Album Reviews

“If you follow every dream, you might get lost,” Neil Young admonishes lovingly on “The Painter,” the opener to his new, excruciatingly personal album—his first since Old Ways to be recorded in Nashville. Young isn’t advising against following every dream, just to be prepared for unexpected turns in the road and to take it as it comes.

Young, having turned 60 and been through brain surgery for a potentially life-threatening aneurysm that left him reeling at last year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Awards, has left Greendale’s bluesy theatrics behind to spin warm-hearted, life-affirming country-style vignettes about the fragility of life, the passage of time and the sustenance of memories.

Whether “The Painter” is about Joni Mitchell or not, when Young sings “She towed the line, She held her end up, She did the work of two men….I have my friends, Eternally, We left our tracks in the sound,” one is easily drawn to that conclusion.

In “No Wonder,” Young, backed by Emmylou Harris and his wife Pegi among others, sings of the passage of time, of the need to grasp onto the familiar, and of his childhood memories when “grain kept rollin’ on, For miles and miles,” and “The birds blocked out the sun, Before the great migration south.” The song refers to 9/11, and “losing time,” but ends on an optimistic note with a wedding and happy people singing.

“Falling Off the Face of the Earth” takes the album to its most personal and tender moment, as Young thanks his wife Pegi (again, my take) for her love and devotion as he feels like he’s “…falling off the face of the earth.”

The album side ends with a “good-timey,” Memphis-Horn drenched reminiscence “Far From Home,” that’s the set’s most mundane offering, yet it still has sufficient charm to carry its weight. In it, Young sings about his childhood dreams of “making it,” talking to a firefly in one breath and setting his sights on Nashville in another if just to let us in on the improbability of it all and to leaven the raw ambition implicit in the dream, which of course, came true for him. “Bury me out on the prairie…cause then I won’t be far from home” Young sings at the song’s end.

“It’s a Dream” opens side two with the album’s most haunting and ethereal song. The stately, string-drenched waltz has Young singing of the transitory nature of life and of it being a dream that’s “just a memory, Without Anywhere to Stay.” It’s one that’ll stay with you—especially if you’re Young’s vintage.

The title tune harkens back to the bluesy riffs found on Greendale, but with a ghost-like, mysterious vibe abetted by judicious use of the Memphis Horns playing reality and a wistful-sounding back-up chorus repeating “Prairie wind blowing through my head” playing the haunting memory. It’s the album’s most chilling and mysterious tune.

“Here For You” is another tenderhearted song of compassion and commitment without strings attached—more like the sentiment offered to an offspring who’s left the reservation than to a lover. Yes, I miss you, But I never want to hold you down, You might say, I’m here for you.”

On side three, Young uses a guitar (one once owned by Hank Williams) as a strong metaphor for life. It’s a companion, a friend, and a life-saver, and like life itself, the more you play it, the better it sounds. Great Emmylou back-up on a tremendously affecting tune only an aging rocker could have written and delivered with such easy going, loving conviction.

Young’s light-hearted ode to Elvis, “He Was the King,” complete with “woo woo” female back-up and Memphis Horn punctuation marks is both a personal tribute and a celebration of Young’s chosen profession. It’s plain fun.

The album abruptly shifts gears to end with the contemplative, hymnal “When God Made Me,” in which, in a series of questions Young addresses the distinction between spirituality and religious partisanship. “Was he planning only for believers, Or for those who just had faith?”, Young asks. “Did he give me the gift of voice, So some could silence me?”

Young is in great voice here, sounding tender, supple and younger than his years, perhaps because when he was young, he sounded older than his years.

Written and recorded with short-order speed, some of it before and some after Young’s brain surgery, the album has been brilliantly produced, arranged and recorded all-analog, and although the LP credits list an analog to digital transfer, that’s just for the subsequent CD bought by losers who don’t own turntables.

The sound on this set is absolutely superb: warm, spacious, organic and full-bodied. The instrumental layering is stunningly rendered, with Ben Keith’s pedal steel way back in space, adding those “lonesome train whistle”-like accents. Because it was recorded live, the soundstage has a three-dimensional coherence and weight rare in rock and almost non-existent in contemporary recordings.

If there are effects added, they are almost impossible to detect as all is in service of the utterly natural presentation. Bass and kick-drum are weighted and full and be sure of this: if it sounds too fat, and out of control, the problem is on your end, not with the recording. This is the sound of musicians playing live, together in a room. How refreshing!

The Harvest-like gatefold packaging is visually and tactilely spectacular. The paper is textured, there’s a full-sized booklet with type you can actually read, and album sleeves too. You can’t download this stuff, folks!

Side four is an interview with Young that’s all about the mechanics of music-making and about musicians and not at all about Young’s life or his personal philosophy. You can complain about wasting a side on conversation, but turning it into a double LP instead of squeezing all the music onto one disc, allows the songs to stretch out in the grooves and be given full dynamic and spectral weight.

Young venerates other musicians and especially sidemen and arrangers like The Memphis Horns, the late drummer Kenny Buttrey, Al Kooper, Lonnie Mack, J.J. Cale B.B. King, Hendrix and many others.

Young says, “When people play together, that’s a whole time that needs to be preserved, that needs to be recognized.” And so it is on this inviting, musically and sonically nourishing album: a “must have” for Young fans.