Neil Young 63: Barn

One of the things we really, really like about the Neil Young Archives website is how he details and logs everything he’s ever released down to the exact recording date and sequence. That’s how we know that Barn was recorded with the Colorado lineup of Crazy Horse exactly a year after the solo performances that spawned his The Times EP, which grew out of various “porch sessions” filmed for streaming during the Covid lockdown. Apparently his preference to record during the days approaching a full moon still holds. (The title is evocative, but unlike many Neil Young classics of yesteryear, with and without Crazy Horse, Barn was not recorded in the fabled barn on Neil’s Northern California ranch, but in one located somewhere in the mountains of, again, Colorado.)

In a clear signal that this will be another comparatively low-key Crazy Horse album, the extremely gentle “Song Of The Seasons” opens, all acoustic with bleats of harmonica and Nils Lofgren on accordion. The quiet mood is properly bludgeoned by “Heading West”, a recollection of the navigational direction young Neil took with Mommy when their family split up, after which she bought him his first guitar. Things start to get sloppy with “Change Ain’t Never Gonna”, which revives Ranting Neil from the Promise Of The Real albums, only this time featuring a wheezing harmonica and Nils on saloon piano. Another stomp, “Canerican”, celebrates both his American citizenship and Trump’s defeat in 2020 without gloating, while “Shape Of You” is a boozy stumble of a love song that illuminates the fun he’s having. We can’t discern the meaning of the mysterious “They Might Be Lost”, and maybe Neil hasn’t either, but there’s something compelling about the uncertainty that permeates, and not just in what he alludes to smoking.

Grandstanding is certainly at a minimum on this album, but “Human Race” is a fresh draft of the thesis already presented in “Who’s Gonna Stand Up” and “Children Of Destiny”. (“It’s all one song,” after all.) Here he finally takes the opportunity to shred while Ralph Molina struggles with the tempo. The recipe is finally perfected on “Tumblin’ Thru The Years”, a nice piano stroll with Billy Talbot adding subtle R&B runs through the verses—something he’s almost never, ever done in his decades in the job—and a nice chord change to set up the title. “Welcome Back” is perversely both the longest track on the album and the softest; barely fretted electric guitars answer each other over the mildest ticking of the rhythm, and we’d love to know who sat on the piano just after the two-minute mark. (This, by the way, is precisely the vocal range he should stick to from here on. Throughout the rest of the album, he insists on straining for notes he hasn’t been able to hit in years.) And while it’s a wonderful sentiment, we might enjoy “Don’t Forget Love”—which he says took him three months to write—all the more if it didn’t recycle melodic sections of “Living With War” and “Horseshoe Man”.

Starting with Peace Trail, Neil seems to be recording his new songs before he’s finished writing them. Perhaps this is because he knows his time is limited; the cumulative effect is that the songs sound tossed off. As press time he said he was already thinking about his next album; while we would prefer one solid album to two okay ones, we’d still want to hear everything anyway. Nonetheless, like Colorado, Barn works well as a whole, particularly if you just let the music wash over. Much as we miss Poncho, Nils is once again a good ingredient in the band, adding color where previously Neil might have meandered into jamming.

Neil Young With Crazy Horse Barn (2021)—3