Living With War (2006)

I think it’s arguable that Living With War is the best album by Neil Young in the decade of the 2000s but note also it’s his 27th album and fifth decade of making albums, introducing an element of faint praise to this assessment. Not surprisingly, there is a certain level of sameness and familiarity to the tunes in this set, all written by Young except the closing chestnut, “America the Beautiful.” The latter is there partly as the US center-left forces with which Young has always more or less been aligned attempted (vainly, I’m sorry to say) to reclaim ideas like patriotism, self-sacrifice, and love of country from belligerent rightwing forces, even as the folly of the second Iraq war was setting in as conventional wisdom. The other reason the patriotic hymn is there is because the 100-voice choir brought in for this album just sounds so damn good. Young looked to the rush job of “Ohio” in 1970 for inspiration, writing and recording Living With War in nine days. Does it work? Well, they are Neil Young songs, marked by his usual points of melody and charging power. You might not think so scanning the track list, but it’s perfectly possible (and recommended!) to sing along with or at least head-bob to songs like “Living With War,” “Shock and Awe,” and “Let’s Impeach the President” (for lying). Listen to the album a few times and you may likely find yourself singing along against your will. Another point that sets this album apart is the 100-voice choir. Album-closer “America the Beautiful” is where it chiefly gets the spotlight, but it appears on most of these tracks, lending the material a wonderful luster and certain level of celestial awe (no shock). Countering this display of beauty—already countered to some degree by the angry political themes—is an occasional trumpet (played by Tommy Bray), which sounds homely and barely competent yet fits the mood perfectly, playing like a soldier in bandages. It is surprising and apt and satisfying the way Neutral Milk Hotel’s cornet can be. Earlier in the decade, I worried that Young’s tribute to the heroic passengers of flight United 93 on 9/11, “Let’s Roll,” veered dangerously close to a lot of the volcanic jingoism that proceeded out of that day until 2006 and well beyond. But Living With War clarifies any ambiguities of Young with regard to the militarism that followed 9/11. In the era of Donald Trump Living With War already sounds depressingly quaint. But it’s still a pretty good Neil Young album.

Mirror Ball (1995)

I like the disco music represented by a mirror ball and I like Neil Young, but I must report that this album has nothing whatever to do with disco or even with mirror balls, except the grungy sepia image on the cover. In fact, that's Pearl Jam backing him for this one, a band that also has nothing to do with disco or mirror balls. The original release was an environmentally sensitive package, but now it comes in jewel boxes like most of them do. Who even buys CDs anymore? Well, in this case, me. I was amazed to find Mirror Ball is not on Napster, though it is on Spotify. The album felt to me then and still feels to me now pretty close to generic Neil Young product, which I know may be something of an oxymoron for the iconoclastic rocker. But it's full of songs that distinguish themselves merely on the fine points, when they distinguish themselves at all, even as it does remain overall satisfyingly lumbering and not without its winning moments of rockin' majesty. After opening with a curious sort of "Blow the Man Down" play in "Song X" it approaches quick liftoff with "Act of Love" followed by "I'm the Ocean," my favorite part of the album in 1995, with an ascendant keyboard pushing against the pounding bottom. That's 12 minutes of goodness right there. "What Happened Yesterday" is a shorty that works at first like the funeral for the Rolling Stones' jaunty "Something Happened to Me Yesterday" nearly 30 years earlier. But it's actually the overture to "Peace and Love," the one collaboration with Eddie Vedder (all the rest are Young songs). "I'm the Ocean" plays for 7:05. "Peace and Love" goes 7:02. "Scenery" is the longest at 8:50. Getting the picture? "Throw Your Hatred Down" (5:45) is there so we know their hearts are in the right place, which we already knew, though it has some very nice guitar. The single was "Downtown" (5:10), which may give some idea of their perspective. Even mediocre Neil Young has its points for fans like me, so I guess I can appreciate the thudding groove of "Downtown," such as it is. But when you're alone and life is making you lonely it's no Petula Clark. Like the rest of the album, the highs here are just not that high.

