Competing for the same Grammy Award with someone who wrote your all-time favorite song is one type of daunting challenge. Competing against a close loved one, let alone a relative, is another. Lukas Nelson is one of the few musicians who can say they’ve experienced both. The eldest living son of country music icon Willie Nelson has enjoyed a prolific and successful music career himself. That has inevitably put him in the same ring as his father, who remains busy as ever well into his 90s.
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Both Willie and Lukas Nelson received a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Country Album for Oh, What a Beautiful World and American Romance, respectively. The Nelsons share the nomination with Margo Price for Hard Headed Woman, Zach Top for Ain’t In It For My Health, and Charley Crockett for Dollar A Day. During a 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Lukas discussed what it was like competing against his father for a Grammy. “Against is a strong word,” Lukas said with a smile.
“Alongside is better,” he continued. “I mean, the Nelsons have a 40% chance of winning, which is pretty good.” Later in the interview, Lukas cited “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” as his favorite song. Once again, he pointed out the irrelevance of his relation to the track. “That’s probably my favorite song,” Lukas said. “The fact that it happens to be written by my father is mind-blowing.”
Willie Nelson Reflects on the Song That Would Become His Son’s Favorite
Willie Nelson wrote and recorded “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” for the 1980 film Honeysuckle Rose, in which Nelson plays country singer Buck Bonham. Lukas Nelson, Willie’s second son, wouldn’t be born until eight years later on Christmas Day, 1988. The “Crazy” songwriter had actually written the moving ballad in the late 1970s. But he held onto it until the Honeysuckle Rose film came about. “Sometimes, I’ll keep a song for a while before I release it,” Willie later said (via SongFacts). “I like to wait until I think it has a chance. If it’s an exceptionally good song, and it gets lost in the shuffle, you always wish that you would have waited for a better time to put it out.”
And indeed, Willie seemed to have made the right choice. “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” is a beloved addition to the songwriter’s catalogue—and not just because of the rogue performance at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas when Willie’s guitarist, Bee Spears, put on tights and a tutu and strapped himself into a harness from an earlier performance of Peter Pan. “He was having a terrific time swooping and sailing and doing his impression of an angel flying too close to the ground,” Willie wrote in his autobiography, Willie. “It was the funniest thing I ever saw onstage.”
Of course, the song also has plenty of opportunities to be reflective and sincere. Willie has often used the song as a way to pay tribute to his eldest son, Billy Nelson, who died by suicide on Christmas Day, 1991. His younger brother, Lukas, was only three years old. The grieving father told a friend at the time, “I’ve never experienced anything so devastating in my life,” per People.
Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images
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