Willie Nelson has been interviewed ahead of his memoir, The Last Leaf, which is published in a couple of weeks.
The country legend is now 93 and still touring. Indeed, in the last twelve months, he’s played 36 shows – an impressive rate of work for a man in his tenth decade. However, it does mean he’s had to make some adjustments in terms of his lifestyle.
Aged 86, having dealt with breathing problems, pneumonia and emphysema for a number of years, he decided to quit smoking weed. Ingesting cannabis via edibles is still very much on his menu though: “I had a lung collapse, so I have to be really careful. I do edibles at night,” he says, adding that he thinks it improves his writing: “Yeah, I do. It relaxes you to a point where you might think a little different.”
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The Guardian also published some interesting titbits from the new memoir. In one Nelson talked about On The Road Again, which took him into the main Billboard charts in the early 1980s and ended up winning him a Grammy.
“I wrote it in 1980 in five minutes on an airplane for producer Sydney Pollack, who needed something in a hurry for a movie I was in,” he reveals. “It won a Grammy and went to Number One. I play it at every show, not because the crowd demands it but because I love it. It defines me.”
He’s also written about another adjustment to the constraints of age. “All my life I’d played standing up,” he says. “At age 89, I had to make a big concession. Standing up for a 90-minute set just wasn’t easy. To get through a set, I had to sit down. I was initially resistant. My machismo put up an argument, but I talked myself into it. ‘Dude, you’ve earned the right.
“Sitting down will relax you. With Micah sitting on one side of you and Luke sitting on the other, it will be like jammin’ in the living room. The audience will feel the intimacy. It’ll be a good change.’”
“It was. I was glad I relented. After doing it once, I could see doing it permanently. Sitting down had a way of bringing the audience closer to me. It was like I was sitting in their living rooms. It felt natural. Like I was taking it easy.”
The Last Leaf comes out on 20 November through Canongate