Psychedelic Pill (2012)

For as shaggy, loose, and extemporaneous as this album often sounds, it appears Neil Young had some definite ideas about what he wanted. The music runs 87 minutes across two CDs (the first about 51 minutes, the second close to 36) and nine tracks. There are eight songs, with the title song repeated. It's about three minutes in both cases, though not first and last in sequence order, as Young has done it previously. One song, "Driftin' Back," is over 27 minutes, and two others are over 16 each. Psychedelic Pill was his first album with Crazy Horse in a decade, so in a way it's not surprising to find long songs. These guys obviously like playing with one another and they have an instinct for how to go places. It's these longs songs that are the highlights here, though it's possible they and this album are only for true believers at this late date. To be clear, I think I'm too fickle to be considered a true fan of anything—I've spent years at different points losing track of Neil Young. On the other hand, I might just be kidding myself with that. I love the rumbling, purring attack of Young with his favorite house band—it's a sound that ratchets up easily to the highest decibels. But it works at quiet levels too, and that's what they seem to be aiming for here. The longest song, "Driftin' Back," is also the first, more evidence of some kind of statement. Its rambling structure is reminiscent of Sonic Youth's "The Diamond Sea," from 1995, reduceable to three-minute verse-chorus-verse popsmithery. "I'm driftin' back," goes the chorus. "I'm driftin' back." These shards of musicality are set adrift, as theme, in a churning stream of brooding Crazy Horse jam, marked by Young's characteristic electric guitar voice, and the furry thudding sensitive accompaniments of guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro and bassist Billy Talbot. Drummer Ralph Molina keeps understated splashy time. After awhile another verse comes floating through, and the chorus, and it's a song again: "I used to dig Picasso / I used to dig Picasso / Hey now now, hey now now." It might be easier to get your arms around this one in digital, because I find myself favoring one disc over the other in the playing—the first, because it's longer and has more of the long songs. I'm not sure I have a good sense of its shape yet. It's altogether an unwieldy size, but I know I'm after those long songs. They feel exhausted and rejuvenated at once, working grossly familiar Neil Young strains yet somehow making them work fresh again. It's quieter than usual. It feels more like they are sitting on couches in a living room, with the amps turned down low, than standing on stage with fans blowing on them heroically. But there's always something heroic about Young, even when he's in a tired mood. Perhaps, giving some thought to the title, this is meant to accompany hallucinogens. I can see it working that way. But it also works fine with marijuana, or cheap wine, or probably even just good company. I play it a lot.

Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

(Related here and here.)

How are you supposed to settle on one favorite Neil Young album? I asked four friends—Phil Dellio, Steven Rubio, Jack Thompson, and Scott Woods—to help me with this imponderable, asking specifically for their thoughts on the one I have landed on, Rust Never Sleeps. For me, it could have equally been After the Gold Rush or Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (and there's a good handful much loved right behind those three, and literally dozens of scattered songs beyond that), except I did not experience them in real time—I resisted Young until Rust Never Sleeps made it impossible for me any longer. I've got a couple of quick points to make, and then Phil, Steven, Jack, and Scott weigh in. Many thanks to them!

Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Down by the River" (1969)

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Last summer Phil asked me to take part in a poll of best Neil Young songs (results here). I was happy to comply and placed this high on my list, tied at #4 with its fellow Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere album track "Cinnamon Girl." "Cowgirl in the Sand," the third leg of that particular thematic album stool, landed slightly lower in my list, in the 20s. (In the poll, "Down by the River" was #3, "Cinnamon Girl" #6, and "Cowgirl in the Sand" #7.) "Down by the River" everybody probably knows, a simmering nine-minute sauté in which, among other things, Young takes a solo with some 30- or 40-odd repetitions of the same note. Fortunately it must be the right note, as the point usually needs to be made before people actually notice. Lord, though, in a nine-minute song of such simple, even primitive, narrative, there's ample opportunity for instrumental breaks and all manner of guitar foofaraw, and so it rolls and tumbles. That narrative, meanwhile, operates in territory of both Appalachian murder ballads and "Hey Joe," with its tragic incoherent revenge story, fragments really. "Down by the river," it basically goes, "I shot my baby." There's a little bit more to it than that, but not much. Yet out of it Neil Young and Crazy Horse (Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina) wring history somehow. It's not so surprising that it captured the late '60s mood so thoroughly it's become a Wonder Years staple of a type for evoking the time with proper visuals: shirtless freaks in top hats flashing the peace sign, etc., division of dark underside division. But it actually plays well in all circumstances, even the most latter-day such as while I am typing this, early dark with Christmas lights still visible late in the season from my window. It does seem better suited at the moment to dark and winter, I'll say that.

