Lukas Nelson’s New Album Is ‘A Love Letter To The Country That Raised Me’

Lukas Nelson took his first steps on a tour bus.

He grew up on highways shadowed by towering grain silos and roads that twisted through ragged hills. He’s not sure there’s an interstate in the U.S. that he hasn’t seen.

Sometimes people ask where he grew up. He’s not sure how to answer.

“I grew up traveling on the roads since I was a baby,” said Nelson, a Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter and the 36-year-old son of Willie Nelson. “I feel like America really raised me.”

Nelson decided to write about his experience of being raised on the road for American Romance, a 12-song solo album that debuted last month via Sony Music Nashville. A departure from his longtime band Promise of the Real, American Romance comes billed as the solo debut for Nelson, a tenured musician who’s worked with Neil Young, Lady Gaga and Lainey Wilson, among others.

For the album, Nelson wanted to write “a John Steinbeck-equse narrtive of my upbringing and travels,” he said in a phone interview with Forbes. Listeners hear the result on a collection of rich, detailed songs that chronicle restless life lessons and open-hearted adventures.

“The diners and truck stops, Thanksgiving dinners away from home … I wanted it to feel like each song is a chapter in a great American novel. A love letter to the country that raised me,” Nelson said.

For American Romance, Nelson recorded at Sunset Sound Recording Studio in Hollywood alongside another second-generation song-maker – Shooter Jennings, a sought-after producer who sat behind the board for releases from Brandi Carlile, Turnpike Troubadours, Charley Crockett and others.

Working with Jennings? It’s comfortable, Nelson said.

“He brought out what I feel like what the best sonic quality you can get,” Nelson said. He continued, “The ideas he had, in terms of how to present the music, and to bring out the best in me, performance-wise … I felt really grateful for his influence.”

The album blends shades of undeniable country influence (on the fiddle-drenched number “Outsmarted”) with ambitious heartland rock (“Runnin’ Out of Time”) and time-tested folk storytelling (no example more evident than the title track, “American Romance”). He enlists guest features from troubadour Stephen Wilson Jr. – on the sobering cut “Disappearing Light” – and Sierra Ferrell, who harmonizes on “Friend In The End,” an endearing number where the two sing “I guess I just found me a friend/ I think I can call you my friend in the end.”

American Romance begins with a declaration from Nelson. In the chorus of the robust opening number “Ain’t Done,” he sings “God ain’t done with you” – five words that remind listeners of the highs and lows that come with living another day. Nelson co-wrote “Ain’t Done” with sought-after Nashville songwriter Aaron Raitiere.

“We fleshed that [song] out in an hour or less. It really wrote itself,” Nelson said. He added, “Sometimes, the good ones come quick and easy and you don’t really overthink it too much.”

And the album ends with “You Were It,” a tender-to-the-touch country tune that Nelson said he wrote as an 11-year-old learning his way around a song.

“That song, when I wrote it, my dad heard it and Kris Kristofferson heard it,” Nelson. “My dad loved it so much he recorded it. He put it on his album It Always Will Be. That really got me the confidence I needed to be a songwriter. That and Kris said, ‘Are you going to be a songwriter?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘well, you don’t have a choice after that song.’”