jtrent238 test blog: Willie Nelson’s Long Encore

August 19, 2022

Photograph by Philip Montgomery for The New York Times.

For several months during lockdown, Willie Nelson and his sons — Lukas and Micah, both musicians — played lots of poker, dominoes and chess. Nearly every evening, the three would gather in the living room with their guitars to sing Nelson's songs and old favorites by the likes of Hank Williams and Roger Miller. "It kept us sane, sort of," Lukas says. "My dad was bored. He was anxious. He was in a state of existential dread, fearing that this thing he'd done his whole life would never come back." Nelson tried to keep busy, meeting with a physical therapist for online sessions, sitting for Zoom interviews and performing livestreamed benefit concerts. But his famous tour bus sat by the entrance to the ranch, uncharacteristically idle.

Nelson has spent much of his life on tour buses, answering the siren call of the Interstate and the concert hall. "I can't wait to get on the road again/The life I love is making music with my friends," he sang, decades ago. For Nelson, barnstorming the country with a hot band is pure freedom. There was a moment, in the 1990s, when he pulled himself off the road, signing a contract for a six-month residency at a theater in Branson, Mo. But his cabin fever grew so acute, he wrote in his autobiography, that he took to "pitching a big sleeping tent in my hotel room and pretending I was out in the woods."

Now, during the pandemic, he was marooned again. Sometimes, he would sit in his parked tour bus, "just to pretend I was going somewhere."

But Willie Nelson's pandemic concert moratorium has finally come to an end. And as he now approaches 90, he is back on the road again, in the middle of a late-life creative burst.

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Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

Willie Nelson's Long Encore

As he approaches 90, even brushes with death can't keep him off the road — or dim a late-life creative burst.

By Jody Rosen

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