15. Neil Young & Crazy Horse, "Powderfinger" (1979)

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Neil Young is obviously fascinated with American culture and hailing originally from Canada has always, I suppose, been at a good vantage to observe it. But it still amazes me that he can reach so far back into primal American experience and just pull something out like this. It's a Civil War story, evidently not on the fields of battle, about an anonymous young man (and Southern, at that) killed in an ambush. There's not much to it: the attacking boat appears on the river, the kid foolishly tries to defend against it even in the absence of elder male family members. He can't, and he dies. The moment of his death is recorded: "Raised my rifle to my eye / Never stopped to wonder why. / Then I saw black / And my face splashed in the sky." It's a particular moment I have found myself pitching headfirst into, so stark and matter of fact and profoundly universal. It's breathtaking—the whole thing is. I can't think of many other moments in all of rock that get to such depths with such economy and so little bombast. A few years ago Phil Dellio compiled an exhaustive list of Neil Young covers, and identified six for this song, by the Beat Farmers, Chris Burroughs, the Cowboy Junkies, Tonia Sellers & Laura Hagen, Uncle Tupelo, and Yung Wu. "Not sure why," he writes, "but this is one case where any voice other than Neil’s seems to automatically diminish the song." Young offered an early version of it to Lynyrd Skynyrd in the mid-'70s, perhaps some kind of response in their mutual "Southern man" quasi-contretemps (or whatever it was). I wish we could have heard what they'd done with it, but their faces splashed in the sky first.

Trans (1982)

"We R in Control" If it weren't for Arc this would probably have to count as the weirdest Neil Young album ever. His first for Geffen, it marks an auspicious kick-start to a relationship that eventually soured to the point where the label filed suit against him, claiming he was willfully creating "unrepresentative Neil Young albums." Interesting theory. Back on Earth, I count this among my favorite Neil Young albums—if not on the short list of his sizeable catalog, certainly in the top 10. He's no electronics wiz, let alone proto-techno artist in any sense of the term, as has been pointed out ad infinitum elsewhere—even such basics as fancy beats are missing in action here. In fact, I think I hear a drumkit. The exotics of it really boil down to just vocoders and keyboards. And, oh yeah, it's a bunch of Neil Young songs too, which is something, writing songs, that he's always been pretty well known for. Now that we are decades beyond the mentality that overshadowed this at the time ("disco sucks and so does new wave, probably"), much of the daringness of it is lost as are the various transgressions against Neil Young fan dogma, which I just like to think means we can make the appropriate assessments now. Or try looking at is this way: if you are a Neil Young rockist and dislike the folkie exercises, or vice versa, there's probably no point checking into this one. You probably never have. If, on the other hand, you like both the rock stuff and the folkie stuff, then you probably already know this is pretty good.

Sleeps With Angels (1994)

It's hard to imagine what it must have felt like for Neil Young to hear Kurt Cobain's suicide note close with his own incoherent denim koan of some 15 years earlier—"better to burn out than to fade away." Particularly as Young & crew's recent and most spectacular return to form paralleled the rise of grunge, even giving a helpful hand to Sonic Youth as opening act on the Weld tour, just as Sonic Youth in turn gave a helpful hand to Nirvana in getting signed to DGC. It's all balled up there. Neil Young stood even more in the crosshairs of history than he knew on that one. I've heard a lot of people dismiss this as journeyman '90s Neil Young, over the hump and on the down slope from his recent heights. But "Change Your Mind" alone belies that to me, 14+ minutes of deceptively amiable anguish that deploys all the sonic extremes of grunge, from a whisper to a scream as it were, delivered in fine Young/Crazy Horse fashion, whose overarching theme is the request to reconsider. There are plenty of missteps along the way, but even if it's the least of them, this is one of the keepers by Young.

Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

I've already nominated After the Gold Rush as my sense of the best Neil Young album (with or without Crazy Horse, and of course allowing for the ridiculousness of such judgments) so I can't say that about this one. But even with weak tracks and/or moments here and there among its nine songs ("Welfare Mothers") this is an awfully close second. No other rock artist has come so close to nailing the experience of the U.S. Civil War as Young does here in "Powderfinger" – not bad for a Canadian, not bad for a history lesson. (N.b., so it seems to me. I wasn't there. I can only speak for the amazing power of it, which has repeatedly set me to bawling.) Ditto "Pocahontas" re: that American legend. Elvis Presley and Johnny Rotten also make brief appearances here that ring with veracity and authority. In short, perhaps no one at the time understood better the moment in history in which he existed. And that's just talking about the lyrics. The music? It's Neil Young and Crazy Horse in peak form. What else do you want to know?

