New Work: Neil Young Review In Seattle Weekly

(Seattle Weekly, 4.23.09)

Neil Young 

Fork In The Road

(Reprise)

Neil Young has always been half-crazy and kinda sloppy: the drunken performances and muddy production of Time Fades Away; the goofy anti-nukes musical Human Highway; the abundance of thrash-and-bash throwaway songs like "Farmer John" and "Piece Of Crap" peppering his albums; his old-coot tirades at Farm Aid each year. But Young, 63, has rarely embraced his messy, inner-oddball as fully as he does on Fork In The Road (released April 7), a half-baked concept album about fuel-efficient automobiles in the U.S.A. The riffs and lyrics seem dashed off in spots, as if "good enough" was all Young aspired to here. But there is an electricity coursing through these songs—one not found on Young's other recent "conceptual" projects, Greendale and Living With War, perhaps because it combines Young's two biggest obsessions, automobiles and environmentalism.

Since this is an album about a car, it makes sense for Young to kick things off by suggesting a road trip. "Taking a trip across the USA/ Gonna see a lot of people along the way," he sings on "When Worlds Collide." His delivery conveys nostalgia for the days when highways were free of traffic jams, gasoline was much cheaper, and cars were built to last. The music here is mostly chop-shop rock n' roll. Young's guitar sounds like it just emerged from an auto garage—he's smearing the fret board with machine grease and powering his amp with diesel. Of course, by the second song, "Fuel Line", we learn that the only diesel Young will be singing the praises of is biodiesel, as he vaguely describes a car that is "not the car that she used to be." The car in question would be Young's 1959 Lincoln Continental, AKA LincVolt, which he had modified to run on 100 miles-per-gallon via a 150kW motor, a bank of lithium-ion batteries, and a small generator capable of running on cooking grease, biodiesel, vegetable oil, etc. (www.lincvolt.com)


If Fork In The Road has a "main character", it would be the LincVolt. The car makes plenty of appearances in this scattered narrative, which is essentially about Young driving the car from his California home, through the heartland, and into a vague future in which he hopes the U.S. will be building more just like it. He writes about the car in a manner most songwriters reserve for their wives: she "looks so beautiful with her top down" in "Hit The Road"; she "goes all night on good clean fuel" in "Johnny Magic"; she "loves to go anywhere" in "Get Behind The Wheel". But Fork In The Road is not just about a much-admired car (Young already wrote that song, "Long May You Run"), it's about American mythology, the failure of our government, and the dim-wittedness of corporations.

Fork In The Road is about an old car adapting to a changing world. But it also serves as a metaphor for Young himself. He makes this much clear on album closer "Fork In The Road." Sings Young: "Download this/ Sounds like shit/ Keep on bloggin' till the power goes out/ And your battery's dead." Lyrics like this will not endear this album to the Pitchfork crowd. If anything, they render Young an easy target for hipster snark that loves nothing more than to paint Young as a Cosby-esque, out-of-touch grandpa.

Sure, Neil Young is nothing if not an ornery old coot these days, but most twentysomethings I know bitch and moan about the state of the world so much you'd think coffeehouses and hipster bars were the new bingo halls. The difference is Neil Young is old enough to remember a different time—when manufacturers didn't build "pieces of crap", when you had to save money to buy things you couldn't afford, when hiding behind your opinion with an internet alias wasn't an option. He wears his wisdom proudly, no matter how grizzled and half-cocked it might be. And if he's learned anything in his 63 years, he makes it known on the third track "Just Singing A Song". Here, Young stares 1960s hippie idealism and present-day progressives in the face with the lyric "You can sing about change...(but) just singing a song won't change the world." He's right. Neither will any amount of blogging, or protesting, or bitching and moaning over lattes at Caffe Vita.

So, what does Neil Young suggest we do? Well, I suppose that's up to us, but I'm guessing he'd like us to follow his example. Realizing he couldn't depend on American auto companies or big oil or the U.S. government to develop a fuel-efficient vehicle, Young went ahead and built the fuckin' thing himself. He was so proud of his LincVolt, in fact, that he made a record about it—a half-baked, messy, scrappy, ornery, hopeful, pro-active, oddball album that happens to feature some of his most unapologetically rockin' jams since 1980s Re-ac-tor. And like that album, Fork In The Road is destined to sound even more intriguing 20 years down the road.