Neil Young and his old fears
ARCHIVE – September 9th, 2019, USA, Santa Monica: Canadian rock star Neil Young. Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s new album Toast is set to be released on July 8th, 2022. (to dpa “Neil Young &… Crazy Horse: A “toast” to legendary times”) Photo: Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP/dpa +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++
What: dpa/Invision/AP/Rebecca Cabage
22 years ago, Neil Young recorded an album called “Toast” with his house band Crazy Horse – and dumped it in the poison closet. Not because it would have been bad. There are completely different reasons why it is only now appearing.
MNeil Young had saved it as everything possible, as a radical environmentalist, sound quality junkie, laconic blueser, part-time rockabilly, guitar thunder god, stubborn genius and a lot more, in recent years also increasingly as an archivist in his own right. On the other hand, he was not on the list as a scaredy-cat. And yet a pattern is gradually emerging.
In the so-called “Special Release Series”, which stands out pleasantly from the “Official Release Series”, the “Official Bootleg Series”, the “Performance Series” or the “Box Sets” due to the manageable number of publications – four so far. , not to mention the regular albums, “Toast” is out now. Seven songs recorded 22 years ago with Young’s house band Crazy Horse in a studio on San Francisco’s Mission Street. They didn’t disappear for so long because they were bad. On the contrary, they’re consistently great and at times downright fantastic. The master complained about something else – they made him sad.
“The music of ‘Toast,'” he wrote on his website neilyoungarchives.com a year ago, “is about a relationship. In many relationships that go wrong, there’s a time, well before the breakup, when one, maybe both, realizes it’s over. That was that time.”
Young’s approach was “shut up, monkey dead”; the discord had been acted out musically, why do they still make it public? Rather, he hurriedly recorded the next album, Are You Passionate?, with Booker T’s chartered soul musicians. A few of the songs that can now be heard with Crazy Horse made it then, in completely different, less tormented and less touching arrangements, to the replacement record, which was more of a shrug. After all, the relationship whose cracks Young had sung on “Toast” – it was with his wife Pegi – only broke up 13 years later because a certain Daryl Hannah had intervened.
Toxic Relationships
Fans remember it was the same with Young’s long-lost Harvest-era album Homegrown. In the mid-1970s he put it in the poison cupboard with the farewell letters to actress Carrie Snodgress (who had been replaced by Pegi) and only brought it out again in 2020. Even then, two years ago, Young reported that he couldn’t handle the emotions that “Homegrown” evoked in him. In the case of such behavior, couple therapists would probably speak of sublimation and subsequent repression. In a relationship, that can quickly become toxic. But if you don’t love the musician, but rather his music, you can throw yourself into the new material without regret.
Neil Young: „Toast“ (Warner)
What: Recovery
Pretending harmlessness, it starts with the lovely “Quit” and its laconic refrain “Don’t say you love me”, which Young finally follows in a clever reversal of the speaker roles: “That’s what she said.” This is followed by the punk rocker “Standing in the Light of Love”, which thunders along like in the best “Ragged Glory” times. Here at the latest one perceives the fantastic production on a good system, with a dynamic that gives Young’s meandering, singing guitar solos the space they deserve. The defiant, desperate “Goin’ Home” was also on “Are You Passionate?”, the only song there even recorded by Crazy Horse. Here it sounds even more pressing, paradoxically more determined to doubt. The feeling of a hopeless relationship and the defeat of General Custer at the Little Big Horn are superimposed in it – a typically gigantic, convoluted Neil Young imagery that makes it to the finish just as staggeringly and crookedly as his best songs. Also big is “Gateway of Love” and the melancholic “How Ya Doin’?”, which would have done credit to the legendary hermit album “On the Beach”.
The revelation of “Toast”, which catapults it unhesitatingly into the first ranks, is the existential brooding drive of “Boom Boom Boom”. On “Are You Passionate?” the song was still called “She’s a Healer”, but it was somehow sedated by the machine guns’ automatically cheerful funk, as if it had been doped with tranquilizers. Here he sways and swings slowly home over an epic twelve minutes, with jazzy minimalist solos from guitar, piano and even a wistful saxophone. One listens enraptured and catches oneself with the faint hope that there may be many other ex-girlfriends cavorting in the musical archive of Neil Young’s heart.