Curating the most notorious, illuminating interviews from 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. Nelson is an American institution.

This collection reveals the icon as a complex and contradictory man, elusive at times, revealing at others. Willie Nelson on Willie Nelson is a collection of interviews that illuminates him not only as a musician, but 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 until 2020 and tie together with connective stories tethering a biographical timeline and compositional history of his most-beloved songs and albums. They reveal not only the life and work 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 on an adoring public.