Neil Young once described listening to a CD – as opposed to a record – as “when you turn on the shower, instead of water, you get hit with broken glass.” Maybe he was a little harsh, but in other words, a CD is completely inadequate – especially for Young’s music.
His new album, Prairie Wind, continues in that same fashion. A nice compliment to Young’s other journeys into quiet reflection, many critics have tried to pigeonhole it as the third-installment in the 30-year saga of Harvest and Harvest Moon. But Prairie Wind, like the others, suffers when it sounds too smooth, too refined. The hisses and pops of the record are needed on the album, as Young brings us through the slow-paced world of an earlier, simpler time.
Few artists have managed to stay relevant or quite as cool as Young throughout their careers. From the beginning, as a member of Buffalo Springfield, Young’s sound was rough and tattered on the edges and his voice, almost paradoxical for hard-rocking, was at once delicate and authoritative. The sound depended on the record’s crackling as another element, and the two mixed into a perfect combination suggesting something more – there was nothing that felt slick and polished about it.
In Prairie Wind, Young sticks to his roots, teaming up with some old Nashville friends – including Emmylou Harris – and creates an album that can stand up to any of his country-rock projects. While recording, Young suffered an aneurism and had to postpone the album for a few months. The theme of death, obviously very close in Young’s mind at the time, shows up again and again in Prairie Wind – the feeling of Young as an old man, with knowledge of the end, telling his grandchildren about life.
But where there is reflection, there is nostalgia, and with that comes the danger of appearing resentful of today, wishing for the return of some glory days of the past. But Young’s music has a timeless quality, and Prairie Wind could have been an album from 40 years ago or 15 years from now. His relevance seems to continue because he does not fall back on some tried and true recipe that bands such as The Rolling Stones and U2 have perfected over their long careers that sell millions of records. For Young, it’s about the music, not the money.
And Young’s matter-of-fact attitude avoids all those feelings of bitterness, or anything resembling a desire to return to the past. He is simply singing about events that he knows, whether they are older subjects or not.
But the turntable is where the nostalgia returns, where it must return, because let’s face it: Neil Young just sounds better on vinyl.
– Sean Cox
