Micah Nelson is no stranger to the music industry’s greatest players (an undeniably cool perk of growing up with country icon Willie Nelson as your dad). Still, even a star’s son can get starstruck. According to Micah, that’s precisely what happened when he watched long-time industry vet and friend of his father, Neil Young, at the Outside Lands Festival in 2012.
He said it was like a slap in the fact, a description that would likely garner a satisfactory smirk from Young himself.
Micah Nelson On Neil Young
Neil Young and Willie Nelson were collaborating and sharing stages before Micah Nelson was crawling in diapers, so it’s unsurprising that the Canadian singer-songwriter would be a familiar figure in Micah’s life. In a March 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, Micah described watching Young at Farm Aid and his father’s annual Fourth of July picnics. He said Young was almost ethereal.
“Neil was always just kind of this being, this overarching energy in my life, and that music is always there,” Micah said. “But it would kind of come and go in cycles. I would sort of venture off into these other worlds, and then he would come back into my life in these moments that always were so prescient, so synchronized, and exactly what I needed at that moment to remind me about rock & roll and rawness and just honesty and songwriting and how that transcends everything else in production or sonics. All that s***.”
“There’s just something so primal and primitive about Neil,” Micah continued, “especially when he is with Crazy Horse. I saw them at Golden Gate Park at the Outside Lands Festival in 2012. It was a full-circle moment and just sort of a slap in the face. It reminded me what I felt like I’d gotten too far from.”
Yet Another Full Circle Moment
If watching Neil Young at Outside Lands in 2012 was a full-circle moment for Micah Nelson, then joining Young on the road as Nils Lofgren’s replacement must be one more revolution completed. Micah’s inclusion in the band was a natural progression. The youngest son of Willie Nelson started to play with his older brother, Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real, which became Young’s primary backing band in the mid to late aughts.
In 2014, Micah caught Young’s attention more directly when his band Insects Versus Robots played an afternoon set at Farm Aid. “We didn’t think anyone was really watching us. But right when we got off stage, Neil was there, and he was like, ‘That was f***ing awesome.’ That was the first time where I felt like Neil recognized me and was like, ‘Oh, we’re friends now, and you’re a weird artist, too. Let’s stay connected.’”
So, they did. With Nils Lofgren busy performing with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Micah was the perfect guitarist to take his place. After all, he’d been playing Neil Young’s catalog for about half as long as he’s been alive.
Micah described the first time he saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse shortly after his 13th birthday: “Neil was like this psychedelic scarecrow, just lurching around and wielding this crazy feedback. They were just on a train of sound, and they would get in their little huddle and powwow. It was one of those moments where you get memories from the future.” Given how things turned out for Micah, it would appear those future memories were coming in loud and clear that day.
Photo by Gary Miller/Getty Images
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