Willie Nelson might know what forever means

At his star-jammed 90th birthday concert, the most legendary country singer alive sounded like a new man

by Chris Richards

Willie Nelson celebrates his 90th birthday at the Hollywood Bowl in April. (Randall Michelson)

LOS ANGELES — A riddle from the Hollywood Bowl: The moment Willie Nelson turns 90, he becomes older than ever, which gives him something new to sing about. Cool trick, right? With each breath, he reaches another temporal frontier, broadening and deepening the earthly experience his music draws upon — and then he transposes the whole thing into neat little songs that shake the air of the eternal now. Oldness is deepness is newness is nowness. Funny how time slips away, sure. But even funnier how it keeps piling up.

That’s what felt so extraordinary, so life-affirming, about Nelson’s starry two-night 90th birthday concert in Los Angeles over the weekend. It wasn’t the cheer and sweep of the love fest — duets with Keith Richards, Neil Young, George Strait; a profusion of tribute performances from Kris Kristofferson, Emmylou Harris, Booker T. Jones, Bob Weir, the Chicks, umpteen more — so much as Nelson’s ability to fit his bigger-than-yesterday life into these tidy parcels of melody and rhyme. His music is a sort of human arithmetic. At 90, Nelson has never known more joy, more grief, more longing, more contentment, more everything, which is why we tend to believe him when he sings the word “forever.” Having drawn breath in 10 different decades, he’s gotten closer to knowing what eternity feels like than most of us ever will.

So what did this new-old Willie Nelson sound like as he spent his birthday weekend floating on the adulation of friends, kin, communicants and apostles? Familiar and unknowable, breezy and profound, casual and dependable, now more than ever. He played “On the Road Again” both nights, confirming its rep as humanity’s nonperishable anthem of restlessness, togetherness and continuity, all while quietly offering a heavy lesson in physical resourcefulness.

Throughout this song and others, Nelson’s guitar playing was judicious by necessity, a wise mind directing stiff hands, reducing all the jazzy dazzle he learned from his hero Django Reinhardt into only the most essential of gestures. It probably sounded best during the slow-motion wanderlust of “Far Away Places,” with some melody lines starting low, then shooting upward and outward, like a backfiring dirt bike, then others falling from the higher frets in a jingly clunk, like car keys being dropped down the stairs. Yet, regardless of the melody’s direction, Nelson picked at those nylon strings hard and decisively, making the flow of time feel less fluid, every note declaring the present — now, now, now, now, now.

Stephen Stills, Lukas Nelson, Willie Nelson and Neil Young at Nelson's 90th birthday party at the
Hollywood Bowl. (Jay Blakesberg)

Then there was Nelson’s singing voice, thirsty but tuneful, and still phrased in that push-and-pull way that eternally complicates the idea of “the present moment.” His songs don’t really ask the question outright, but can we ever truly experience the present? Light travels at one speed. Sound moves at another. On top of that, it takes time for our neurons to shinny their electricity up into our skulls. As a singer, Nelson has always understood this stuff. When he phrases a line behind the rhythm, he sounds as if he’s leaning into the lag established by physics and biology. When he rushes ahead, it’s like he’s trying to catch up to the truest version of now. This has to be the reason Nelson’s singing has always felt realer than reality, and whenever his voice did those cosmic somersaults at the Hollywood Bowl, you might have felt riveted to your distinct position in space-time.

Or at least you felt more properly attuned to his. Bantering with the crowd before her big duet on Sunday night, Sheryl Crow told a story about how Kris Kristofferson once gave her some priceless advice on sharing the stage with Willie: “Don’t try to sing with him, just sing louder than him.”

Not everyone on this massive bill was lucky enough to have the opportunity. Nelson materialized for roughly 30 minutes at the end of each night, but the tribute performances that preceded him spoke to the breadth of his influence in thoughtful and satisfying ways. Some acts sounded like ace students of Nelson’s hallmark techniques. (Norah Jones solving his sense of timing like the quadratic equation; Tyler Childers singing from the bottom of his nose.) Others felt like followers of a music industry rebel who arrived at his own sound by forging his own path. (Sturgill Simpson presenting his granite twang as a manifestation of stubbornness; Dwight Yoakam making his guitar clink and shimmer like a Coinstar machine.)

And if it felt as if more than half of the recording business had shown up for this thing, it somehow felt entirely reasonable. Is there a living nonagenarian with a wider pop-cultural sneakerprint than Nelson? His early songwriting masterpieces from the 1960s — “Hello Walls,” “Crazy,” “Night Life” — are older than most of today’s country stars, and yesterday’s, too. Then, in the 1970s, Nelson’s albums took an industry-defiant turn toward the raw and the spiritual. By the time “On the Road Again” and “Always on My Mind” made him into a superstar in the early 1980s, everyone started comparing him to Buddha, Jesus and your grandpa. Today, Nelson stands as one of the greatest songwriters we’ll ever know — a lyricist with a singular gift for unfancy profundity, and a singer who can turn time into a plaything.

Kris Kristofferson and Rosanne Cash. (Joshua Timmermans/Noble Visions)

Of the dozens of stars who took the stage at Nelson’s sprawling birthday party, two of the weekend’s best channeled that knack for clock-tampering. First, there was Miranda Lambert throwing the entirety of her heart and lungs into “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” singing it as if she knew the words at birth, but also with a freshness that could’ve convinced all of Hollywood that she’d just learned it backstage. Time collapsed. Then came another big country star with an even bigger voice, Chris Stapleton, putting the squeeze on “Always on My Mind,” seemingly determined to wring at least a dozen notes out of each word printed on the lyric sheet. Time felt full.

And when Dave Matthews stepped up to deliver an unaccompanied rendition of “Funny How Time Slips Away,” the pocket watch didn’t seem to be melting so much as the man, the signature darts and curlicues in his voice signaling a genuine bafflement over how fabulous this song was. No singer better captured the weekend’s conjoined mood of deep understanding and happy disbelief — unless they were related to Willie Nelson by blood.

That’s because Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah understand their father’s unique position in temporality with an intimacy the rest of us will never comprehend. To a child, a parent is time, the backdrop you live your life against, so whenever they appeared onstage to sing one of his songs, it couldn’t have meant more to anyone other than them and their siblings. The profound grace and generosity of these performances — Lukas, “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground”; Micah, “The Ghost” — might have made that hard to believe, but believe it. Realer than real for us is even realer for them.

And time is only so flexible. Nelson walked right up to the edge of that cold, hard truth during “Something You Get Through,” a recent ballad, and probably one of the wisest songs ever written about grief. “It’s not something you get over,” he sang, “but it’s something you get through.” Clocks and calendars ceased to exist as a 90-year-old man and his guitar consoled us from an impossible future: the day that time finally takes Willie Nelson away.

Lukas Nelson and Willie Nelson perform at Willie's 90th birthday celebration. (Randall Michelson)

First published in The Washington Post, May 2, 2023