NEIL YOUNG & THE CHROME HEARTS : TALKIN TO THE TREES

1. Family Life
2. Dark Mirage
3. First Fire Of Winter
4. Silver Eagle
5. Let’s Roll Again
6. Big Change
7. Talkin To The Trees
8. Moving Ahead
9. Bottle Of Love
10. Thankful

Label : Reprise Records

Release Date : June 13, 2025

Length : 37:56

Review (AllMusic) : The sole constant in Neil Young's body of work is that he's going to do what he feels like doing in the moment. This usually means plenty of change from album to album, but it often finds him touching upon sounds that have long been his mainstays -- country-leaning rock, noisy guitar workouts in the manner of Crazy Horse, and emotionally intense folk-influenced numbers. When Young announced in 2024 that he'd formed a new backing band, the Chrome Hearts, it was no great surprise that they were full of familiar faces. Guitarist Micah Nelson, bassist Corey McCormick, and drummer Anthony Logerfo were all members of Promise of the Real, the band led by Lukas Nelson (Willie Nelson's son), who backed Young on several albums and tours, while keyboard player Spooner Oldham is a veteran session musician and songwriter who has been working with Young on and off since 1978's Comes a Time. 2025's Talkin to the Trees is Young's first studio collaboration with the Chrome Hearts, and they bring a welcome energy to these songs while delivering the sounds that are Neil's sonic comfort food -- big, slightly sloppy guitar fury on "Big Change" and "Dark Mirage," rootsy and melodic country-flavored accents on "Thankful" and "First Fire of Winter," and folkie simplicity on the title track. The Chrome Hearts are adaptable and supportive wherever Young wants them to go, and while he might normally use different sets of musicians to capture his various moods, they manage to hit all the bases with aplomb, even rising to the occasion on outliers like the vibraphone-enhanced "Bottle of Love" and the rowdy groove of "Movin' Ahead." They give Young just what he wants and needs, and so the album's strengths and inconsistencies all fall on the headliner. "Let's Roll Again" and "Family Life" sound as if Young wrote them while playing them for the first time, the former a clunky but impassioned message to the auto industry, and the latter a warm if clumsy love letter to his children and his wife. Curiously, "Family Life" is immediately followed by "Dark Mirage," a grungy companion piece that lends credence to rumors Young and his daughter had a severe falling out after he divorced his second wife (and her mother) in 2014 so he could marry actress Daryl Hannah. Most of the rest of the tracks capture a more refined degree of spontaneity, long one of Young's musical trademarks, and like many of his albums since 2010, it's uneven, with moments of genuine beauty like "First Fire of Winter" and "Thankful" and bracing rockers like "Big Change" sharing space with lesser numbers like "Silver Eagle" (a pleasant but unremarkable tribute to his tour bus) and "Let's Roll Again." In short, Talkin to the Trees is another album of Neil Young doing what he felt like doing in the moment, and if it's flawed, after 60 years of record-making, no one with any sense would want him any other way.

