Some nights, deep in a dream, Willie Nelson strums his 1969 Martin N-20 guitar, Trigger. When he wakes, he finds that he’s not performing “Whiskey River,” “On the Road Again” or one of his other country hits, but laying in bed, playing his wife’s arm. When this happens, Annie D’Angelo, Nelson’s partner of almost 40 years, laughs. “It’s better than his night terrors,” D’Angelo said recently, idling a few feet away from her husband aboard his tour bus, the Honeysuckle Rose.
Nelson had performed the previous night in Connecticut, and in the morning, he and the band were headed to Philadelphia. But today was for rest, so they parked the Rose in New Jersey, drew the window shades, and cranked the A.C. At age 93, Nelson still has an alarmingly firm handshake. He was padding around in socks and a Farm Aid shirt; D’Angelo, 70, wore a black T-shirt and jeans, and her long gray hair flowed past her shoulders.
A man once prone to drunken barroom scuffles, Nelson no longer imbibes. That afternoon, D’Angelo handed him something to sip and placed a paper towel beneath it in case he spilled. She is, in more ways than one, Nelson’s indefatigable guardian: his benevolent bouncer, his trusted confidante, the one who braids his hair.
Yet even among his loyal fans, D’Angelo has remained something of an unknowable figure. Nelson has released more than a hundred albums, but written just one song about her, a Django Reinhardt-inspired number titled “Annie.” There are no lyrics. She prefers it that way.
Willie Nelson can sometimes seem like more of an entity than a living, breathing, imperfect man, a force that has always been and always will be. His voice oozes with warmth and a soulfulness that drifts across genres. But a fundamental reason he’s still doing this as a nonagenarian is his wife.
This fall, the intensely private D’Angelo is slowly getting ready to open up.
In Nelson’s new memoir, “The Last Leaf,” out Nov. 10, he reveals more about the woman he’s called his soul mate. D’Angelo is the one who hatched the idea to host festivals at Luck, the couple’s sprawling ranch in Spicewood, Texas. She is instrumental in the success of Nelson’s THC businesses, Willie’s Remedy and Willie’s Reserve. She is also the woman who, four years ago, literally saved Nelson’s life when he came right up to the edge of losing it.
Why only begin to share some of her story now? “Having people just assume what our relationship was … ” D’Angelo said aboard the bus, “You know, clearing that up was better than letting them decide who we were.”
‘Like a Locomotive’
In person and in conversation, D’Angelo can be fiery, even intimidating. When she speaks, it’s often in quick bursts. She shuffles or paces as she tells stories, a counterbalance to Nelson’s laconic drawl.
“Annie comes at you like a locomotive. If you’re not careful, she’ll run over you. If you are careful, she’ll run over you the same,” Nelson writes in “The Last Leaf.”
On social media, D’Angelo likes to fire off barbs about the state of the country. (Pete Hegseth? “Kegsbreath.”)
“She’s outwardly political in a way Willie isn’t,” said John Spong, host of the “One By Willie” podcast and a former Willie-ologist for Texas Monthly.
D’Angelo used to race motorcycles and knows how to shoot. She scoffs at the idea that Democrats like herself don’t own firearms. As a young girl in California, she said, she learned self-reliance working alongside her mom, a Sicilian immigrant, washing canines at a pet groomer, “dollar a dog.”
She eventually carved out a career as a Hollywood makeup artist, and, one morning, found Willie Nelson in her chair. He’d been cast as Doc Holliday in a 1986 TV-movie remake of “Stagecoach.” Members of the production wanted him to cut his hair. D’Angelo intervened, knowing that doing so would be a mistake. Nelson dug her candor.
The two had an instant rapport, but she was never one to get star-struck. She also had three personal rules: Don’t date a divorced man, a man with children, or a celebrity. Nelson was all of the above, plus, in his telling, a man for whom fidelity was a challenge.
Then, as now, Nelson speaks matter-of-factly about his shortcomings.
