Most stories about Lukas Nelson start with referencing his popular pop, Willie. So when I interviewed Lukas in advance of his Santa Rosa appearance in early 2024, I made a point to ask a series of questions about his own work, then later in the interview I asked a question about Willie. Big mistake.
“I don’t want to make the interview all about growing up with dad. That’s probably not where we want to go with this. Maybe that’s what the readers want to hear. If that’s the case, then that’s fine, we can just part ways here, but you know, it should be I think about what we’re doing here as a band.”
I quickly pivoted to the rest of my questions about Lukas, his band, and his new album. And in the story, I don’t even name Willie Nelson until the final paragraph. Below are a few excerpts from the story. To read the full story, click here.

Lukas Nelson photo by Shervin Lainez
“I have a knack for putting myself in others’ shoes when I write,” he said. “I like to … put myself in the mind and the heart and spirit of someone else and try and write from a different perspective sometimes.” …
In 2014, Neil Young invited Nelson and Promise of the Real to be his band, filling the shoes of the incomparable Crazy Horse. They were on Bottle Rock’s main stage with Young in Napa in 2019, ripping through the blistering encore, “Rockin’ in the Free World,” when, to adhere to the curfew, Bottle Rock cut the sound at precisely 10pm. Young appeared momentarily stunned. Then he kept playing without amplification, shouting lyrics through a dead mic.
The crowd of thousands could barely hear Young and the band, but their message was loud and clear. They would not be silenced. “I thought that was pretty rock and roll, the epitome of why you want to play with a guy like Neil,” Nelson said. “Neil wanted to play, and we were backing him up, so we kept going.” …
Nelson believes that music should be “beyond politics and bring people together with more of a focus on the heart, and finding heart, and living in heart and empathy.” Authentic music can “go straight to the heart and the soul. I think that people who aren’t so much in touch with their hearts and souls can have that awakened in them if exposed to a good concert or a good song,” he said.
“I’ve got good friends on both sides of the aisle, and I find it to be really important that my music can reach both of them. I think it’s more effective to try and reach people’s hearts than it is to tell them how to think or what to say or do.”
Nelson spent some of his formative years with his parents and brother living on Maui not far from spiritual leader Ram Dass. “I was trying to get into the art of what being alive was,” he told the Austin American-Statesman. When he was 13, he was reading Hermann Hesse and “already trying to figure out was life was all about.”