Review (Rolling Stone Music) : Time fades away, but Neil Young never does. He’s been on a like-a-hurricane live roll lately with his ferocious new band the Chrome Hearts, who make their studio debut on Talkin to the Trees. The band came together fast last year, after Neil’s amazing spring tour with his old outlaw pals in Crazy Horse. Since Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot are both over 80, Neil was one of the youngest dudes in his own band — he’s still a spring chicken of 79. Health issues ended the tour early, almost exactly a year ago, but Neil quickly recruited the Chrome Hearts, with the same initials but also the same fighting spirit. Not to mention the same guitarist — 34-year-old Micah Nelson, who saw his first Neil show at his dad’s Fourth of July Picnic. Since Micah’s dad is named “Willie,” it’s fitting the Hearts made their live debut at Farm Aid. The rhythm section is Corey McComick and Anthony LoGerfo, who’ve already recorded with Neil Young with Promise of the Real, their band with Micah (and his brother Lukas). And Neil’s got an old outlaw buddy on the organ: Spooner Oldham, the 81-year-old Memphis legend heard on so many soul classics by Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Percy Sledge. He’s been playing with Neil since his 1978 country-fried classic Comes a Time. So the band is steeped in Young’s history — Micah Nelson even learned to play the late Ben Keith’s pedal-steel parts on his Telecaster. Talkin to the Trees is Neil taking stock as he heads out into his eighties, with a defiantly messy statement of purpose for anyone who wants to trap him in the past. As he declares, “Might be short and it might be long/But I’ll be singing my new song.” “Silver Eagle” is a tremendously endearing love song to his tour bus, and all the ground they’ve traveled together, with a Woody Guthrie campfire-folkie tune. (Okay, the exact same tune as “This Land Is Your Land,” not the only time on the album he uses this melody.) It’s poignant to hear him cop to being a rambler who only feels at home when he’s in motion. “Silver Eagle, keep blowing on,” he tells his ten-wheeled bus muse. “Full of stories, both yours and mine/Silver Eagle, we’re rolling through time.” “Bottle of Love” feels like an accidental tribute to the late Brian Wilson, with Neil playing a lonesome Pet Sounds-style vibraphone. Neil and Brian are California boys who go way back to the Sixties, even before Neil closed his 1972 Journey Through the Past soundtrack with the Pet Sounds instrumental “Let’s Go Away for a While.” Neil sang a heart-wrenching version of “In My Room” at Brian’s 2005 MusiCares concert; they also did “Surfin’ U.S.A.” together for a 2014 Bridge School benefit. “Big Change” goes at Trump with loud guitars, though the words are surprisingly soft and vague. But Neil takes aim elsewhere at his crony Elon Musk, snarling, “If you’re a fascist get a Tesla/If you’re a democrat taste your freedom.” “Let’s Roll Again” is a sequel — not to “Roll Another Number (For the Road),” lamentably, but to “Let’s Roll,” the post-9/11 broadside that’s one of his all-time least-loved songs. As he’s mentioned a time or two before, Young has strong feelings about the auto industry, ranting to the Big Three (“Build us something that won’t kill our kids/Runs real clean”) and warbling, “China’s way ahead, they’re building clean cars.” It’s definitely a trip to hear the road-dog who sang “Long May You Run” complain about noisy mufflers. Spooner Oldham’s best showcase is the title tune, where he provides a delicate organ backdrop for a tale about a old man’s morning in the country. Neil stands in line at the farmers market, listening to his old pal Dylan: “Thinking about Bob, all the songs he was singing/All that time just wanting to say hello / Prime of life, thinking of that old song/Passed me by, could be yesterday.” The Dylan song in his head sounds like it might be “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” since Neil also sings about hearing the rooster crow at the break of dawn. “Thankful” and “First Fire of Winter” are homegrown folkie ballads, evoking the sounds he and Oldham made together on Harvest Moon. “Dark Mirage” and “Family Life” are strange and jarringly angry barbs that seem to address his estranged daughter, after the death of her mom Pegi; they make a stark contrast with hippie-dad songs from her childhood like “Amber Jean” or “Buffalo Springfield Again.” He complains about not being allowed to see his grandchildren, but finds consolation in Daryl Hannah, as he’s “singing for my best wife ever/The best cook in the world.” Talkin to the Trees is a deliberately spiky songbag from a man who remains miraculously undiminished as a live performer — his first shows with the Chrome Hearts were mind-blowing noise symphonies, throwing down the gauntlet with a 13-minute jam on “Down by the River.” He and the Hearts are heading back out there on tour all this summer, raising hell on Old Black and walking like the giant he is. He’s not aiming for a major work here — just taking his new group out for a spin in the studio and seeing where they can go, which could be end up being anywhere. Long may they — and he — run.

