For a guy who’s made his living in music, Willie Nelson sure has been a prolific book author. Autobiographies, biographies, essays, collections of letters and musings, remembrances of family and friends. Even a Christmas novella!

But fans know that his best writing is in his lyrics, in by his estimate over 1,000 songs he’s put pen (or typewriter) to paper in creating. He reflects on 160 of those in the coffee table book Energy Follows Thought: The Stories Behind My Songs (400 pp., $50, William Morrow).

It was written in collaboration with music journalist David Ritz and Nelson’s bandmate of half a century, harmonica man Mickey Raphael.

Early on, Nelson writes that in his songwriting it’s the words that “always” come first. And many times, fewer words do a better job.

“Say what you got to say in three minutes or less,” he offers. “Good storytelling is disciplined storytelling. The discipline comes in editing yourself. Understand that your listener doesn’t have all day to listen to you moan and groan.”

In addition to reproducing the full lyrics to each song, Nelson offers his reflections on them. Some are straight ahead “how I wrote it” entries, while others are deeper musings and dialogue fantasies with a dash of philosophy thrown in. And records like Phases and Stages, Red Headed Stranger, Tougher Than Leather, Spirit and Teatro get extra attention.
All the Willies are on display here: The grizzled gunslinger; peg-legged pirate, romantic dreamer, and drinking/smoking party monster. Some of the stories here he’s told and retold ad nauseum over the years. Like writing “On the Road Again” as a whim on an airplane when the producers of Honeysuckle Rose implored him that they needed a theme song; or how he sold “Family Bible” for $50 for grocery money and was going to do the same with “Hello Walls”—until Faron Young told him he was crazy and loaned him money so he could keep the rights to it.

Speaking of crazy, he was too nervous to gauge Patsy Cline’s reaction to his tune “Crazy” that her husband/manager really liked. So much that he brought Nelson directly from a picking party at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge to their home late at night. He stayed in the car until Patsy Cline herself appeared in the front yard and told him—essentially—to get his ass inside the house.
Nelson notes that a lot of his early songs were written in Houston in the late ‘50s when he was working as a DJ. And a bevy of famous friends show up in the remembrances and litany of photographs and ephemera from his now 90 years of life, with many of the images never before published.

You’ll see and read about Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Branford Marsalis, Ray Price, Leon Russell and assorted friends and family in these pages. And there’s Ray Charles, who professed shock that the person who wrote “Night Life” was actually a white guy!
The book is divided into themed sections. And while many of Willie’s “greatest hits” are represented, there’s a bevy of both way older and way more recent songs he gives equal consideration to, including the track that gives this book its name with these words:

“Imagine what you want/Then get out of the way/Remember energy follows thought/So be careful what you say.” And “Your mind is in control/Even when you do not know/And if you let it idle/Ain’t no telling where it’ll go.”

Consider Energy Follows Thought a no-brainer as the next birthday or Christmas gift for the Willie Nelson fan in your life, be it casual listener or the guy who knows the exact number of musicians who’ve signed Trigger, Nelson’s beloved and battered acoustic guitar of many, many decades.

“Trigger is the most precious nonhuman object I own,” Nelson writes in a caption underneath of photo of one of the world’s most famous instruments. Now, that would make a great subject for a song.