New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
At 74, Neil Young will finally be a U.S. citizen
Neil Young has come up with a canny way to disarm those who have periodically criticized the veteran Canadian singer and songwriter’s most pointedly political songs or public statements about life in the USA on the grounds that “he’s not even an American.”
As of next month, that argument will no longer hold water.
“I’ve passed all the tests; I’ve got my appointment, and if everything goes as planned, I’ll be taking the oath of citizenship” shortly after turning 74 on Nov. 12. The salient point being, “I’ll be able to vote,” said Young, who has lived roughly twothirds of his life in the U.S. since arriving in Los Angeles in the mid’60s and first making his mark on the rock ‘n’ roll landscape with Buffalo Springfield.
“I’m still a Canadian; there’s nothing that can take that away from me,” he said. Young was at a studio in Santa Monica where he and his wife, activistactress Daryl Hannah, assembled their new film, “Mountaintop,” documenting the recording of Young’s latest album, “Colorado,” which arrived Oct. 25.
“But I live down here; I pay taxes down here; my beautiful family is all down here — they’re all Americans, so I want to register my opinion” about this country. He means doing so at the ballot box; he’s often registered his opinion musically, in songs such as “Ohio,” about the killing by National Guardsmen of four students at Kent State University during campus Vietnam War protests in 1970, or “Rockin’ in the Free World,” a 1980s commentary on the inequities of Reaganomics.
More recently, that compartment of his songbook has expanded with “Shut It Down” from “Colorado,” the project for which the twotime Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee has reunited his longrunning band Crazy Horse for the first time in seven years. In that song, Young takes a jab at the many ways he thinks the country has veered off course, his remedy being “shut the whole thing down” and start again.
Why become a citizen now, after living in the states for more than half a century?
“We’ve got a climate emergency, and governments are not acting,” he said, between bites of the omelet and sauteed spinach that constituted his lunch, part of a healthier diet and lifestyle he’s embraced in recent years.
Climate change surfaces as a theme in another song from “Colorado,” “She Showed Me Love,” in which he owns up to his station in life at this point in life, singing, “You might say I’m an old white guy . You might say that,” adding that “I’ve seen old white guys trying to kill Mother Nature.”
The song spontaneously stretched out into a signature Crazy Horse jam that extends for more than 13 minutes on the album during the recording session high in the mountains of Colorado earlier this year, for which he reunited with longtime Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina. This time out, Crazy Horse also includes guitarist Nils Lofgren, who first played in Crazy Horse back in 1970 and has periodically collaborated with Young over the years when he hasn’t been occupied with his duties as a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Lofgren has stepped in for guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, who has retired to his home in Hawaii, according to Young.
In his 2012 autobiography “Waging Heavy Peace,” Young revealed that he had given up smoking pot, something he had enjoyed for decades, after doctors recommended he quit following a lifethreatening brain aneurysm for which he underwent surgery in 2005.
Young acknowledged the major life changes he has weathered in recent years: the 2014 divorce from his wife of 36 years, Pegi Young, and her death earlier this year; his move out of the ranch in Northern California he bought in 1970; a 2010 fire that ravaged his LincVolt electric car project and the warehouse it was stored in, and another last year that partially destroyed the home he owned in Malibu Canyon; his marriage last year to Hannah, their purchase of a second home in Colorado, and the death in June of his longtime manager and friend, Elliot Roberts.
“It’s a new world,” he said. “Thank goodness I got married to Daryl.”