Young’s passion is undiminished
He rages and reflects in new album, book.
On “She Showed Me Love“from his new album “Colorado,” Neil Young confesses, “You might say that I’m an old white guy … a few bricks short of a load.” But if he’d removed that line and left the rest of the music as it is, you would think he and his band Crazy Horse are 14 years old, assailing the crises of our time in ecstasies of anger, joy and with disregard for social or musical nuance.
Young’s voice, an acquired taste for more than half a century, sounds exactly as it did when he excoriated the killing of Vietnam War protesters at Kent State University on the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young classic “Ohio.” His intensity has only grown since, as you can hear on “Help Me Lose My Mind,” which evokes the rage of those who live in willful denial: “Gotta find myself a new television,” he yells over waves of snarling guitar. “Make the sky look like the Earth is flattened.”
That alone would be enough to test any performer’s capacity for outrage. But Young, 73, is just warming up. On “She Showed Me Love” the cauldron boils for more than 13 minutes. Vengefully he slashes back at those who have violated his lover, who, in a stroke of allegorical brilliance, is “Mother Nature.” “Shut It Down” is similarly biblical in its judgment, though written with the apparent intention of getting audiences to meld with the message by chanting along with the hook. As Crazy Horse hammers ever more urgently, Young abandons melody to declaim, as a prophet at the penumbra of doom, “This is the only way we can all be free. Start again and building for eternity.”
But age brings a tempering reflectivity as well to “Colorado.” His call for unity through diversity is gentle and inviting on “Rainbow Of Colors.” And on “Eternity,” whose title nicely mirrors the word’s more incendiary impact in “Shut It Down,” Young assures us that for all the carnage we have inflicted on ourselves, hope endures.
So if you enjoy that teenage band squalling in your neighbor’s garage as much as you value the intersection of poetry and truth, “Colorado” is a great fit.
Never one to rest, Young also delivers an intriguing new book. “To Feel The Music,” is co-written with consumer electronics specialist Phil Baker. Together, they recount another concern of
Young’s: The decline of quality audio, beginning with the transition from vinyl to CDs. The first half makes the case through Baker’s data and Young’s advocacy for analog’s superiority, going so far as to disparage peers whose preference for digital proves only that they’ve been “fooled.” Ultimately, of course, preference for one type of sound or another is subjective. Yet Young, as in his music, states his case without a hint of compromise, almost defying anyone to disagree. While this can be compelling in a three-minute song, it might get a little wearying when stretched through multiple pages.
But the direction shifts in the book’s second half, which becomes an intriguing account of Young’s determination to provide world-class audio to consumers by launching his own company. Here he lets us glimpse a side of himself that he acknowledges as less certain and speaks candidly about those who assisted and impeded his struggle to understand corporate politics. This saga ends with a surprise and some sobering insight into the uneasy marriage of business and idealism. In print as in song, Young’s passion will not be quenched.