Legendary folk-rocker Neil Young teamed up with icon-in-his-own-right music producer Lou Adler for Young’s latest album, Before and After. Comprised of 13 songs and clocking in at just under 48 minutes, the album features a mix of popular earworms and deep cuts spanning Young’s prolific career. Most songs are solo acoustic recordings, but vibraphone and second piano credits go to Bob Rice. The Volume Dealers, Young and Nico Bolas, collaborated on mixing the album. Before and After is officially released on December 8.
Plucked from moments across his lifetime, Before and After is a non-linear, instrumentally minimal emotional odyssey.
“Songs from my life recently recorded create a music montage with no beginnings or endings. The feeling is captured, not in pieces but as a whole piece,” said Young in a statement about the album.
I’d argue there is a beginning and an end to the album, and it’s the same; it starts and ends with love.
The album starts with “I’m The Ocean” from Mirror Ball, released in 1995. Mirror Ball featured Pearl Jam backing Young. Stripped of the band’s distinct grunge-era instrumentation, “I’m The Ocean” succeeds in this peeled-back version. The lyrics have space; listeners get to experience the vastness of Young’s love and fear – “I’m the ocean, I’m the giant undertow” – before being sent into the second song, “Homefires.”
“Homefires” was recorded in 1974 at Broken Arrow Ranch, and until Before and After, it could only be found in the artist’s archival volumes. A brief contemplation on romantic love, or more accurately, a soured love, the song is entirely more emotionally specific – in contrast to “I’m The Ocean.” Raw and heart-piercing truths about changed feelings are infused with emotionally evocative guitar and harmonica, “I’m free to give my love, but you’re not the one I’m thinking of, so for me the wheels are turning, got to keep the homefires burning.”
The third song, “Burned,” is from Buffalo Springfield’s 1966 self-titled debut album. Before and After’s next song, “On the Way Home,” also came from his time with Buffalo Springfield. “On the Way Home” was recorded in December 1967 for the band’s final album. Unlike “Burned,” Young didn’t sing on the original track; despite writing it, he played the piano in the ’67 Sunset Studio, Los Angeles recording, while Richie Furay sang lead vocals.
The pump organ and harmonica drop listeners off from “And I love you/Can you feel it now?” into “If You Got Love” around 14 minutes into the album. “You feel so complete inside ’cause you got love. If you got love, the world you’re walking in is at your command,” Young promises. Confusingly, I was reminded of the Daniel Johnston classic “True Love Will Find You In The End.” Johnston’s style was Young-like, so it feels like the master’s work reflects the student’s interpretation of the master. Listen for yourself, it’s a musical “Inception.”
The montage then pans to a song from Young’s 20th album, Sleeps with Angels, recorded in 1994 with Crazy Horse: “A Dream That Can’t Last.” On Before and After, the recording is as potent as a whiff of patchouli oil for awakening sense memories of the heroin-addled early nineties and the tragic death of Kurt Cobain. “A Dream That Can’t Last’s” twinkling piano and Young’s raw vocal musings float listeners through the subconscious before two powerful harmonica pulsations ground listeners.
In “Birds” from the 1970s After the Gold Rush, the imagery of a bird taking flight alone, casting a shadow over a former lover, leaving the wings of a trusted partner in search of something better feels at once romantic and tragic. The tune picks at a heart-sickened-kind-of-sadness scab, distinctly not the same as the observational qualities of in “A Dream That Can’t Last,” “Birds” is felt more than seen.
From “Birds,” Before and After transitions back to a Sleeps with Angels’ tune titled “The Heart.” Lying against the sparse key accompaniment, images of birds, falling stars, dreamstates, the march of time, and heartfulness continue. “The Heart” and “Birds” were released 24 years apart, but the arrangement here reminds listeners of the era-agnostic quiet burden of hauling around a deeply felt sense of personhood.
“When I Hold You in My Arms” from 2002’s Are You Passionate? examines external transformations and the observer’s reactions to them. Listeners are like a fly on the wall of Young’s interior contemplations. When the Are You Passionate? album was released, it was characterized as an extreme departure from Young’s style and met with mixed critical reception. “When I Hold You in My Arms” doesn’t have a sizeable stylistic divergence in Before and After… which likely comes from being thematically linked to the rest of the album and the recurrent images across each tune.
As a montage, there is naturalism to the transition from “When I Hold You in My Arms” to “Mother Earth.” Despite the latter being written 12 years before the former, energetically, the two are connected, and they further the montage by leading up to 1967’s Buffalo Springfield song, “Mr. Soul.”
After the subtle but heady build, the 1978 tune “Comes A Time” brings listeners back. Adventuring through Young’s richly experienced life quite literally feels like coming through a forest of sounds – “It’s a wonder tall trees aren’t laying down” – nod to Young’s activism promoting forest conservation to the Canadian government and the gift of being alive for a long time, despite experiencing death.
“Don’t Forget Love” from 2021’s album with Crazy Horse, Barn is the musical equivalent of a literary denouncement. We’re at the end and the beginning, a reminder to give and receive and experience love. Listeners are invited, with Young, to dissect it, examine its end, recall its beauty, question its presence, or search for it amidst change. In Before and After, Young reminds listeners that love transcends circumstances, conditions, or timing and exists absent of any of us, and before and after all of us.
NEIL YOUNG’S NEW ALBUM, BEFORE & AFTER, WILL BE OUT IN THE WORLD THIS FRIDAY!
