Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) – Lukas & Willie Nelson

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

Introduction

There’s something deeply calming about tending a garden—getting your hands in the soil, watching something grow. It reminds me of a moment in my own life when, feeling overwhelmed by the constant buzz of headlines and social media, I turned off the television and spent an entire weekend planting tomatoes and basil. That peaceful rebellion is exactly what Lukas Nelson captures in Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)—a song that doesn’t shout to be heard but rather whispers an invitation to slow down, reconnect, and rebuild from the roots.

About The Composition

  • Title: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)
  • Composer: Lukas Nelson and Promise of the Real
  • Premiere Date: June 14, 2019
  • Album/Collection: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden)
  • Genre: Country rock / Americana

Background

According to the Wikipedia entry, Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) is the fifth studio album by Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real. Released in 2019, the title track quickly became an anthem for those feeling disillusioned by the noise and negativity of modern media. The album reflects a philosophy of mindful living and quiet resistance. With roots in Nelson’s upbringing—his father being the legendary Willie Nelson—Lukas brings a familiar sincerity and country soul to the message: change begins at home.

This song emerged in a period marked by global unrest, divisive politics, and 24-hour news cycles. It resonated not only as a critique of the information overload but also as a call to action for compassion, community, and creation.

Musical Style

The track blends classic Americana and country rock influences with a laid-back, organic arrangement. Clean guitars, a grooving rhythm section, and Lukas Nelson’s warm, clear vocals create an inviting soundscape. There’s nothing overproduced here—just honest, heartfelt musicianship that serves the song’s message.

The musical structure is simple, with verses that build gently into a memorable chorus. The instrumentation includes acoustic and electric guitars, piano, and subtle backing vocals, all working in harmony to create a sound that’s both modern and timeless.

Lyrics/Libretto

The lyrics advocate for intentional living and emotional presence. Lines like “Turn off the news and build a garden / Just my neighborhood and me / We might feel a bit less hardened / We might feel a bit more free” offer a kind of musical therapy—a reminder that sometimes the best way to respond to chaos is to choose peace.

Rather than being escapist, the song promotes active engagement with one’s immediate surroundings: building gardens, supporting neighbors, and choosing love over fear.

Performance History

Though not a classical piece with concert hall performances, the song has been widely performed at music festivals and on national television, often gaining traction during times of social unrest. It’s been embraced not only by fans of Americana but also by broader audiences looking for a sense of calm and grounding.

Cultural Impact

The message of Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) reached far beyond country rock circles. Its themes were echoed during the COVID-19 pandemic when people literally began turning to gardening, cooking, and home-centered activities to cope with uncertainty. The song was featured in various playlists and editorials focused on mental wellness and social resilience.

Its cultural relevance also stems from its eco-conscious message and advocacy for community-oriented living, aligning with broader movements around sustainability and mindfulness.

Legacy

While still relatively new, Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) feels destined to endure as a comfort song—one people return to when the world gets too loud. Its legacy is intertwined with its timing: a gentle protest against division, a musical push for reconnection. Lukas Nelson, through this song, adds another thoughtful branch to the rich family tree of American songwriting.

Conclusion

Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) is more than just a song—it’s a philosophy. It’s an invitation to step away from noise and step into something real. Whether you’re literally planting seeds or just looking for a little stillness in your day, this track offers both solace and strength.

I highly recommend the acoustic version for its intimacy, and if you get a chance, watch Lukas perform it live—he brings an authenticity that reminds you how powerful music can be when it comes from a place of truth.

So next time the headlines feel too heavy, maybe try this: turn off the news, and let the music grow.

Video

Lyrics

I believe that every heart is kind
Some are just a little under-used
Hatred is a symptom of the times
Lost in these uneducated blues
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
Turn off the news and build a garden
Just my neighborhood and me
We might feel a bit less hardened
We might feel a bit more free
Turn off the news and raise your kids
Give them something to believe in
Teach them how to be good people
Give them hope that they can see
Hope that they can see
Turn off the news and build a garden with me
Trust builds trust
All that negativity’s a bust
Trust builds trust
Don’t you wanna be happy?
Turn off the news and build a garden
Just my neighborhood and me
We might feel a bit less hardened
We might feel a bit more free
Turn off the news and raise the kids
Give them something to believe in
Teach them how to be good people
Give them hope that they can see
Hope that they can see
Turn off the news and build a garden with me
Turn off the news and build a garden with me

