The road has raised Lukas Nelson just as much, if not more than his father did. In and out of buses as a tyke, he’s now spent over a decade as the captain of his own, continuously retreating under its wing. Sure, the latter taught him how to tie his shoes, throw a baseball, and lightly strum his first chords, but the former has also been under him since his knees were wobbly. It’s where he learned to keep his feet steady even when the ground under him rumbled. It’s where he’s played his way out of paternal comparisons, clawing twice as hard as his not-so-nominally gifted peers to make it half the distance up the mountain. It’s where he finally feels at home after almost two decades and a fully stamped passport. On American Romance, he manages to entrap 50 states in six strings with no outside noise to distract him, save the truckers on the freeway.
It also marks Nelson’s first solo record, and given his aforementioned genetic disposition, doing it himself was a war on two fronts. With no company kept, the journey of self-discovery sounds taxing, frantically paced, ebbing, and flowing between energy and exhaustion. It’s as if Nelson picks us up in the middle of the road trip, home so far behind him, yet the destination is the size of an ant in the windshield. The trek starts with a screech and halts on “Ain’t Done,” a wide-open, breezy, spectral post-LSD era rock revamp. Knick-knacks fly onto the dashboard, but the ruckus fails to interrupt his rambling about what he’s gonna do when he gets to where he’s going once we’re in the passenger seat. If he even gets there.
If he doesn’t make it, it’s not because of the lack of lessening the load. Nelson dropped off his former band, Promise of the Real, at an exit a few miles behind us, and he’s talking like a guy who’s let the silence get a little loud. Sentences fall out of him in fragments; babbling turns prophetic or proverbial, blunt isms getting wrapped in blank stare musings. “When I was younger, I had clever lines that now reside beside my eyes,” he warbles on, “Outsmarted.” He’s a dodgy hitchhiker, performatively so at times. Worn and weary, entrancing you with one sentence and frightening you with the next. He’s trimmed the branches that once gave him shade to get to the root of his identity. Now, he’s bare in the sun, with cracked lips and a croaky throat, moving only out of necessity.
And while he’s hellbent on getting his bare feet on the ground, something in the blood seems to direct his steps.“Disappearing Light,” with the help of Stephen Wilson Jr., whispers like a younger Willie, a Delorean trip away from a world of screens clouding the stars. Nelson, now 36, has never shied away from his father’s influence, but he’s certainly moved past tribute band territory. It’s not nearly as hollow an imitation as previous records with his road crew, now contorting what’s informed him to form fit his road-weathered flesh and bone. It’s protean, probably pulling from Dad’s record collection as he weaves in and out of eras like curves in the road. The tools and wherewithal at Nelson’s disposal make this sort of effort much less tacky than it could’ve been in greener hands than his.
Take “Born Running Out of Time,” for example. It evokes a Sisyphean soliloquy akin to Tom Petty’s “Runnin’ Down A Dream,” though refreshingly placed in a more modern context. On the other hand, “The Lie” is a heartbeat away from an Eagles anthem, guitar screeches, and soothing ’70s chord progressions cruising us by the beach at sunset. Paired with fellow kin of a Highwaymen and celebrated neo-nostalgic Shooter Jennings behind the control board, playing the hits has always been the goal. Figuring out how to abide by their rules is the grueling part. Mostly, it’s Americana barebones draped in visceral, cutting-edge songwriting skin. It concocts something special coming out of Nelson’s voice, distinct yet comfortable in a family tree full of old souls.
But every lyric is calloused, earned through the tread, just happening to confirm for himself where history tells us his heart lies. The bend is a loop at the record’s close, where our title track collages all these curated memories to make a scrapbook map of the moments that now act as an internal map. That wiry, tired tenor babbles on sights to see like bullet points, hitting all the highlights while staying in cruise control. When the rubber finally met the road, Nelson felt accustomed to its bumps and potholes. Watching him insist on figuring out where that intuition came from on his own was the journey that was taking priority. The roads and tunnels he’s always hellbent on romanticizing feel less hollow on a record where knowing your way around is the thesis statement.
We all fear becoming our parents. And in Nelson’s case, it’s hard to shake the shades of his father. But in maturing to and past the age Willie was when the going got good, he seems to have found some solace in the quirks and phrases that make most midlife men yelp at realizing what’s happening to them. The loop closes on “You Were It,” originally written by Lukas and performed by Willie on his 2004 “It Always Will Be” LP. In the chorus, he cries, “I once had a heart, now I have a song.” His hero’s journey bookends not with a parade but a patio beer back home after finally defining the story for himself. He’s never sounded more singular, and singular has never felt quite so familiar.
