“I Wanted to Get to the Heart of What America Meant to Me”: Lukas Nelson on the Joy, Pain and Power of American Romance

Lukas Nelson’s new album is a truckstop diner on Thanksgiving Day—a turkey plate special and a stale cup of coffee served with a smile from a kind stranger. It’s the nonstop hum of a Walmart parking lot and the hush of a midnight flight. It’s the penthouse view of a city’s glow through double-glazed glass—and a roadside Holiday Inn, where all the drifters and dreamers hum a song of humankind.

Mostly, though, the album is a car window. Through it flicker scenes from Nelson’s life: grain silos and wind turbines, billboards and vacancy signs, markers of progress along an odyssey still winding toward some long-promised dream.

“I felt that I needed to write the story of growing up,” Nelson tells Holler, speaking about American Romance, his debut solo album. It marks his first release since parting ways with his longtime band, Promise of the Real, and his first with Sony Music Nashville. “When people would ask me where I was from, where I was brought up—I couldn’t say one state. It was all of them.”

Raised on the road as the son of country icon Willie Nelson, Lukas was shaped by the highways, byways and side-of-the-road civilizations that make up America. On American Romance, across a dozen carefully rendered tracks, he pens a love letter to that upbringing—and to the country that raised him.

You can hear it in the racing heartland rock of “Born Runnin’ Outta Time,” which conjures wide-open plains and restless ambition; in the breezy intimacy of “Montana,” its folk sensibilities dancing along the mountain ridge; and most fully in the title track, where dulcimer flourishes and warm rhythms tell the tale of it all.

“Each song is a chapter,” he says, “that describes the loves and losses, the heartache, the elation, and the joy of growing up and being raised by the country. It explores philosophy, religion—it’s full of the questions I ask myself about what it means to be an American now.”

That question—what it means to be American in a time of division, violence, and noise—is one Nelson doesn’t answer through headlines or politics. Instead, he turns inward, away from media narratives, toward the real people and places he’s encountered along the way.

“I tried to leave all of the media stuff out of it,” he shares. “I wanted to get to the heart of what America meant to me, devoid of what I'm supposed to be feeling."

And what he found was hope.

"What I'm actually feeling is encouraged,” he adds. “By the people that I'm around most of the time. By most people's ability to sit down, talk and understand.”

On the road, that hope becomes real. In diners, gas stations, and green rooms, he meets strangers who remind him why he believes in humanity in the first place.

“I've learned to love people and their differences,” he says. “This album is a study of myself and how I relate to those people.”

In that sense, American Romance is Nelson’s most personal work yet, one that likely couldn’t have emerged from within Promise of the Real. The band, which he founded, spent 15 years making bold, socially conscious roots rock statements and even backed Neil Young on tours and records. They even contributed to A Star Is Born in 2018, gaining cinematic attention. But eventually, Nelson felt the need to go his own way.

“I didn't want to keep doing that,” he says simply. “I'm my own artist. I need to follow that journey.”

So he returned to the reason he started in the first place: songwriting. He traced it all the way back to the first song he ever wrote—’You Were It’, a bare, heartfelt track he penned as a young teen. His father recorded it for It Always Will Be in 2004, and family friend Kris Kristofferson heard in it something undeniable. “You have no choice—you’re going to be a songwriter,” Kristofferson reportedly told him.

That early affirmation helped Nelson find his voice—and gave him the confidence to use it on his own terms. In the years since, he’s carved out a sound, career, and fanbase distinct from his family legacy. Now, with American Romance, he circles back to that first spark of inspiration and looks ahead to a new chapter beyond the group that shaped much of his artistic identity.

Newly untethered, Nelson was free to dig deeper. To explore his past and unravel a life lived in constant motion–to find the meaning, the heartbreak, the beauty and the complexity in all of it. What emerged were 12 songs that hold that full spectrum. Across the album, themes of peace, patience and introspection surface again and again. Forgiveness and release are constant undercurrents. You get the sense that Nelson had to make peace with a lot before this album could come to be.

“There's a banner that flies in the house that I grew up in,” he shares. “It says: ‘In the end, it all comes down to how well we learn to laugh, how well we learn to love and how well we learn to let go’.

That kind of quiet wisdom echoes throughout American Romance, but it’s that last line–let go–that resonates most. It whispers through songs like the hopeful ‘Ain’t Done’ and the gut-punch of ‘The Lie’. But it’s especially present in ‘Pretty Much’, a sweeping meditation on life’s final moments: the sheer beauty of being surrounded by loved ones, feeling the bittersweet relief of release, and knowing you did the best you could. That, Nelson says, is what spurs him on in everything he does.

“All of my art is intended to express fully the width and breadth of my own human experience,” he explains. “Knowing that it's impermanent only makes it more important and more powerful. That impermanence–and that understanding that we all will have to let go at one point–makes me feel a sense of urgency with my art. To just build a great sandcastle before the big wave comes.”

American Romance is merely the beginning of that mission, and Nelson is just getting started. At the end of the day–be it from some truckstop diner or in a big city high-rise–Nelson plans to keep chasing the music in his head, and crafting songs that have something to say.

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