Neil Young and Crazy Horse: Barn review – raucous, highly tuneful songs of life and love

(Reprise)
The veteran rocker and his powerhouse of a band let rip in a barn in Colorado on Young’s least frustrating album in a while

For a double national treasure, one who could justifiably be claimed by two countries, Neil Young is hardly the most enigmatic of musical elder statesmen. Put together, the Canadian-born American’s last two albums (2019’s Colorado and now, Barn) state exactly where, and how, they were made – in a barn, in this longtime Californian’s recently adopted Colorado. Largely recorded live, both albums pair Young with his most charged powerhouse of a backing band, Crazy Horse.

Perhaps more significantly, Barn is probably the least frustrating new Young album in some time. These are 10 cogent songs about love and life, about the recent past, the years long gone and our future, delivered with verve, emotion and snarls of six-string authority. Infamously, Young’s one-time label Geffen sued this prolific but bloody-minded artist in 1983 for delivering records that “were not commercial in nature and musically uncharacteristic of Young’s previous records”. Laughably, Barn actually fulfils most of those criteria. This is a Crazy Horse record that is both raucous and highly tuneful, saturated with in-band bonhomie.

“The horse’s gait in the rhythm I feel somehow/ And the melody I play,” Young croons on the album opener, Song of the Seasons. He might be referring to the equine lope that underpins a number of Barn’s tunes, but it’s no leap at all to imagine Young means the other seventysomethings arrayed behind him in the draughty outbuilding, a structure captured on the video for another of Barn’s nuanced and engrossing tracks, Welcome Back.

The Horse have shape-shifted a little of late, of course: guitar stalwart Frank “Poncho” Sampedro retired after 2012’s Psychedelic Pill. As on Colorado, his place is filled by Nils Lofgren, who played with Crazy Horse in the early 70s before becoming a pillar of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Lofgren’s presence is key: subtle but undeniable.

Naturally, Lofgren turns up his amp for the classic, two-guitar Crazy Horse workouts – the swinging, growling Canerican, say – an autobiographical ballad in which Young pledges his troth to those twin motherlands as the band hit their resonant stride. “Canerican is what I am,” he avows, “all colours is what I am/ Stand by my brother for freedom in this land.” There’s plenty of gnarl on offer on tracks such as the furious Human Race, which imagines the blasted heath of “fires and floods” that gas-guzzling humanity is leaving in its wake.

Just as often, though, Lofgren plays honky-tonk piano or accordion, lending Barn a shimmying prettiness that goes beyond the more typical Crazy Horse cordite burn. The fault that seasoned NY&CH fans will find with Barn is the relative dearth of guitar fireworks. The fadeout at the end of Canerican, mid-solo, is a perverse and self-defeating act.

But the tilt towards tinkle and wheeze means that bittersweet songs gain in melancholy, as with the harmonica-and-accordion call-and-response on Song of the Seasons. Another key track, Heading West, galumphs along cheerily, Young’s guitar to the fore, recalling his idyllic childhood and his parents’ divorce, retold here as a road trip out west with his mother. The song’s breeziness is underpinned by Lofgren’s insouciant work on keys.

At 76, Young is all about embracing change, prompted to some degree by his relationship with actor and environmentalist Daryl Hannah. She’s the subject of the album’s gooey centrepiece, Shape of You (nothing to do with the friskier Ed Sheeran song). Love suffuses a number of these tracks, few more so than the final cut, Don’t Forget Love. Emphasised by Crazy Horse’s falsetto backing vocals, it’s an admonition to lean into one’s better feelings.

The crowning glory of this album, though, pairs Young’s tendency to baldly auto-describe with a sense of profound, possibly existential uncertainty. On one level the slow-burning They Might Be Lost finds Young and his other half pacing on the porch waiting for some guys in a truck, maybe to move some of the couple’s gear from one rural redoubt to another. (Young and Hannah recently bought a property in Omemee, Ontario, where he grew up.) This domestic scene finds Young killing time, reminiscing about the old days through “the smoke that I burn”. But the weather is changing. The truck is late. “The boys” might be lost. It’s hard to know.

And the past? Who knows about that either. “The jury is out on the old days, you know,” sings Young, “the judgment is soon coming down/ I can’t quite remember what it was that I knew.” This song about not-knowing finds Crazy Horse at their most elegant and consolatory: Young’s warm harmonica and Lofgren’s discreet keys having their own quiet conversation as the rhythm section of Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot bears a steady, unobtrusive witness to Young’s thousand-yard stare.