Album Review: Neil Young - American Stars 'n' Bars

Neil Young's 1977 album followed a very productive streak which produced the peerless On The Beach and Zuma. It's a bit of a mish-mash of styles, opening up with The Old Country Waltz, which is just that, a relatively hokey, countrified waltz featuring backing vocals from Linda Ronstadt and Nicolette Larson. Dodgy songs abound, particularly the country-rock pairing of Saddle Up The Palomino and Bite The Bullet, and the slow country of Hold Back The Tears is not much better.

So why bother with this album? There are 4 very fine tracks on it. The country strum of Hey Babe strides along very nicely, and the acoustic ballad Star of Bethlehem is equally fine. But the latter half of the album is dominated by two tracks which taken together last 15 minutes. The spooky acoustic ballad Will To Love is the first of these. The song features a vibraphone along with the sound of campfire crackling in the background, lending it an eerie atmosphere. Oblique lyrics about "an ocean fish who swam upstream" simply add to this.

The next track blows all the cobwebs away. Like A Hurricane was recorded with Crazy Horse, and it shows. The song is an epic guitar tour de force, a straightforward descending melody provides the background for Neil Young's blistering guitar solos. The final track, country-stomp Homegrown is something of a let down but this album is worth seeking out for the previous two tracks alone.

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.