“I did everything wrong for many years and paid for it,” Nelson said on the bus. “And I’m still paying for it in some ways, but, you know, that’s what crazy people do.”
He and D’Angelo wed in 1991; her first marriage, his fourth. Why was she willing to break her rules?
Simple: “He felt like home.”
Blocking Everything Out
Nelson already had five children with his previous wives, and he and D’Angelo added another two to the mix, Micah, 36, and Lukas, 37. “I was always the bad cop,” D’Angelo said. “He dadded up when it was important, but mostly all of that was left to me.”
When Nelson wasn’t touring, D’Angelo said, she tried to give her kids a “Huck Finn” existence as much as possible at the family’s homes in Texas and Hawaii.
It’s this window into their family that Nelson and D’Angelo are sharing in-depth for the first time.
In “The Last Leaf,” D’Angelo reveals that she once planned on taking her sons and leaving Nelson. While she was out grocery shopping, though, one of his songs came on. “I realized then that I couldn’t get away from you, and then I realized I didn’t want to,” she says, to Nelson, in the book.
The singer-songwriter Nathaniel Rateliff, a regular touring partner of Nelson’s, described D’Angelo as a person with a strong sense of self who keeps the dreaded hangers-on away. “A lot of people want to get close to Willie that probably don’t need to be close to Willie,” he said. “Annie’s really good at blocking a lot of that.”
In a phone interview, Micah Nelson described his dad as nice to a fault. “He’s what I would call a ‘toxic empath,” the younger Nelson said. “Inevitably, you’re going to have mosquitoes who come circling, and they’re going to take advantage of that kindness and generosity.” His mother, he noted, is there as his dad’s protector, “even when he doesn’t want to protect himself.”
In the Wings
These days, Nelson likes to say that he’s “chasing 94 and dragging 93.” D’Angelo makes sure that he’s never far from an oxygen cannula.
Beyond being one of the most prodigious marijuana tokers in the modern history of the plant, Nelson had also spent years as a tobacco smoker, sometimes at the rate of three packs a day.
“Put so many bad things in my lungs that I had a lung collapse one time. And, you know, I paid for it,” Nelson said.
In 2016, D’Angelo was standing by her husband’s side when he was diagnosed with COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. In 2022, she was by his side again when he contracted a severe case of Covid.
She said she had been preparing for such a scenario. D’Angelo had trained as a medical assistant, and had been helping out at Covid vaccination sites near Austin. When it happened, they were on the road. Nelson was 89, his lungs were weak, and D’Angelo kept him isolated in the back of the bus. As the bus rolled home to Texas, she administered Paxlovid, and arranged for a doctor to come to the house with monoclonal antibodies. But even with the intensity of the treatment, Nelson nearly slipped away.
“For 10 days I was really out there wanting to die,” Nelson said. “And she was sleeping on an ironing board in the next room to make sure she could be here when I died.”
“Massage table,” D’Angelo clarified.
“It almost took me out,” Nelson said. “In fact, there was a few days there I wanted to go. And she told me, ‘If you die, I’ll kill you.’”
He has battled long Covid ever since. D’Angelo rarely lets a visitor near Nelson without a face mask, and she reminds him to do his pulmonary work. Luckily, singing is an ideal exercise for lung strength.
In Philadelphia, after their New Jersey rest day, Nelson headlined a bill along with Neil Young. Behind a curtain, he took his seat next to Micah, who is in his dad’s band and also backs Young, and, like his brother Lukas, is a solo artist. Each set, D’Angelo is out there until the last moment, helping her husband and son.
Under the stage lights, Nelson looked simultaneously old and ageless, wearing a puffer jacket for warmth and a red bandanna for style. Though he occasionally coughed into his fist, his voice was singular and strong.
As his band played the final few bars, Micah helped him rise from his seat. Nelson threw his cowboy hat out into the crowd like a Frisbee and blew kisses with both hands as he shuffled off the stage. D’Angelo was waiting for him backstage.
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