Related Post

Country Music

LEFTY FRIZZELL WROTE “I LOVE YOU A THOUSAND WAYS” FROM JAIL TO THE WIFE HE FEARED HE’D LOSE. THREE YEARS LATER, THAT PRIVATE APOLOGY BECAME A NO. 1 COUNTRY HIT. Long before the Grand Ole Opry, Columbia Records or the vocal style that would influence George Jones and Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzell was a 19-year-old husband in serious trouble. He had married Alice Harper in March 1945, when both were still teenagers. By 1947 they had a young daughter and were living in Roswell, New Mexico, where Lefty was trying to build a music career while Alice worked and helped hold the family together. Then Lefty was arrested and convicted on a statutory-rape charge. He served six months in the county jail. For a young man already married with a baby at home, the confinement carried another fear beyond the sentence itself: that Alice might take their daughter and leave. So Lefty wrote to her. Country Music Hall of Fame records that he wrote numerous songs to Alice while incarcerated. One of them was “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” a plainspoken apology and declaration of devotion born inside the jail rather than a Nashville writing room. At the time, there was no reason to think the song would ever matter beyond their marriage. After his release, Lefty struggled on. He failed an audition for the Louisiana Hayride, moved around the Southwest and eventually found steady work at the Ace of Clubs in Big Spring, Texas. There, his unusual phrasing and original songs began attracting attention. In 1950, producer Don Law heard a demo and signed him to Columbia. For Lefty’s first single, the label paired “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time” with the song he had written to Alice from jail. Both sides went to No. 1. The success arrived with astonishing speed, but the marriage behind that first record was never simple. Lefty’s drinking, touring and personal problems placed years of strain on the family. Still, Alice remained part of his life for three decades. Bear Family’s account notes that by the time of Lefty’s death in 1975 they were living apart, yet remained in daily contact. That gives “I Love You a Thousand Ways” a different weight from an ordinary early hit. It was not written after Lefty Frizzell became famous enough to sell romance to an audience. It came from a frightened young husband trying to reach one woman on the other side of a jail wall — years before the rest of country music learned his name.

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS TOLD HIS PRODUCER THE WESTERN ALBUM HE WANTED TO MAKE PROBABLY WOULDN’T SELL 500 COPIES. COLUMBIA LET HIM DO IT ANYWAY — AND GUNFIGHTER BALLADS AND TRAIL SONGS BECAME THE RECORD THAT DEFINED HIM. By 1959, Marty Robbins did not need to prove he could make hits. He had already scored with “Singing the Blues,” “A White Sport Coat” and other crossover records aimed well beyond the traditional country audience. But the music he most wanted to record came from somewhere older: the Western stories his grandfather had told him as a boy, the cowboy songs of Gene Autry, and the landscape of the American Southwest. Columbia was less enthusiastic. Robbins had to persuade producer Don Law to let him make an entire album of Western songs. His argument was simple: he had given the label enough hits that they owed him one project for himself. Robbins even admitted the record might not sell 500 copies. On April 7, 1959, they went into the studio. Eight hours later, the entire twelve-song album was finished. Among the songs were “Big Iron,” “The Master’s Call” and “El Paso,” the latter built around a story Robbins had been carrying in his head for years. He had first thought of the title while driving through El Paso in 1955; two years later, with his wife driving their Cadillac toward Arizona, the full song finally poured out while Robbins worked in the back seat. Grady Martin supplied the Spanish-flavored guitar that gave “El Paso” its unmistakable shape. When the album appeared that September, the song quickly became the centerpiece. Columbia released it as a single in October — along with a shortened version because the full recording ran more than four and a half minutes, unusually long for radio. Fans preferred the complete version. “El Paso” reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts and later won the Grammy for Best Country & Western Performance. Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs sold more than a million copies and was eventually added to the National Recording Registry. Its legacy was larger than one hit. At a time when Nashville was increasingly polishing country toward pop crossover, Robbins proved there was still a national audience for long-form Western storytelling, cinematic characters and songs that behaved almost like miniature movies. The album Robbins feared might barely sell at all became part of what later Western singers called “Cowboy 101” — a record generations of artists learned from before they ever tried telling their own stories of guns, deserts and border towns.

