See Willie Nelson and Sons Lukas and Micah Play ‘Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)’

Willie Nelson and his sons Lukas and Micah are waiting out the coronavirus pandemic at their Luck Ranch in Spicewood, Texas. The three are killing time with card games, gardening, and lots of music, including last Friday’s Luck Reunion, which drew more than 100,000 online viewers. The trio closed out the livestream with a moving short acoustic set that included Willie’s live staples “Whiskey River” and “On the Road Again,” along with his sons’ original songs. 

One of those highlights was Lukas’“Turn Off the News (Build a Garden),” a song about finding the good in a dark time. It’s the perfect message for our current crisis, with lyrics like “I just want to love you while I can/All these other thoughts have me confused/I don’t need to try and understand/Maybe I’ll get up, turn off the news.”

“You have to look at the positive in everything,” Lukas told Rolling Stone last week. “[My dad is] concerned for all of the people not able to work. I’m concerned about that too … Until they lift the gather ban, everybody is kind of between a rock and a hard place. But on the other hand, I saw images of carbon emissions all but disappearing. I saw things from Italy, saying the Venice canals are running clean for the first time in like, forever. Nobody is denying climate change anymore, only the fringe folk are doing that — which is a good thing.”

On March 27th, Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real will release Naked Garden, with previously unreleased songs and alternate cuts that came out of the sessions for their 2019 album at Shangri-La studios.

”When we walked out of Shangri-La recording studio on the sixth day, we knew we had captured something special,” the band said in a statement. “It was so productive, in fact, that there was simply no way to fit all the material on one release. So, think of this project as something of an epilogue to our previous album, Turn Off the News (Build a Garden).”