Neil Young: Before and After
An album review of the 45th studio album in Neil Young’s idiosyncratic catalogue; this is a set of new, stripped back covers of songs from his earlier self/selves…
Neil Young
Before and After
Reprise
The Neil Young train rolls on, regardless of whether you’re at the station. If you’re there for him to stop by, so be it. But he’s out on the tracks every year, working through his archive to release rarities, and creating brand new material too. This one is a bit of a hybrid, in that it’s a brand new set of recordings, but the songs are from all across Young’s catalogue; here he covers himself — his earlier self, or selves — and presents it in a song-cycle or suite, as if a continuous 48-minute solo performance. You will hear Neil at the piano and pump organ, on the harmonica and electric guitar, and of course that heavy-handed thump of his acoustic guitar strum.
Even if some of these versions mean more to Neil now than to anyone in the audience, there are nice surprises. In some cases, there’s a whole new appreciation for a song forgotten, or lesser known. The album opens with a radical recasting of I’m The Ocean from his Pearl Jam collaboration, Mirrorball. It’s immediately followed by relative rarity, Homefires, which was only discovered by the masses with its inclusion on 2020’s second box set of Archives.
For some, it will be about the well-known songs turned on their ear, such as a slow-crawl through Mr. Soul at the pump organ, or Burned — here just a plaintive acoustic strum with a little harmonica; both Buffalo Springfield songs from over 50 years ago.
For others, myself included, it is far more about the lesser known songs allowed to finally shine. My Heart was always charming to me as the opener on Sleeps With Angels, and that’s a ‘big’ Young album for many, but it’s super nice to be reminded of it. It’s followed by When I Hold You In My Arms, another piano treatment. But I barely remember this song, because it is originally on the fairly forgettable, Are You Passionate? — which really seemed to suggest that Young was not. Here there, it’s like Old Man or Mother Earth or any of the other ‘statement’/passage of time songs that Young does so well. In fact it here it leads into Mother Earth, which is completely recognisable but has been a key live song for Young across much of the last two decades, so why not re-record it to keep it in perpetuity.
Also completely recognisable, and often in the live sets (acoustic, solo, at least) is Comes A Time, recast simply by being on theme — Young looking forward and back at the same time, as he’s arguably always done, but here with a cohesive theme to encapsulate this scrapbook of old songs. The album closes with Don’t Forget Love from 2021’s Crazy Horse album, Barn. Here it’s just Neil at the piano and it’s as strong of a statement as Mother Earth — the two themes here aren’t the actual before and after, they’re love and the environment. We had them before. Will we have them after? They’re what we need to get by.
And we still need Neil Young too. He’s vital in his mercurial, stubborn, beautiful way.
