Life on the Road with Willie Nelson

At ninety-two, the musical icon is still touring, discovering new ways into songs. But tour-bus life isn’t always easy. Plus:

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• Mort Gerberg’s favorite cartoon

Alex Abramovich
A writer and professor of journalism at New York University.

John Spong hosts “One by Willie,” a podcast that asks (mostly) musicians—Bonnie Raitt, Norah Jones—to choose a favorite Willie Nelson song, stick around, and swap stories. It kept me good company as I followed Nelson around for the better part of a year for my piece in this week’s issue, sometimes in a black Dodge Durango, sometimes on the band bus.

Either way, days blurred together. Was it Buffalo where we stayed in that converted insane asylum with freakishly high ceilings? Checking my notes, I see that it was. I recall that Hershey, Pennsylvania, was where Nelson’s longtime harmonica player, Mickey Raphael, wandered out into the crowd and came back with Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa—the crown prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain—a guy we’d seen on CNN, sitting in the Oval Office, a few weeks earlier. The crown prince was dressed in a Sturgill Simpson Dick Daddy Powder Company T-shirt. We chatted for a while about country music (which he was a fan of, and knew lots about) and, in general terms, the state of the world. He was born in 1969, in the midst of the Cold War, when “the world was divided into good and bad. It’s more gray now. But I love America. And what is more American than Willie Nelson?”

Back on the bus, Raphael; Nelson’s guitar tech, Armando Garcia; and I stayed up late, listening on an iPhone speaker to Billy Joe Shaver singing his proud, big-hearted songs. Nelson has called Shaver the best songwriter from Texas; I believe it’s a three-way tie between Shaver, Cindy Walker, and Nelson himself. But I hold a special place in my heart for Billy Joe, who never got past the eighth grade but came up with lines like “There weren’t another other way to be.” How is that possible, I asked Raphael, to write something so Texan, that also happens to be in perfect iambic pentameter? “This album is pretty good,” Raphael replied. “I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it.”

“Mickey, you’re on it,” I said. The days, weeks, months, and years had blurred for him, too. Even a luxury tour bus is not the most comfortable thing. The bunks are just that—bunks, not beds, with mattresses that let the road through. The highway, at night, is loud and samey. You roll into the next town at four or five in the morning. Each time, the same choice: Do you get up and check into a hotel room or stay on board, trying to sleep, in the hotel parking lot? Raphael was bone-tired by the end of the tour. You would have been, too. But you would not have been lonely, and if you got bored there was always one more episode of “One by Willie” to listen to, one more Shaver song to play. (The King James Bible helps explain how Shaver did it.)

For a long time, a simple line I had in my head as we bounced along was “Willie Nelson is on the road again.” That, too, is pentameter, plain as plain can be. May it be so in 2026, too—this glorious, ragged old band, travelling the country, trying to sew our ripped social fabric together once more, one town at a time.

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Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.

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