In 40 years he has written in the order of 2,000 songs, roughly one a week, though "actually I'd skip a few weeks and then maybe write six or seven in a day" There are far more than can ever be recorded. Spirit, the new album, starts with three songs remembered from 15 years ago. The nearly completed reggae album rescues forgotten tunes from the early Sixties. I had an accountant who didn't tell me the right thing to do.

He had me in some tax shelters and things that were disallowed, and it was really not that good advice." To settle his debt, reduced to about $9m, he did not in the end, as has been widely misreported, have to auction off his studio, golf course, western town, house and fishing camp. But he did hurry out a compilation called The IRS Tapes: Who'll Buy My Memories. The 1980s found him diversifying into film (soundtracks and acting) and the annual Farm Aid benefit to help America's struggling rural communities like the one into which he was born.The constant throughout has been his obedience to his twin mistresses, writing and the road. He's often been portrayed as a financial incompetent, but he blames, and indeed sued, the people he hired to be competent for him "It was bad bookkeeping on their part. I still try to throw it away quicker than I make it, but so far I haven't been able to do that." At the end of the 1970s, the IRS decided that Nelson owed them.

Stardust, a collection of covers, defied all dire warnings of disaster.The money now avalanched into his wallet, but never settled "I didn't keep it It sort of went through me A lot of people had a good time, including me I don't regret it. Shotgun Willie was a shot across the bows, then Red Headed Stranger went gold. Wanted: The Outlaws, made with fellow troublemaker and most frequent collaborator Waylon Jennings, was the first country album to sell a million. I felt like if I was going to be there and really relax and do what I wanted to do, it was a good time to do it because the audiences were definitely not dressing up. So I didn't see the need to do it, because I really wasn't trying to impress anybody." And yet this was when he started to do just that: he switched labels in 1973 and spent the rest of the decade cooking up albums done to his own specifications - not the overdone style of Nashville but rare, almost raw. Though financially secure, his own singing career stayed stubbornly in neutral: a contract with RCA tied him up for 18 underpromoted albums. His voice's nasal phrasing was too loose and interpretive for regimental Nashville, and when his house burnt down two days before Christmas in 1970, he needed no further encouragement to slip home to Austin and grow his hair."It was a way to blend.

The words came actually quicker than the chord changes."Pretty soon he was in Nashville, writing songs for a publisher that others would record. When Faron Young gave him his first hit, the songwriter, $20,000 richer, tracked the singer down to Tootsie's Orchid Lounge and kissed him on the lips Nashville had its first taste of Nelson's unorthodoxy. "That was a nice week." Did he know "Crazy" was that good a song? "Once I found the chords to it: I heard some chords in my mind and so I went to the guitar and tried to find them and it took a little while. Commuting from Pasadena to perform over in Houston, he composed in the car, and in one week he wrote "Crazy", "Night Life" and "Funny How Time Slips Away", the rights to which would keep someone less spendthrift in moderate comfort for life.