Willie Nelson, now 90, has been writing songs for nearly a century. He wrote his first song when he was 7 years old. Given his energetic album output of late, he probably wrote his most recent song this morning.
Over the course of a very long and eventful musical career that has produced at least 100 studio albums and 14 live albums, Willie has also found the time to write two engaging autobiographies and another dozen or so books filled with stories mostly about his childhood and his extended musical family.
But now he’s published his real autobiography, Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs, in which (with the help of ghostwriter David Ritts and Willie's longtime harmonica wingman Mickey Raphael) he recounts the circumstances, both musical and personal, that inspired 160 of his best-known songs.
ADVERTISEMENT
I say real autobiography because the marrow of Willie’s existence is songs—songs he’s written and songs he’s sung. You can chuckle at his preaching for weed, and you can tip your hat to what he’s done for America’s farmers with FarmAid. But we come to Willie, and we stick with him, because of those songs he wrote and the way he sings them.
Some of his songs are clever (“You Don’t Think I’m Funny Anymore”). More than a few are as simple and profound as koans (“Crazy,” “Still Is Still Moving to Me”). And some are so directly from the heart, articulated with all the force of spoken English compressed into diamond-like poetry, that your heart just melts (“It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” is the truest, most poignant song I know about what it feels like to be a parent).
One of the most striking things about Willie Nelson songs is how short they are without seeming in any way incomplete. As he says about the first song he ponders in this book: “I like the feeling of ‘To Make a Long Story Short’ because that’s my mantra when it comes to lyrics. Less is more. You’ll see how some aren’t any more than eight lines… I love short songs. Say what you got to say in three minutes or less.”
The best example of what he’s talking about is probably “Night Life,” which I had never thought of as especially terse, but when it’s reduced to its lyrics, it’s only three brief verses of four lines where the same last two lines repeat in every verse. And then there’s that totally unexpected but totally right bridge that rips through the song like a chainsaw: “Listen to the blues they’re playing / Listen to what the blues are saying.” It catches me unprepared every time I hear it.
“Night Life” is not a happy song, but it’s not sad either. It comes out of the blues (Ray Charles told Willie that the first time he heard the song he was convinced it was written by a Black man, to which Willie replied, “Thank you.”), and as Willie says, “The blues are beautiful because they transform sad to glad. When you sing them, and when you listen to them, you can feel that heavy weight of heartbreak starting to lift.” Nearly everything Willie Nelson has ever written is touched at least a little by the blues.
His lyrics never sound fancy, but that’s because they’re crafted by a master intent on not showing off. He has a genius for sounding conversational without ever sounding sloppy. “Funny How Time Slips Away” is a monologue song right up there with “One for My Baby.” It’s just a guy talking to an old flame who did him wrong, but with every indelible line, the picture gets a little darker.
“It feels like only yesterday that the story fell out of my brain onto the page. Like all these songs, I let my unconscious do the work,” Willie says. “Maybe my unconscious was thinking of mystery movies. I love those film noirs from the fifties like Kiss Me Deadly and The Big Heat. Maybe ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ is a mini movie, with its black widow-type character, a woman who does a man dirty.”
Willie Nelson performs during the Farm Aid Music Festival at the Ruoff Music Center on September 23, 2023 in Noblesville, Indiana.
Suzanne Cordeiro/AFP/GettyA lot of Willie’s songs have something elusively cinematic about them, like movies that we dream. We are never told much at all about that “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” but who upon hearing it can help but project themselves into the story, at least a little? More obviously, who can resist the walking bass line that dances you right onto Willie’s bus in the ultimate road-movie song, “On the Road Again”?
My favorite stories in Energy Follows Thought are the ones that don’t quite make sense, or that turn logic on its head.
To explain “Sad Songs and Waltzes (Aren’t Selling This Year),” one of his more perversely brilliant songs, Nelson recalls a conversation with his producer, Arif Mardin, who observed, “You’ve written a song that says it will never sell… You’ve composed a double-reverse revenge song where you claim that no one—not even the object of your wrath—will ever hear it. At the same time, the whole purpose of the song is to broadcast your fury.”
“You make it sound complicated, Arif.”
“You’re complicated, Willie! You write a song that you label unfashionable and unmarketable in the hopes it will be just the opposite. Am I understanding you?”
“As much as anyone can ever understand me.”
On Friday night, Willie was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and why not? He slipped the bounds of genre long ago, and at this point, it does no good to label his music as anything but American—music being the only place in this country where the idea of a melting pot might still work.
That’s certainly the takeaway from Energy Follows Thought. The number of songs about cheating lovers might superficially imply that their creator was a country artist, but by the end, there are enough songs about enough subjects to prove that this artist, living up to that Duke Ellington ideal, is beyond category.
The world didn’t do much to deserve Willie Nelson, but it’s lucky to have him.
