Love, Death, and a Bleating Goat: Inside Willie's Strange and ...

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk through a dream with Willie Nelson? To encounter old ghosts and regrets, to peek in on long-ago moments of joy and pain, some seemingly ever-present and others deeply buried, and to have Willie at your side? Not as a tour guide but as a translator, the reassuring, 91-year-old shaman who keeps pulling your focus back to the big picture Truth—that the journey is not a straight line, it’s a circle. That life’s ups and downs are sure enough real; beginnings and ends are not.

That is the feeling of listening to Willie’s new album, Last Leaf on the Tree. It was produced by his 34-year-old son Micah, an L.A.-based, all-disciplines artist whose musical works, created under the guise of Particle Kid, are built on traditional instruments but also feature found sounds, reversed guitar recordings, and laptop blips and bleeps. They get classified as “experimental future-folk,” as apt a description as any for the ethereal, atmospheric Last Leaf, which is a clear sonic outlier in his dad’s catalog. Some of Willie’s previous 152 albums have opened people’s minds—1975’s Red Headed Strangerfound fans who thought they hated country music, and three years later, Stardust subtly introduced country radio listeners to jazz. Others, like 1996’s humble, acoustic meditation, Spirit, and 1998’s moody, Latin-infused Daniel Lanois production, Teatro, required an open mind on the way in but then went on to become cherished records for true believers. Last Leaf will live squarely with the latter.

Last Leaf is largely a collection of covers of unexpected artists—including Beck, the Flaming Lips, and Nina Simone—and Willie doesn’t so much interpret their songs as experience them. Micah chose most of the cuts, but he didn’t provide his dad with any of the original recordings. Instead he put together the backing tracks, playing most of the instruments himself—guitars, bass, piano, cello, dulcimer, a ten-string Andean lute, and more—and recording their parts wherever they occurred to him, be it a hotel room on the road, the loft in his house, or the woodpile off his back porch, where he used fallen branches, dead leaves, and firewood to create much of the percussion. “I wanted this to sound like an old, faded photograph of a crumbling, rusting barn,” says Micah, “or a band playing in a giant tree that you just happened upon. The last thing I wanted it to sound like was anything else.”

The description sounds weird, but listening to Last Leaf isn’t. All the little elements that might strike fans as “other”—wind chimes that sound like pocket change dropped on a tabletop, a bowed Gretsch guitar that sounds like an eighteen-wheeler passing by—feel almost sneaked into the songs by Micah, who was careful to leave as much room in the music as possible for his dad. As a result, Last Leaf is the closest thing to a true Trigger record since 2013’s Let’s Face the Music and Dance, with Willie’s guitar carrying melodies and roaming freely on playful solos and fills. “I really missed having Trigger be the lead character,” says Micah. “I wanted everything to be holding space for Trigger and Dad’s voice so that they could be telling the story.”

The story itself, though, is open to interpretation. Last Leaf opens with the Tom Waits–penned title track, which was the jumping-off point for the project. Back when Willie World was planning last year’s all-star ninetieth birthday concerts for the Hollywood Bowl, there was a hope that Waits would perform. When scheduling didn’t work out, he sent Willie a short cellphone video of himself playing “Last Leaf on the Tree,” a characteristically Waitsian, beat poet’s metaphor, cast in the video as a salute to the lone member of a whole generation of artists. Willie liked the song enough to record it and make it the lead single once the rest of the album followed, and when he plays it live now, he gets mid-show standing ovations. The line that gets the biggest response, however, is the one that gets fans thinking further into the future than they want: “I’ll be here through eternity, if you want to know how long / If they cut down this tree, I’ll show up in a song.” 

It’s an uneasy sentiment that appears repeatedly on the record. Of course, there are light moments too. Keith Richards’s “Robbed Blind” is a funny kiss-off to a miserable breakup. And Willie and Micah’s chugging take of Neil Young’s “Are You Ready for the Country?” outshines both the 1972 original and Waylon Jennings’s 1976 hit cover. With a sawing fiddle, bouncing Jew’s harp, and relentless bursts from Trigger—plus occasional rooster crows and goat bleats—it sounds just like the funky, back-porch-picking party that Micah envisioned.

Willie Nelson’s Son Micah on Trigger, Roger Miller, and “Still Is Still Moving to Me”

By John Spong

Still, the mood overall is pensive. One of the best tracks, and one of the loveliest Willie has ever recorded, is one he cowrote with Micah, “Color of Sound.” Over a softly flowing melody breathed through medieval recorders by a friend of Micah’s, the multi-instrumentalist Sam Gendel, Willie sings of fallen trees, homebound roads, and the “new beginnings unfolding when the end comes around.” Another standout, Warren Zevon’s “Keep Me in Your Heart,” is a ready-made hit for Americana radio, with Micah’s strolling rhythm guitar, Mickey Raphael’s ever-steady harmonica, and two Trigger solos. But it’s also a farewell Zevon wrote to his wife shortly before he died of cancer, populated with lines like, “Hold me in your thoughts / Take me to your dreams / Touch me as I fall into view.”

Micah didn’t intend that focus. “Picking these songs was an intuitive, gut-feeling decision,” he says, “just thinking that if my dad sang this now, at his age, would it make sense? Would it feel natural? And it wasn’t until later that I looked back and saw, ‘Oh, these are all songs about death and love and accepting change.’ It was a theme that I didn’t even—it was not a preconceived thing.”

It is also not a sad glass half-empty. Reviewers will no doubt compare Last Leaf to Johnny Cash’s late-in-life recordings of contemporary rock songs with Rick Rubin, and in particular Cash’s cover of Trent Reznor’s funereal “Hurt.” To my ear, that’s a lazy comparison. For one thing, Willie’s been surprising fans with left-field covers for at least sixty years, starting with the Beatles’ “Yesterday” on Country Music Concert: Live at Panther Hall in 1966, and running through the Allman Brothers’ “Midnight Rider” in 1980, Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” in 1993, and Pearl Jam’s “Just Breathe” in 2012, with dozens of others in between.

But more to the point, much of the poignancy of Cash’s last recordings came from the strain in his voice. He sounded proud but weary. On Last Leaf, the age in Willie’s voice is unmistakable, but much more prominent is the wisdom. His is the voice of authority, and he’s reminding us how he got to this point, advising us to pray, to relish the moment, to be ready when our moment is over, and to believe we’ll live on in some other form. And when Micah harmonizes with him, you hear the son’s voice, airy and almost tentative, leaning on his dad but also revealing what he’s learned from him. It’s beautiful.

“My dad’s got this unstoppable faith,” says Micah. “Not in dogma or institution but a total trust in nature’s infinite ability to recycle itself into brand-new things every day, every single nanosecond, all the time, forever. We’re made up of that process, and it’s made up of us. So when he sings these songs, that’s the feeling that comes through. It’s like comfort.”

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