Mining Neil Young's Heart of Gold

I've always loved Neil Young.

For just about as long as I can remember loving music, Neil Young has been right up there in probably my top two or three favorite artists. But it hasn't always been easy.

You see, when he is at the top of his game, there are basically two Neil Youngs:
One is the organic, reflective folkie responsible for mellow classics like Harvest, Comes A Time, and Harvest Moon. The other is the wild, thrashing guitarist who gave us Rust Never Sleeps, "Cortez the Killer," "Like a Hurricane" and the rest... as well as, with his band Crazy Horse, some of the loudest concerts in rock history. But in between the time he spends making great records like those mentioned, Young has this really irritating habit of spending years - sometimes entire decades - doing goofy experiments.

In the 1980s, it was Trans and The Shocking Pinks. More recently, he has released wildly uneven work like the albums Are You Passionate? and Greendale.

Neil Young's track record with film hasn't been that great either. From Journey Through The Past to the jumbled 8-millimeter-looking mess that is Greendale, the problem with Young's films (concert documentaries and otherwise) has been a consistently amateurish quality.

Even the Rust Never Sleeps film, despite the great music on it, plays as a somewhat dark and grainy-looking document viewed nearly 20 years later.

But the great thing about Neil Young is that you can always count on him to eventually find his way back home. And even though it may sometimes take 10 years for him to hit that one home run, when he does, he usually bats it clean out of the park.

Prairie Wind, the album Young released last fall, is just one of those records. Recorded in Nashville with longtime cronies including Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham, the album is a flawless return to the form of records like Harvest Moon. It is also quite possibly the most lyrically personal album of Neil Young's career.

Last August, Neil Young premiered Prairie Wind with a pair of concerts at Nashville's historic and acoustically pristine Ryman Auditorium. The performances were filmed by veteran filmmaker Jonathan Demme, who's known for another great concert documentary, the Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense. The result is Neil Young: Heart of Gold, which finally gives this great artist's fans the definitive film document of Young onstage that they've long awaited.

Article Author: Glen Boyd

You'll find Blogcritics music editor Glen Boyd sharing his Thoughtmares on his personal blogs The World Wide Glen, and The Rockologist. Glen is also the author of Neil Young FAQ, scheduled for a spring 2012 release by Backbeat Books/Hal Leonard …

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