Willie Nelson on Willie Nelson: Interviews and Encounters (Musicians in Their Own Words)

Curating the most illuminating interviews with an American icon isn’t easy.

Willie Nelson’s words can be found everywhere: TV, radio, movies, and on the many musical recordings he is responsible for over a decades‑long career. Nelson, the last surviving member of the Highwaymen, has outlasted most of his generation of outlaw country musicians. And he is still releasing albums—and featuring on tracks with current superstars such as Beyoncé. Willie is an American institution.

Willie Nelson on Willie Nelson is a collection of interviews that illuminates him not only as a musician but also as an actor, writer, political and animal‑rights activist, drug advocate, and environmentalist. These interviews with Nelson, many of them unseen for decades, range from the early 1970s to 2020 and take us through the ups and downs of his remarkable life and into the compositional history of his most beloved songs and albums.
This collection reveals the icon as a complex and contradictory man, elusive at times, outspoken at others. It celebrates the life and work not only of Nelson but also a bevy of committed journalists, some of them amateur, whom Nelson welcomed, one and all, to share his sometimes‑radical worldview with an adoring public.

Willie Nelson on Willie Nelson is the definitive source for anyone wanting to authentically encounter the legend in print.

Paul Maher Jr. is the author of Becoming Kerouac: A Writer In His Time as well as the editor of Miles on Miles and Tom Waits on Tom Waits among other titles. He resides in Lubec, Maine, with his wife, Caitlin.