Willie Nelson will return to San Diego to perform at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay in October

Willie Nelson is shown at an early 2022 concert at his Texas ranch

Willie Nelson isn’t wasting any time getting back to San Diego, where he performed a sold-out July 10 show at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay that sold out in a near instant.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Aug. 30, 2022 10:53 AM PT

Willie Nelson isn’t wasting any time getting back to San Diego, where he performed a sold-out July 10 show at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay that sold out in a near instant.

The 89-year-old American icon, whose name has long been synonymous with country music, is returning to the intimate Shelter Island venue for an Oct. 18 Willie Nelson & Family performance.

His encore concert at Humphreys comes just two days after Nelson had been scheduled to conclude a three-day fall California concert swing headlining the latest leg of his annual Outlaw Country Fest.

Those three California dates are in turn being preceded by Nelson’s 10-city September tour of the East Coast. He has performed at least 36 concerts so far this year, after rebounding from contracting COVID-19 in May.

Nelson’s most recent album, “A Beautiful Time,” was released in April. His latest book, “Me and Paul: Untold Tales of a Fabled Friendship,” will be published Sept. 20.

Tickets for Nelson’s Oct. 18 Humphreys concert go on sale at 10 a.m. Thursday at ticketmaster.com. They are priced at $130 each, plus service fees, the same price as his July 10 concert at the venue.

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”