Neil Young. Photo / AP
Now this makes more sense. Although some enjoyed Young's recent Americana which saw him reunited with Crazy Horse after a decade, it was clear that was just the throat-clearing rehearsal of old folk and American roots music.
This sprawling double disc is what it was leading to, but typically it
isn't quite what we might expect.
With Crazy Horse, Young had delivered some of the most exciting, primal, grinding and almost paleolithic rock 'n' distortion. But though there is some of that here, across these 85 minutes Young is mostly reflective.
On the beautifully blissed-out 27-minute opener Driftin' Back (with a chorus of "hey now now") he considers his past and suggests things were better then as the music ebbs and flows between acoustic guitars, quiet passages and widescreen grunting chords. Young's mercurial guitar work has seldom sounded better.
Later he sings in his country style of being Born in Ontario ("That's where I learned most of what I know, because you don't learn much when you start to get old"), acknowledges when he first heard Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone and discovered the Grateful Dead (Twisted Road) and how this world has been good to him.
