which is strange because when I first wrote and recorded it, I wondered what Willie could do with it. Now I know. Funny how things go round,” Richards said. “Micah’s great production keeps it in the family.”
Beck is from a new generation of writers but his contribution “Lost Cause” gained some preferential status when it was one of three singles pre-released from the album, the others being “Lost Leaf” and “Do You Realize??”
“Lost Cause” - from the Grammy- winning 2002 album Sea Change -was one of several Beck songs considered by Micah and Willie. But Micah said it was chosen because it was “more like a country song” and this is personified beautifully by Raphael’s wistful harmonica riffs that Micah weaves in and out on a very intoxicating version.
And Beck was another to bask in the Willie treatment: ”Willie’s songs have been my companions for most of my life. I’ve been lucky to get to hang out and sing with him on several occasions over the years,” he said. “There’s no one like him in music and it’s the greatest honour to have recorded this song.”
No one, it seems, has a bad word to say about Willie Nelson. And he repays with gems like Last Leaf On The Tree!
Paul Cutler
Editor Crossroads – Americana Music Appreciation
Comments