Tonight's the Night (1975)

By design, this is an exceedingly dark album. The original gatefold vinyl LP was black inside and out, including the Reprise label itself, normally orange. Based on Neil Young's visceral reaction to three separate drug-related deaths in Crazy Horse and their road crew, some have gone so far as to call it anti-drug, which I suppose is fair enough, but a little bit of a stretch for someone who lives inside a marijuana cloud (not, in the interests of avoiding the appearance of hypocrisy, that there's anything wrong with that). More than anything it's a wail of pain, and the first of many abrupt revitalizations that would come to be a feature of Young's career. It's sloppy, loud, plain-spoken to the point of homely, self-indulgent, self-pitying, and often unlistenable. But when the mood suits – and that mood has more to do with Neil Young and Crazy Horse generally, rather than anything you might guess, like depression, sadness, or being bummed out – nothing else will do.

After the Gold Rush (1970)

Ah, more high school memories. In this case, the debate centered on the quality of Neil Young's voice. Everyone agreed, however grudgingly, that there was something amazing about Young and his songwriting. But many – including myself, I'm sorry to say now – couldn't handle the turns of high-pitched wheedling. "I just can't stand that voice," our ignorance spoke to eternity. Two decades later I would hear the same argument applied to actress Rosie Perez, but even by then I was well over it or anything like it. This is where so much begins and exists for all time with Neil Young. If I had to pick only one of his many, many albums to pack for the proverbial desert island this would likely be it. His songwriting is rarely so strong track to track – everything, even the two clocking in at less than two minutes, is perfectly realized, and the typical division for him between folkie and hard rocker is rarely so hard to draw. Not to mention other divisions along the lines of melody master, politically outraged spokesperson for a generation, and man of disaffected alienation. It's all here, and it just doesn't get much better than this.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Some things probably everybody knows: 1) Neil Young is good, but Neil Young with Crazy Horse is usually better. This is the first album by Neil Young with Crazy Horse, and includes such signature career classics as "Cinnamon Girl," "Down by the River," and "Cowgirl in the Sand." 2) Neil Young tends to work best in collaboration, whether it's Crazy Horse, Crosby, Stills &/or Nash, Emmylou Harris, or whoever. His first band, the Mynah Birds, was fronted by fellow Canadian Rick James. (Yes, that Rick James.) 3) Neil Young is a folkie with the capacity to rock harder than practically any other gentle strummer of an acoustic guitar. He's also wily in his effectiveness, viz., "Down by the River," in which at one point Young plays the same note some 43 times consecutively. One of the greatest guitar solos ever. 4) People routinely claim this as one of the great rock albums. Others say it's the greatest. I'm not about to get in anybody's way on this, but listen, there's no question, this is a really good one.

Weld (1991)

Yeah yeah, the tour was basically a reprisal of the Neil Young/Crazy Horse Rust Never Sleeps tour, down to the oversized amplifier stage design. Twelve years later is a long time to be doing the same thing, but when you consider the careening of Neil Young's career between, the times at hand and the war of the moment, and the brilliant addition of a cover of "Blowin' in the Wind" to the repertoire – I mean, it was like they were literally blowin' in the wind as they performed the song. Oh, that was giant fans they were using? Anyway, what really works here is the unabashed appreciation for the sonics of rock 'n' roll as it emerges from the crucible. In fact, I think it was because the exuberant, prolonged turns toward feedback of those shows sounded so good that a 35-minute selection of them was compiled for a throwaway disk, called Arc, included in original releases of this set. Didn't quite work isolated that way, but somebody's heart was in the right place.

Freedom (1989)

"Wrecking Ball" I don't know about you, but by the time this came out I had about had it with Neil Young and his zany career across the '80s (not that that made David Geffen's lawsuit any less idiotic). Trans? OK, sure. Good songs. But the Shocking Pinks? Landing on Water? This Note's For You? No, no, and no. Maybe it was Geffen after all. Whatever. Something straightened him out. This marked the beginning of a resurgence from which he still enjoys momentum. The songcraft that had deserted him returned. He engaged the world again. He meant every word, and practically every word hung from a lovely melody and/or treaded rock-solid underpinning. It's as if the way ahead simply crystallized for him one fine day.

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