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Album Review: Neil Young – Prairie Wind

Which Neil is it this time in 2005? Ah, acoustic countrified Neil. Time to sit back, relax and let the sunshine lull you into the ‘harvest’. It opens with the plaintive The Painter, featuring Neil Young’s acoustic and producer Ben Keith’s pedal steel touches over a very pleasant melody.

Many of the tracks echo Neil’s previous work. No Wonder opens a little like The Old Homestead (from Hawks & Doves) before evolving to become a more realized, fuller-sounding song, complete with fine electric guitar and fiddles. Falling Off The Face of the Earth is more muted, but has a strong melody. Unfortunately he revisits the soul territory mined on Are You Passionate? on Far From Home, He Was The King and the title track.

It’s A Dream is a piano-led almost sickly sweet ballad which narrowly avoids becoming total schmaltz, despite the syrupy strings, while the harmonica-led Here For You is almost Harvest pastiche, with acoustic, steel et al, all in the right places.

One of the finest tracks is This Old Guitar, which sounds like Harvest Moon (the song) on a comedown, all bleached out with Neil Young sounding parched, and the unmistakeable backing vocals of Emmylou Harris. The album ends with the hokey gospel of When God Made Me.

Far from essential but enjoyable.

Album Review: Neil Young – Silver and Gold

For his first studio album in 4 years, released in 2000, Neil Young is firmly back in his country mode for the first time since Harvest Moon. And it fits him like a comfortable pair of slippers. Which is kind of like an analogy for how this album sounds. Right from the opening track, Good To See You, we get the plaintive acoustic guitar, harmonica, Young’s warm croaky voice and Ben Keith’s yearning steel guitar. It’s almost like the title of the song is welcoming him back to the type of territory where he achieved his greatest commercial success.

There’s very little wrong with any of this, particularly when it’s done so well. The title track follows in a similar vein with a nice lyric about how “our kind of love never seems to get old.” This sort of thing gets a little corny, cropping up again and again over the course of the album.

Daddy Went Walkin’ is a little hokey for my tastes, though it’s redeemed by piano, while Buffalo Springfield Again harks back his old band with a fuller sound.

The chord progressions throughout are all very pleasant and some of them are a little familiar, harking back to his work from the early 70s. Horseshoe Man starts with a piano motif that could have been lifted from After the Gold Rush and more lyrics about “love, I don’t know about love”, while later Distant Camera starts off sounding like a dead ringer for Old Man, yet becomes something akin to Green Green Grass of Home, with yet another lyric about wanting “a song of love”.

To round out the nostalgic feel, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt provide backing vocals on Red Sun and a rustic sounding acoustic guitar solo. Final track Without Rings is a little different, with Neil Young singing in a lower register. It sounds resolved, like the end of something, and not just an album either.

For anyone who enjoys Neil Young’s more acoustic material, this compares favourably with After the Gold Rush, Harvest, Comes A Time or Harvest Moon.