The Last Leaf

Beloved American icon Willie Nelson shares his well-earned wisdom about reaching an astonishing creative flourishing and an even deeper union with the love of his life, Annie.

Willie Nelson is 92, and he has not been slowing down. In the past 12 years, he has recorded 17 new studio albums, written 36 new songs and headlined over 400 live shows. What has been going on? With his trademark down-home wit, Nelson opens up and brings us in touch with the same inexhaustible, vital stream of energy he has learned how to stay tapped into.

'Looking to the future as I look to the past,' he writes, 'I stay in the present.' That captures the spirit of The Last Leaf: forging ahead. It also flashes back to life-altering moments, including facing almost certain death during Covid and what Nelson gained from that.

Woven into his recollections of his own life as an artist is his beautiful and often hilarious account of how the fiery spirit of Annie, his wife and best friend for four decades, has matched his own. Much has been written about the thrill of first falling in love. In The Last Leaf we get, beautifully, the other end of the story—the abiding of that love into the harmony of sustained partnership.

In every great book, at least ideally, the last chapter is the best chapter. The Last Leaf shows how true that can be.

'How can you make sense of him? How would you define the indefinable or the unfathomable? What is there to say? Ancient Viking Soul? Master Builder of the Impossible? Patron poet of people who never fit in and don't much care to? Moonshine Philosopher? Tumbleweed singer with a PhD? Red Bandana troubadour, braids like twin ropes lassoing eternity? What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it's the last loyal dog in the universe? Cowboy apparition writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long. I guess you can say all that. But it really doesn't tell you a lot or explain anything about Willie. Personally speaking I've always known him to be kind, generous, tolerant and understanding of human feebleness, a benefactor, a father and a friend. He's like the invisible air. He's high and low. He's in harmony with nature. And that's what makes him Willie.' --BOB DYLAN