NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE : BARN

1. Song Of The Seasons
2. Heading West
3. Change Ain't Never Gonna
4. Canerican
5. Shape Of You
6. They Might Be Lost
7. Human Race
8. Tumblin' Thru The Years
9. Welcome Back
10. Don't Forget Love

Label : Reprise Records

Release Date : December 10, 2021

Length : 42:47

Review (AllMusic) : One of the great Neil Young stories concerns a visit to Young's ranch by Graham Nash. Young ushered his friend into a rowboat, as he wanted to listen to his new album Harvest while lazing about on the lake. As it roared out of twin speakers emanating from the house and barn, producer Elliot Mazer asked Young how the playback sounded, Young hollered back "More Barn!" It's hard not to think of this tale when faced with Barn, the second album Young has made with Crazy Horse after the retirement of guitarist Frank "Poncho" Sampedro. Nils Lofgren, the guitarist who Sampedro essentially replaced back in 1975, returned to the fold on Colorado, the 2019 album which feels like a cousin to Barn. Like Colorado, Barn is heavily informed by Young's new surroundings in the Rocky Mountains, a place where he restored an old barn with his wife Daryl Hannah. Naturally, the barn is also where Crazy Horse recorded Barn - a process documented by Hannah on an accompanying feature-length documentary - and the building also seems to be part of the record itself, providing a homespun warmth and wide open spaces. The setting gives Crazy Horse a lot of room to roam, enough to make it clear that this version of the Horse isn't as heavy-footed as the one with Poncho. Lofgren can crank up his amp but his gift is empathetic support. He nimbly follows Young's lead on both the rockers and ballads, decorating the open-ended ramble "Welcome Back" with unexpected flourishes. As for Neil, he's living in the moment, pondering his civic duties as a new American citizen (he coins the term "Canerican"), worries about the state of the world, wonders what future generations will think of the wreckage today's population leave behind, yet never forgets to hold onto love. Alternately cutting and corny, Young's songwriting feels impassioned to the point of diffusion: the songs aren't so much crafted as delivered. Happily, the loose performances more than suit these ragged compositions, turning Barn into a snapshot of this moment in time: a bunch of old friends in isolation, finding solace and comfort in the noise they can still make.

Review (Wikipedia) : Barn is the 41st studio album by Canadian-American singer-songwriter Neil Young and his 14th with Crazy Horse. The album was released on December 10, 2021, by Reprise Records. A stand-alone film of the same name will also be released on Blu-ray and will be directed by Young's wife Daryl Hannah. Reviewing in his Substack-published "Consumer Guide" column, Robert Christgau gave Barn an "A" and declared it the first worthwhile album of new Young songs since 2009's Fork in the Road. In comparison to that album, he said that "Crazy Horse is quieter and gentler [here] as the green consciousness their boss embraced as of 2003's Greendale turns ever more militant and also, unfortunately but fittingly, much darker". Among the highlights in Christgau's mind were "Canerican", "Change Ain't Never Gonna", "Today's People", "Tumblin' Through the Years", and "Don't Forget Love", although he was most impressed by "Welcome Back", calling it a "full-bore astonishment" whose sincerity is evinced in Young's guitar, "so quiet and caring it feels like love". Writing for PopMatters, John Amen gave the project a 7/10, concluding, "Their navigations of sublimity vs. subtlety, maximalism vs. spaciousness, and free improvisation vs. precise composition are like inexhaustible stylistic lodes ...."

Review (The Guardian) : 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. Barn CD cover "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. The album's crowning glory pairs Young's tendency to baldly auto-describe with a sense of profound uncertainty 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.

