“I’m the last leaf on the tree,” sings 91-year-old living legend Willie Nelson on the title track of his new album. Last Leaf on the Tree is Nelson’s 76th solo studio album and 153rd overall in a career that saw him inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.
“The autumn took the rest/But they won’t take me,” Nelson adds in defiance. The song “Last Leaf,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, appeared on Waits’ 2011 album, Bad as Me.
Produced by Willie’s son Micah, The Last Leaf on the Tree actually began as a Tom Waits tribute album, which explains the inclusion of Waits’ “House Where Nobody Lives" (from his 1999 album Mule Variations) as well.
But they ultimately decided to expand to a broader palette of idiosyncratic songs by the likes of Beck, Neil Young, Keith Richards and the Flaming Lips. It’s like what Johnny Cash did with Rick Rubin on American Recordings in 1994.
Nelson’s the wise elder on tracks like Beck’s plaintive “Lost Cause” (from his Grammy-winning 2002 album, Sea Change) and Warren Zevon’s elegiac plea, “Keep Me in Your Heart" (from The Wind), penned knowingly just before his 2003 death from mesothelioma.
Micah, who played in Young’s Crazy Horse band, oversees a pair of Neil covers, including “Are You Ready for the Country?” (from Harvest in 1972 and a Top 10 country hit for Waylon Jennings in 1976), offered up as a campfire hootenanny and the sprawling “Broken Arrow” (from 1967’s Buffalo Springfield 2), which opens with “Mr. Soul” and goes from widescreen cinema to a miniature pocket symphony, its wandering tale now a metaphor for an end in sight.
Keith Richards is represented by a version of his outlaw “on the run” saga, “Robbed Blind” (from the Stones co-founder’s 2015 solo album Crosseyed Heart), and Nelson gives the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize??” a lovely folk rendering. They even bring Venice, CA boardwalk busker Sunny War’s lonesome love ballad, “If It Wasn’t Broken,” to life with a neat percussive track. (Her real name is Sydney Lyndella Ward.)
The album closes with a Willie/Micah original, “Color of Sound,” which asks the rhetorical question, “If silence is golden, what color is sound?” That’s answered by “The Ghost,” a remake of a song written by Willie in 1962, first appearing on the 1967 compilation, The Party’s Over and Other Great Willie Nelson Songs.
On the playful “Looking for Trouble,” a final “hidden track” attached to “The Ghost,” Willie acknowledges loss with his own characteristic good spirit. The experimental, avant-garde number has plenty of aural squiggles, and ends with Nelson literally having the last laugh.
Stepping into the producer’s chair capably manned by Buddy Cannon in recent years, Micah wears many hats, playing several of the instruments (including cello), designing the album cover, creating the animation video with wife Alexandra Dascalu and bringing in collaborators like Daniel Lanois, the Doors’ John Densmore and Senegalese percussionist Magatte Sow to accompany Willie on his trusty acoustic guitar Trigger and longtime harmonica maestro Mickey Raphael.
There’s a fragility to Willie’s vocals on this stripped-down effort that’s reminiscent of his 1996 album Spirit, which featured him with his piano-playing sister Bobbie, rhythm guitarist Jody Payne and Johnny Gimble on fiddle. Micah puts Willie front and center, creating down-home arrangements that are both minimal and subtle, mostly recorded at the Hen House studios in Venice with engineer Harlan Steinberger.
Once again, Willie Nelson – whose voice rivals Sinatra's in its instant recognizability, warmth and ability to stamp any song with his personal style – provides a respite from our collective mortality, a pause before we shuffle off this mortal coil. The Last Leaf on the Tree proves Willie Nelson’s music will outlive us all.
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