Tuesday, November 10, 2026. Apologies to Gay Talese, another American master, who is 94.
At ninety-three, Willie Nelson has a new record, a cannabis business, and places to be. Naturally, a reporter would like to ask him about the IRS.
Before Simon Hattenstone interviewed Nelson for The Guardian, the publicist explained that Willie preferred to talk about the future.
This presented a difficulty.
Hattenstone had come armed with Johnny Cash, the IRS, and the story about the airplane sick bag.
I sympathize.
If I had fifteen minutes with Willie Nelson, I would spend the first fourteen trying to find a dignified way to bring up the sick bag. Read the interview.
It gets better.
Willie was promoting a memoir. He had gone to the trouble of putting the past in a book, and here was a man on the phone asking him to take it back out.
Hattenstone asks whether writing it taught him anything about himself. “No!” Willie says, and laughs.
That laugh ought to be played at certain writers’ retreats.
Then everybody could go home a day early.
We’d like you to sum up now
The older you get, the more folks want you to explain what your life has meant. The question sounds generous. It also has the timing of a waiter trying to clear your plate while you’re still eating.
Some of us even do this at the family table.
Somebody asks Grandma to tell the story about how she met Grandpa.
She tells it beautifully, with the pause in the right place, because she’s been doing this bit since the Carter administration. What she wanted to talk about was the neighbor who took down a perfectly healthy maple. She has photographs. She knows exactly who hired the bastard.
A family can love you and still keep you in repertory.
Everybody has a favorite version. The daughter who used to make peace at Thanksgiving can go twenty years without being asked whether she enjoys Thanksgiving.
The old man who once did something reckless will be asked to perform the recklessness in anecdote form, preferably after pie.
If he wants to do something reckless next Thursday, there will be a family meeting.
Some of those meetings are necessary. It’s still worth noticing how quickly concern can become a referendum on what somebody else is allowed to look forward to.
Before, during, and after
When Hattenstone asks why playing shows still matters to him, Nelson says, “I always feel good before, during and after.”
The before is what got me.
There’s pleasure in having a reason to get your shirt out, find your guitar, and be somewhere at seven.
Retirement talk tends to start with all the things you’ll be relieved to give up. I wonder how many souls discover, a few months in, that they miss having something on Thursday worth thinking about on Tuesday.
Most of us have to arrange our Thursdays with considerably less help from a bus.
Willie misses his friends, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson.
He says so in the interview. But he’s also just made another album with Buddy Cannon.
At ninety-three you can still have something on Thursday worth thinking about on Tuesday, and still catch yourself thinking about who would have come.
If Willie ever gives me fifteen minutes, I’ll ask him what he’s working on. I’m saving the sick bag for minute fourteen.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.