Review (Rolling Stone Magazine) : In the last decade or two, you generally know what's coming when you hit play on a new Neil Young record. You know there will be a few sweet lovestruck hymns that sound as if they're being played in dusty Old West saloons or around campfires. You anticipate the songs that wax nostalgic about his childhood, and the ones that rage against the destructiveness and stupidity of mankind and the impact on the planet. You await those moments when he turns the volume knob up and makes his guitar sound like it's sandblasting paint off an old shed All those elements are in play in Barn, but the crucial difference is the presence of a reconstituted version of Crazy Horse, with recurring Young sideman Nils Lofgren replacing the retired Frank "Poncho" Sampedro. Young first reconvened his on-again, dismissed-again band for 2010's underwhelming Colorado, but maybe they all just needed time to warm up. On Barn, cut in just a few days at a log-cabin structure in Colorado, the thunderous and ornery side of Young and the Horse revs up again, and sonically, at least, it's akin to running into an old friend you haven't seen face to face since the pre-pandemic days. Take, for instance, "Heading West." One of those look-backs at his youth and his parents' breakup, it's not nearly as detailed or fleshed out as previous narratives from "Don't Be Denied" to "Born in Ontario." But with his electric leading the way, the music is cranky and clankety, and drummer Ralph Molina can still hit his kit hard. "Canamerican," where Young revels in his newfound ability to vote in this country (and for Joe Biden), and "Change Ain't Never Gonna," one of his apocalyptic rants, also summon up the old Horse rumble, down to those spooky, ethereal harmonies by Molina and bassist Billy Talbot. Likewise, "Welcome Back" has a muted, slithering beauty, like an older, more somber "Cortez the Killer," and "They Might Be Lost," with another narrator awaiting the arrival of something foreboding, plays like a lyrical older companion to "Powderfinger." Young's softer, more maudlin side rolls out in "Song of the Seasons" and "Tumblin' Through the Years," the inevitable paeans to his wife Daryl Hannah and their new life together, and damn if Young's voice, especially its upper register, hasn't aged shockingly well. The rollicking "The Shape of You"-no, not a cover of the Ed Sheeran song-is awfully goofy, but that falsetto in the chorus is the sound of someone in love and unafraid to embarrass himself in public while expressing it. At times, you miss the splatter of Poncho's rhythm guitar, and you also wish Young had taken another shot at his lyrics, which can feel a little cringy and first draft ("Before your computer turns on you/And walking through the garden/You remember something you've been through/And mingle with the stars in the sky"). But even more so than on Colorado, Lofgren's contributions and his musical interplay with Young-his jabbing guitar on "Change Ain't Never Gonna," piano parts here and there-recall what he also brought to Tonight's the Night. The deluxe edition of Barn includes an hour-plus documentary about the making of the album (also available as a separate Blu Ray). Directed by Hannah, credited as "dhlovelife," it's almost like a webcam: We see the four men wander in and out of the barn, tune up their instruments, turn Young's request for cold beer into a vocal warmup exercise, play the songs, make small talk between takes, and celebrate Talbot's 76th birthday with cake and candles. It's Get Back without people walking out in frustration or mentioning Eric Clapton. You're struck by how up there in their years they all look - Young himself turned 76 last month. But in light of how many of Young's peers are retiring, no longer writing new songs or, alas, dying, seeing and hearing these weathered veterans summon up some of that old power is about as reassuring as heritage rock gets in 2021. And yes, it almost makes you say: More barn.

Review (Pop Matters) : With his new album, Barn, Neil Young again teams up with Crazy Horse fixtures Billy Talbot (bass) and Ralph Molina (drums), as well as guitarist Nils Lofgren, who rejoined the group on 2019's Colorado, replacing Frank "Poncho" Sampedro, who retired following the release of 2012's Psychedelic Pill. While not necessarily breaking new ground, Young's latest set resonates as fervently composed and heartfeltly topical, and the band are as committed as ever to authentic and vigorous performance. The project opens with "Song of the Seasons", Young's percussive strum pattern intermittently reminiscent of 1972's "Heart of Gold". The harmonica and harmonium add a rustic tone to the track. Lyrically the piece is a desultory tribute to a relationship that has withstood numerous challenges ("We're so together in the way that we feel / That we could wind up anywhere"). The opening measures of "Heading West", featuring open chords soaked in distortion, hearken back to Young's second solo LP and first with Crazy Horse, 1969's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Young's vocal is airy and unpretentious, indicative of his often espoused "first take, best take" mantra. "Canerican" is a satirical take on American politics ("I am American, American is what I am / I cast my vote and now I got my man"). Young's melodic runs contrast dynamically with Lofgren's loosely staccato licks. Talbot and Molina maintain a steady but accent-filled rhythm. Young's explosive solo, replete with whammy-bar bravado, is concise yet viscerally gratifying. On "They Might Be Lost", a sultry melody and rambling narrative about a loner/outsider waiting "for the boys to come get the goods" bring to mind "Trans-Am" from 1994's Sleeps with Angels and "Crime in the City" from 1989's Freedom. "Welcome Back" launches with a rhythmic intro that resembles the signature riff of 1969's "Cowgirl in the Sand." Young implicitly alludes to climate change, world hunger, and systemic inequities while also pointing to human ingenuity and our ability to adapt. In this way, he strikes a balance between dystopianism and faith, as he did most evocatively on 1970's "After the Gold Rush." As the tune unfolds, Young's wiry notes and fluid passages, euphonies, and discords alternately evoke a sense of exhilaration and anxiety. The closing "Don't Forget Love" is a wistful reminder that positive change and sustainable meaning depend on the presence and cultivation of love. Even when Young and Crazy Horse employ familiar audial and thematic elements, as they do on The Barn, their offerings rarely sound rote or feel formulaically generated. Their navigations of sublimity vs. subtlety, maximalism vs. spaciousness, and free improvisation vs. precise composition are like inexhaustible stylistic lodes, influencing many of popular music's major movements, including art-rock, noise-rock, shoegaze, and grunge, as well as these genres' contemporary heirs. To reference Young's 1976 collaboration with Stephen Stills, long may they run.