The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity--and My Longest Love Affair

Beloved American icon Willie Nelson shares his well-earned wisdom about reaching an astonishing creative flourishing, and not coincidentally, an even deeper union with the love of his life, Annie.

Willie Nelson is 93, and he has not been slowing down. In the past twelve years, he has recorded twenty-one new studio albums, written more than fifty new songs and seven books, and headlined over eight hundred live shows. What has been going on? He’s not going to get mawkish about it, but he does have some thoughts. With his trademark down-home wit, he opens up wide 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,” Nelson writes, “I stay in the present.” That captures the spirt of The Last Leaf: Forging ahead, it also flashes back to life-altering moments, including facing almost-certain death during COVID and what he gained from that.

Woven into recollections of his own life as an artist is the 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 early spark of romance, 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, even its deepening, into the pure 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.