Lukas Nelson coming to Napa with new music and a new band: Nov. 9 at the Uptown Theatre
Lukas Nelson is a talented and prolific Grammy-winning country/Americana singer-songwriter. The son of Willie Nelson, he has recorded nine albums over the past 15 years, the latest being American Romance, released in June. His 2019 Grammy Award honored his co-creation, with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, of the music of the 2018 re-make of A Star is Born.
Nelson and his band will perform at the Uptown Theatre in Napa on Sunday, Nov. 9, at 8 p.m. Details and tickets are available at uptowntheatrenapa.com.
On the phone from a tour stop in Omaha, Nebraska last month, Nelson talked about his new band and the new album. Asked about his separation from Promise of the Real, his old band mates, he emphasized that the change was less significant than it appears. “Honestly, “he said, “I didn’t even want to make a press release about the band change.
“I started Promise of the Real. A lot of them ended up going and playing with Neil Young. Most of them still are. I just wanted to keep playing the music that I’d written. I felt that some of the members of the band and I had gone down different paths in life, and I just chose my own path separately. But it’s always been my music, my songwriting.
“I really took care of those guys. I love them as brothers; we all love each other, but they understood and supported me as the lead creative force in that band. So I’m just continuing on with what I do. It’s really not that different. There’s a different drummer and a few added musicians, but that’s pretty much it.”
Nelson described enjoying names for the new group. “Last night we were Daffy and the Quack Heads,” he said. “We’ve been the Golden Diapers on this tour. We’ve been the Shadow Band, which is sort of meta in its own way. We’ve been the Spread Eagles. I’m just trying to poke fun at why people get so hung up on the names of a band. I don’t really think it matters that much.”
Nelson spoke about the influences for creating the new album, songs about love, about loss and death, about resilience, about feeling small. “American Romance is sort of a dissertation,” he said. “I wanted to write about the road and how it feels to try and have romance and try to have a normal life while I’m traveling, doing what I do, never being willing to give up what I do.
“I like the American landscape in novels. I used to read John Steinbeck and I like his novels. I like Cormac McCarthy. I like these great American authors. There’s a book that Steinbeck wrote called Travels with Charley that really impacted me when I was younger. I seem to feel that my whole life has been like that in a way, although not with a dog.” (Steinbeck wrote about a long road trip re-discovering America with his standard poodle Charley.)
“I’m interested in the sacrifices that come with being on the road,” he said, “and what you get to see, and the similarities between people. You really see that people are more or less the same. And there’s more that brings us together than divides us in this country, and in the world really.”
Finally, Nelson spoke with admiration about the members of the new band. “We’ve got Corey McCormick, who’s been playing with me for years, and he’s amazing, a great bass player. And we’ve got Maxwell Flanders, a solid drummer, a great strength behind me. We have an amazing left-handed man in steel guitar, lap steel world, Dakota Holden. And we have Jake Simpson, a virtuoso fiddle player who plays guitar too, which is what I really needed. He also sings and sings background, which is helpful. And then there’s Eli Kleiner on keys, and the way he plays is great. He plays the organ and the piano and really adds a lot.
“So we’ve got a real full sound with us. And it’s very much, to me, like going to church when I play with these guys. It’s a revival, and we can work an audience into a frenzy at times, go up and down and bring people on a musical journey, which is what we plan for the Uptown in Napa.”
