Neil Young

This is Neil in haunting-melodies-backed-by-delicate-slide-guitar-and-other-capable-session-players mode (as opposed to howling-melodies-backed-by-joyously-sloppy-drenches-of-feedback mode), so prepare to be gently moved. Whether he's singing about old guitars, Elvis or God, he manages to make it all feel equally profound.

Neil Young has come a long way since the 1990s, when he reigned as rock's noisiest elder
statesman. In 2005, he's as far removed from Ragged Glory as Ragged Glory was from
Tonight's the Night, and his past ten years have been his quietest ever. Since Young turned
fifty in late 1995, at the peak of his powers, he's made only a handful of albums, none of
them big successes: the elegiac Crazy Horse slow-motion slopfest Broken Arrow,... More >

Where long ago Harvest's heavy orchestrations and dead beats groaned with significance, even the horn parts here are strictly utilitarian, meant to deliver the words as efficiently as possible. What makes the words different isn't that Young almost died, although that got his attention, but that they're devoid of fancy. Meditations on mortality and the passage of time are a trope that will wear out faster than road stories and fame plaints as more rockers visit the critical list. But few will make as much of unmistakable, one-dimensional language as this chronic obscurantist. "If you follow every dream you might get lost." "Yes I miss you/But I never want to hold you down/You might say/I'm here for you." "Silently it waits for me/Or someone else I suppose/This old guitar." For once he makes sure he's understood--a matter in which melodies that might otherwise seem overfamiliar are of great service. (Grade - A-)