Change is a constant for Neil Young but the 2010s were particularly rife with upheaval for the rocker. Not all of it was musical, not by a long shot. Within a matter of years, Young wrote two memoirs, made a valiant effort to reshape the digital audio industry with his music player Pono, struck up an alliance with Lukas Nelson's band The Promise Of The Real and severed his marriage to his longtime wife Pegi. He fell in love with Daryl Hannah, married her in the summer of 2018, then saw his home in Malibu destroyed in the Woolsey wildfire, so he moved to Telluride, Colorado, where he would be free to be at one with nature and smoke pot legally.
Colorado is also the title of his new album, his first record with Crazy Horse in seven years, but don't read too much into that. The album could've been called anything. For a brief time, it was called Pink Moon, named after a particularly luminescent moon that glowed upon the band during their recording sessions but Young changed his mind. The title swap didn't happen because Neil discovered Nick Drake released a celebrated album of the same name way back in 1972. Young told Mojo in this month's cover story that he was completely unaware of the existence of Drake's Pink Moon, a revelation that isn't exactly a surprise: a career spent doggedly pursuing his own muse doesn't leave much time to explore British bedsit singer/songwriters.
It's not so much that Young solipsistic — he supported Devo in the 1970s, recorded with Pearl Jam in the 1990s — but he prefers to control his surroundings, and he's becoming markedly less curious as he's settled into his golden years. It's been a long time since he forced Sonic Youth upon unsuspecting audiences. Instead, he's retreated to the world he began erecting back in the 1970s, cultivating a rotating set of collaborators and establishing a homefront on a ranch in Northern California. In 2019, many of those colleagues are gone — Elliot Roberts, his longtime manager, died this summer; he's estranged from David Crosby, perhaps permanently — but Crazy Horse is still here. Most of them are, at least. Frank "Poncho" Sampedro bowed out in 2014, never quite recovering from getting his hand smashed in the tour bus door. Enter Nils Lofgren, who played with the band in the early 1970s, stuck around through the sessions for Tonight's The Night, and has stayed in Young's orbit over the years, popping in on the occasional record.
Lofgren lends a hint of a sense of finesse to the primitivism of Crazy Horse, a refinement that suits the elegiac undercurrent running through several of Colorado's songs. Songs about loss and age, even newfound love are tinged with a slight melancholy that contrasts handsomely with Young's enduring ecological rage. Neil's worry for mother nature is a long-standing obsession but during the 2010s it became his defacto muse, fueling a series of albums with Lukas Nelson & The Promise Of The Real and effectively anchoring about half of Colorado. On "She Showed Me Love," the album's lumbering 14-minute centerpiece, Young attempts to shade his climate concern in metaphor, but generally, he's so blunt in his messaging, he makes Crazy Horse seem nuanced.
His direct, almost clumsy, lyricism on Colorado reflects how Young made the album in an era where Young documents his every move in exceeding detail. Over at Neil Young Archives — the online manifestation of the deep vault trawl he's promised for decades — he offers a direct line to his thoughts via the NYA Times-Contrarian, a hybrid of a newsletter and blog that parcels out news, links, and musings, but he's Colorado is accompanied by to larger, reflective projects. With To Feel The Music, a book co-written with Phil Baker, Young takes stock of the legacy of Pono, detailing his digital dreams and how they came crashing to the ground. Mountaintop is a fly on the wall film chronicling the recording of Colorado, a ninety-minute slog where Neil bitching about malfunctioning monitors amounts to drama. The audio problems at Studio In The Clouds--a boutique recording retreat lying just outside of Telluride — are perhaps the violent incident of when Young's ideals don't quite jibe with reality, but it's a theme that runs through both Mountaintop and To Feel The Music, or Colorado for that matter: Young is now a man who the times have left behind, but he's soldiering ahead with his dreams.
It's a notable shift in Young's persona and his art. For decades, his ornery willfulness manifested itself in sudden artistic left turns, but in the 2010s, he's been channeled that energy into controlling his environment. Set aside whatever personal turmoil he's experienced as of late: he's been fighting the good fight for high-end audio and climate change, leaving his music not so much as an afterthought, but as his anchor in troubled times. He's no longer searching within his music, he's relaxing inside of it, and that leads to a considerable lack of tension, even when he's brought Crazy Horse — usually his vehicle for wild rides — back into the barn.
Even at their peak, Crazy Horse wasn't especially fleet of foot, but fifty years on from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, they move with a creaky, deliberateness; they can still get to where they want to go, it just takes a while longer, since they're moving a bit slower. Take "She Showed Me Love," designed as this album's "Cowgirl in the Sand" or "Change Your Mind" — it circles around and around, offering a reminder of the band's transcendent past, yet never quite leaving the ground. The same can be said for the protest "Shut It Down," which begins with noisy squalls and settles into the grinding chant. When the tempos slow and the emotions sweeten, as they do on the bittersweet "Olden Days" and garrulous opener "Think Of Me," the music seems livelier, but like the woolier numbers, these tunes seem underbaked, confirming that there are detriments to Young's stubborn swiftness.
Neil originally planned a second session sometime after the April stint at Studio In The Clouds, but he decided a few weeks later that he had an album in hand, so he shelved the session and proceeded with the release of Colorado. The world turned between the record's completion and release when Elliot Roberts died on June 21. Plans to tour with Crazy Horse in the fall were scrapped, and Young released Colorado when his future seemed uncertain. Roberts' passing is naturally not acknowledged on Colorado but it's hard to not hear it through the prism of his passing, or Young's losses of the past few years. Neil never explicitly mentions any of this on Colorado — he's too consumed with climate change, for one, and combatting the resurgence of American ignorance — but his voice is worn and the Horse is slow. There's no getting around it: Neil Young sounds like an old man. He's returning to his favorite supporting band but they're also moving at the same measured gait as him, trying to blow through their years with sheer volume but not quite succeeding. That may mean that Colorado lacks the visceral rush of Crazy Horse at their peak — it isn't even as galvanizing as 2012's Psychedelic Pill — but there's a poignancy in the album's slightness. The songs aren't sturdy and neither is Neil's voice, yet through their wobbly performances and human harmonies, it's evident that Crazy Horse provides Young sustenance and solace in stormy times.