Country Music

ONE TOP 10 SONG PULLED TOM T. HALL OUT OF A VIRGINIA RADIO STATION. WITHIN A FEW YEARS, HE WAS WRITING COUNTRY SONGS LIKE THREE-MINUTE SHORT STORIES. In the early 1960s, Hall was still working as a radio DJ in Virginia, writing songs between shifts after earlier years in Kentucky bluegrass groups and Armed Forces Radio. Nashville publisher Jimmy Key heard enough promise to place Hall’s “D.J. for a Day” with Grand Ole Opry singer Jimmy C. Newman, whose recording reached the country Top 10 in 1963–64. That success convinced Hall to move to Nashville in 1964 and try songwriting full-time. The move quickly paid off. Dave Dudley took Hall’s “Mad” into the Top 10, while Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” gave him his first No. 1 in 1965. Hall was proving that a country song could carry more than romance or heartbreak; it could sound like a newspaper column, a conversation overheard at a bar, or a short story compressed into three minutes. By the end of the decade, that approach had become unmistakable. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” went to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts for Jeannie C. Riley, while Hall’s own recordings soon produced “A Week in a Country Jail,” “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” and “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine.” The Country Music Hall of Fame later credited his layered character studies with expanding the language and social range of country songwriting. Hall never needed elaborate production to make those stories work; the strength usually came from an observed detail, a believable voice and the sense that the person in the song had existed before the first line began. That influence lasted well beyond his own chart years, because generations of country writers inherited the permission Tom T. Hall helped establish: ordinary people, small failures and quiet observations were worthy subjects for serious songs.

You Missed

Country Music

LEFTY FRIZZELL WROTE “I LOVE YOU A THOUSAND WAYS” FROM JAIL TO THE WIFE HE FEARED HE’D LOSE. THREE YEARS LATER, THAT PRIVATE APOLOGY BECAME A NO. 1 COUNTRY HIT. Long before the Grand Ole Opry, Columbia Records or the vocal style that would influence George Jones and Merle Haggard, Lefty Frizzell was a 19-year-old husband in serious trouble. He had married Alice Harper in March 1945, when both were still teenagers. By 1947 they had a young daughter and were living in Roswell, New Mexico, where Lefty was trying to build a music career while Alice worked and helped hold the family together. Then Lefty was arrested and convicted on a statutory-rape charge. He served six months in the county jail. For a young man already married with a baby at home, the confinement carried another fear beyond the sentence itself: that Alice might take their daughter and leave. So Lefty wrote to her. Country Music Hall of Fame records that he wrote numerous songs to Alice while incarcerated. One of them was “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” a plainspoken apology and declaration of devotion born inside the jail rather than a Nashville writing room. At the time, there was no reason to think the song would ever matter beyond their marriage. After his release, Lefty struggled on. He failed an audition for the Louisiana Hayride, moved around the Southwest and eventually found steady work at the Ace of Clubs in Big Spring, Texas. There, his unusual phrasing and original songs began attracting attention. In 1950, producer Don Law heard a demo and signed him to Columbia. For Lefty’s first single, the label paired “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time” with the song he had written to Alice from jail. Both sides went to No. 1. The success arrived with astonishing speed, but the marriage behind that first record was never simple. Lefty’s drinking, touring and personal problems placed years of strain on the family. Still, Alice remained part of his life for three decades. Bear Family’s account notes that by the time of Lefty’s death in 1975 they were living apart, yet remained in daily contact. That gives “I Love You a Thousand Ways” a different weight from an ordinary early hit. It was not written after Lefty Frizzell became famous enough to sell romance to an audience. It came from a frightened young husband trying to reach one woman on the other side of a jail wall — years before the rest of country music learned his name.

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS TOLD HIS PRODUCER THE WESTERN ALBUM HE WANTED TO MAKE PROBABLY WOULDN’T SELL 500 COPIES. COLUMBIA LET HIM DO IT ANYWAY — AND GUNFIGHTER BALLADS AND TRAIL SONGS BECAME THE RECORD THAT DEFINED HIM. By 1959, Marty Robbins did not need to prove he could make hits. He had already scored with “Singing the Blues,” “A White Sport Coat” and other crossover records aimed well beyond the traditional country audience. But the music he most wanted to record came from somewhere older: the Western stories his grandfather had told him as a boy, the cowboy songs of Gene Autry, and the landscape of the American Southwest. Columbia was less enthusiastic. Robbins had to persuade producer Don Law to let him make an entire album of Western songs. His argument was simple: he had given the label enough hits that they owed him one project for himself. Robbins even admitted the record might not sell 500 copies. On April 7, 1959, they went into the studio. Eight hours later, the entire twelve-song album was finished. Among the songs were “Big Iron,” “The Master’s Call” and “El Paso,” the latter built around a story Robbins had been carrying in his head for years. He had first thought of the title while driving through El Paso in 1955; two years later, with his wife driving their Cadillac toward Arizona, the full song finally poured out while Robbins worked in the back seat. Grady Martin supplied the Spanish-flavored guitar that gave “El Paso” its unmistakable shape. When the album appeared that September, the song quickly became the centerpiece. Columbia released it as a single in October — along with a shortened version because the full recording ran more than four and a half minutes, unusually long for radio. Fans preferred the complete version. “El Paso” reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts and later won the Grammy for Best Country & Western Performance. Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs sold more than a million copies and was eventually added to the National Recording Registry. Its legacy was larger than one hit. At a time when Nashville was increasingly polishing country toward pop crossover, Robbins proved there was still a national audience for long-form Western storytelling, cinematic characters and songs that behaved almost like miniature movies. The album Robbins feared might barely sell at all became part of what later Western singers called “Cowboy 101” — a record generations of artists learned from before they ever tried telling their own stories of guns, deserts and border towns.

