Neil Young seems to be in a reflective mood these days. Now that his memoir is finished, he’s got his old tried and true band Crazy Horse back together again, and after recording two albums together they are on a tour that will soon be moving across Neil’s old stomping grounds of Canada. This seems fitting, and harkens back to those beautiful opening lines from his song “Helpless” written more than forty years ago that are so poignant in their simplicity: “There is a town in north Ontario. All my changes were there.” Things seem to move in cyclical patterns for Papa Neil, who has a song titled “Born in Ontario” on his newest release, Psychedelic Pill.
The record is a unsurprisingly sprawling work of new material that begins with “Driftin’ Back,” which starts with Neil alone with his trusty acoustic guitar, but slowly we hear the horse chime in with loud and electric instruments and vocal harmonies. The song also clocks in at over twenty-seven minutes, and ranges from idle threats that Neil is “gonna get a hip hop haircut,” to his conclusions that the religion he most closely subscribes to might be Paganism, to how he used to like Picasso’s paintings, to his distaste for MP3s. He’s driftin’ back and, one could also argue, just driftin’.
By now the musician memoir trend is nothing new, and when you think about it, who has more stories to tell than the rockers and rollers. Pete, Slash, Patti, Keith, Rod and Bob have all penned theirs, some with more help than others, but I bet that Neil is the only musician who wrote and published his memoir, and then made a record that includes songs about the writing process of said memoir. In the opening track “Driftin’ Back” Neil also sings, “Dreamin’ ’bout the way things sound now, write about them in my book.”
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