Late-career classics are all the rage in the 2020s – Dylan, with his Rough and Rowdy Ways, the Stones with their Hackney Diamonds, and McCartney with his reflective Boys of Dungeon Lane.
Now here comes Neil Young, 80 years young, with his Chrome Hearts band, which includes the superlative guitar of Micah Nelson (Willie’s youngest son) and veteran keys player Spooner Oldham, with two gargantuan tracks dominating new album Second Song. Among its seven tracks are two that date back to Young’s first band The Squires (“I’ll Love You Forever” and “Casting Me Away From You”), their sweet Beat Group vibes revisited 62 years later.
The centre-pieces are two long, reflective, meandering songs, the 11 min 20 sec title song and the slightly shorter “Soon I Might Be Going”. “Second Song”carries you along a slow current that flows beguilingly without pooling or deepening, but keeps moves on. You sense an improvisatory spirit in both the singing and what’s sung, and in how his band move and coalesce around him. But rather than leaving you listless, it soaks you in with its fluidity of thought, feel and expression. Drummer Anthony LoGerfo, who’s been with Young since 20125, is excellent at stoking and framing that fluid drive.
Album opener “The Foggy Edge of Time” sets the tone with acoustic layers shifting around the simple piano pulse Young sets off under his high, fragile voice. Spooner Oldham’s organ weaves through it, the lyrics looking back to Young’s first setting out from Canada for the wild West Coast.
The other big song of the set, “Soon I Might Be Going” is sandwiched by the two early songs from the Squires days, and sports one of the album’s only instances of Young’s grungy electric guitar. “Soon I might be gone,” he sings at the start, “so I just wanted to you to know...”. Its mix of interior monologue and loving paean is interspersed with reflections on time, on change, on strange weather, on politics and the stain spreading out from the White House, on the ephemeral and the beautiful too. The music around it ebbs and flows, builds and disperses then coalesces in a beguiling, almost weightless flow. It’s as quietly and seriously compelling as the album itself.