Country Music

ONE TOP 10 SONG PULLED TOM T. HALL OUT OF A VIRGINIA RADIO STATION. WITHIN A FEW YEARS, HE WAS WRITING COUNTRY SONGS LIKE THREE-MINUTE SHORT STORIES. In the early 1960s, Hall was still working as a radio DJ in Virginia, writing songs between shifts after earlier years in Kentucky bluegrass groups and Armed Forces Radio. Nashville publisher Jimmy Key heard enough promise to place Hall’s “D.J. for a Day” with Grand Ole Opry singer Jimmy C. Newman, whose recording reached the country Top 10 in 1963–64. That success convinced Hall to move to Nashville in 1964 and try songwriting full-time. The move quickly paid off. Dave Dudley took Hall’s “Mad” into the Top 10, while Johnnie Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” gave him his first No. 1 in 1965. Hall was proving that a country song could carry more than romance or heartbreak; it could sound like a newspaper column, a conversation overheard at a bar, or a short story compressed into three minutes. By the end of the decade, that approach had become unmistakable. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” went to No. 1 on both the country and pop charts for Jeannie C. Riley, while Hall’s own recordings soon produced “A Week in a Country Jail,” “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” and “(Old Dogs, Children and) Watermelon Wine.” The Country Music Hall of Fame later credited his layered character studies with expanding the language and social range of country songwriting. Hall never needed elaborate production to make those stories work; the strength usually came from an observed detail, a believable voice and the sense that the person in the song had existed before the first line began. That influence lasted well beyond his own chart years, because generations of country writers inherited the permission Tom T. Hall helped establish: ordinary people, small failures and quiet observations were worthy subjects for serious songs.

Country Music

STONEWALL JACKSON ASKED TOM T. HALL FOR A PRISON SONG. HALL COULDN’T WRITE ONE — BECAUSE HE’D NEVER BEEN TO PRISON. THEN HIS WIFE REMINDED HIM OF THE WEEK HE ONCE SPENT IN A KENTUCKY JAIL. In 1968, Tom T. Hall was already a successful Nashville songwriter, but he was still learning what made a song sound unmistakably like his. He had written hits for other artists and could turn out the kind of commercial material publishers wanted. Then Grand Ole Opry star Stonewall Jackson asked him for something different: a prison song, inspired in part by the renewed interest surrounding Johnny Cash’s prison recordings. Hall tried. Nothing sounded honest. He finally told his wife, Dixie, that the problem was simple: he had never been to prison and felt phony writing as if he had. Dixie answered with an even simpler suggestion. He had been in jail. Write about that. Years earlier, Hall had been detained in Paintsville, Kentucky, after a traffic violation. What should have been a short stay stretched into several days because the local judge was away following a death in the family. Hall found himself stuck in a small county jail with little to do except watch the people around him. That memory gave him everything the imaginary prison songs had lacked. A sheriff unimpressed by who he was. Plain jail food. Long hours. The jailer’s wife becoming more attractive as the days dragged on. Finally, a judge returning to lecture him about traffic laws, collect his money and send him home. Some details were sharpened for comedy, but the spine came directly from experience. Hall wrote “A Week in a Country Jail” almost like someone telling a story across a kitchen table. There was no conventional chorus and very little effort to make the situation heroic. Producer Jerry Kennedy recognized that other singers might find the structure too unusual, so he encouraged Hall to record it himself. Released in late 1969, the song became Hall’s first No. 1 as a performer, topping the country chart for two weeks in early 1970. The bigger breakthrough was artistic. Hall later described it as the first song where he stopped inventing generic situations and began simply reporting the people and places he had actually encountered. From there came the character-driven writing that would define “The Storyteller.” Stonewall Jackson never got the prison song he originally requested. Instead, his request helped Tom T. Hall discover the kind of songs only Tom T. Hall could write.