It’s touching how a very old Neil Young still believes that he has to defend cultural techniques of the 20th century against modernity. Now that technology has changed the culture itself, when songs die a second death, they don’t fall into the house with the hook. Against random shuffles and machine playlists, he literally sets an album in one piece. “Before And After” lets 13 tracks flow together as a 48-minute distillation of his solo sets in summer 2023. Guitar, voice, harp, harmonium, piano.
Even if Young overloads the work with his dogma, one has to attest to the fact that he succeeds in a coherent re-contextualization of old and not-so-old songs, which – unlike “Mr. Soul” and “Comes A Time” – until now they have often led a shadowy existence and are now allowed to be on display again, held together by – what else – love & death, and also in the expanded sense of a “Mother Earth” (from “Ragged Glory”) ).
Guitar, voice, harp, harmonium, piano
Especially in the middle section, “Before And After” becomes a devotion from an artist who seems to speak more to himself than to his community. It culminates in the five-minute long “When I Hold You In My Arms”, freed from the retro-soul pastiche of the “Are You Passionate?” original. Previously in “If You Got Love,” a track from the little-loved vocoder experiment “Trans,” his voice drifts away in the chorus, as if overwhelmed by the love that is there (or not). “I feel like I died and went to heaven.”
Also not to be missed is “A Dream That Can Last”, his “Sleeps With Angels” requiem for Kurt Cobain. But there is still a road of gold. Also a heart? “My heart, my heart, I gotta keep my heart!” begs Young. And: “It’s not too late, I gotta go somewhere,” to immediately feel that he doesn’t have to go anywhere anymore. “If you don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t forget love,” Young warns – now that many people don’t know what they’re talking about, but still like to do it all the time.
Author: Jörg Feyer