I put off buying Neil Young's Greendale when it came out two months ago because I wanted to come up to speed on his past. It's a bookish affectation on my part, I know --this tendency to view major atists as mountains to climb, start at the bottom and work your way up, earliest to latest, worst to best, best to worst, whatever formula feels right at the time. I tend to avoid artists in their latest or most popular incarnation, because they already have everyone else's attention, and because you're only getting the latest chaper of the story, and maybe not the best chapter. Jimmy McDonough's bio Shakey had already made it abundantly clear that I've either forgotten a lot of high points of Young's career or simply missed them altogether.

I want to say Greendale is Neil Young's best work in years, but I haven't really followed his work of the past decade. I've focused over the past few months on his peak years of the 1970s, which is also when I first discovered him. It's too early to say that Greendale is on par with, say, Tonight's the Night or Rust Never Sleepsbut it certainly has epic ambition, and it has obviously inspired him in a major way, as if he has pursued and uncorked some major statement that he wants everyone to hear. The disc is 78 wordy-but-never-wearisome minutes long, with some cuts clocking in at the I-can't-stop-writing ten and twelve minute mark, and it comes with a DVD of the songs performed live. There's also an exhaustive website, a reportedly theatrical tour, and a movie of some kind is reportedly in the works. The latter isn't the greatest news, as Young's previous cinematic adventures rank him as a film auteur of the Frank Zappa or Bob Dylan stripe, i.e., he makes unwatchable movies with often exceptional scores.

Distinct from Young's other records, Greendale has a somewhat literary scope to it, as if Young wanted to write a rock and roll Great American Novel, full of fascinating characters and a plot both tragic and strange that says something of enormous import about the times we live in. There's Grandfather Green, a stately old coot who reflects a time gone by, his son Earl, Earl's wife Edith, their daughter Sun Green — who reminds me a bit of Prairie Wheeler in Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland — and Earl's dope-dealing brother Jed. When Jed guns down a police officer named Carmichael, the family is placed in the media spotlight, which rather spontaneously brings on the grandfather's heart-attack and — for reasons that aren't entirely clear — inspires the young Sun's career as an environmental activist.