Review (The Independent) : “When today has come and gone/ I might be singing my new song…” growls Neil Young on the opening line of his 48th studio album, Talkin’to the Trees. Although he’s backed by a ragtag band of long-term collaborators (branded here as The Chrome Hearts), the bumble-bump of the wheezy harmonica, acoustic strum and rattling drum of “Family Life” make him sound like a one-man band rummaging absentmindedly through a cramped store cupboard in search of the next line… Which turns out to pivot on the almost comically underwhelming, yet triumphantly delivered, rhyme: “Might be short and it might be long/ But I’ll be singing my new song!” Taahh-dahh! You wait patiently as the rambling rocker lifts line after line from the shelves, listing his family members, telling you where they’re at now and worrying away at emotional sores. He names his sons and pines for “my grandchildren who I can’t see”. The question of why Young might be estranged from the children of his daughter, Amber, appears to be answered when he goes on to describe actor Daryl Hannah (who he married in 2018) as his “best wife”. Surely an unnecessary slap in the face for Amber’s mother, Pegi, to whom Young was married for nearly 40 years? Unnecessary, even if true. Also, is it sweetly homely or plain patronising that the highly accomplished Hannah (who recently released a documentary about Young on tour) is lauded only for being “the best cook in the world”? It’s all par for the course on this collection of 10 new songs that find the Godfather of Grunge beetling along heroically/tediously in the same old tyre tracks he’s been stuck in for years. As a longtime Young fan, I found myself feeling as torn as his well-worn stage denim. On the one hand: I found myself bored listening to tracks such as “First Fire of Winter”, which leans heavily into the recycled three-chord riff of his 1970 classic song “Helpless”, and again as “Silver Eagle” chunters along to the singalong tune of Woody Guthrie’s 1940 anthem “This Land Is Your Land”. On the other, I found it undeniably heartwarming to hear Ole Shakey bumbling through the same old chord sequences he’s used since the Seventies, singing about being stuck in the queue at his local farmer’s market (as he does on the title track). Elsewhere, though, we find that the man who wrote the blistering “Ohio” in 1970 (hitting back against President Nixon in response to the Kent State shootings) has lost none of his electric rage against injustice. Even if the lumbering, two-chord anti-Donald Trump, anti-Elon Musk protest tracks (“Big Change” and “Lets Roll Again”) do sound as though they’ve been busked up in minutes. “Lets Roll Again” sees him calling on the American car industry to “Build us something that won’t kill our kids/ That runs real clean”. But there’s little of Ohio’s efficient lyrical craft in the lines, “Come on America/ Let’s get in the race … Over in China, they’re way ahead/ That’s hard to swallow.” There’s also some incoherence as Young rails against Musk with: “If you’re a fascist get a Tesla/ If you’re a democrat taste your freedom/ Get whatever you want and taste your freedom” Does that mean democrats are exempt from the Tesla boycott? Who knows! There’s still something to love in the way Young has stayed in his lane. Talkin to the Trees drifts into more interesting territory towards the end, with its spaceously jazzy drumming, yawning whale song, pedal steel and lullsome keyboards of “Bottle of Love” (over which Young’s crackle-glazed high tenor croons of “flying across the fields”). The closer, “Thankful”, is an acoustic swayer on which he leaves us with a hippified glow of gratitude for the “peaceful earth” and an ongoing plea for the planet. Many artists, including the late Marianne Faithfull, created some of their best work in their later years. This is not Young’s best work. It is, however, a record that should raise smiles on the faces of the faithful.

Review (Mojo Magazine) : Old age has galvanised Neil Young, spurring the singer-songwriter into creative overdrive. Talkin To The Trees, his 46th proper studio album, appears amidst a flood of archival releases, films, and tours. Once his trusty Crazy Horse became too wobbly to ride, Young formed the Chrome Hearts by recruiting most of his other backing group Promise Of The Real, swapping Lukas Nelson for the legendary keyboardist Spooner Oldham, who first played with Neil on 1992’s Harvest Moon. Reshuffling his old friends into the Chrome Hearts indicates Young is amenable to changing his plotted course but he’s wary to roam too far from home. With the world outside engulfed in tumult, he’s battened down the hatches, using protest songs as an escape hatch. Let’s Roll Again, a pseudo-sequel to his 9/11-era anthem, is designed as a rallying call for his beloved auto industry, which happens to be at a political crossroads in 2025 thanks to Elon Musk’s presence in the second Trump administration. As the Chrome Hearts lumber forth, Young spits, “If yer a fascist, then get a Tesla” to a melody that mirrors This Land Is Your Land, a song that also echoes through Silver Eagle. The Woody Guthrie nods, combined with the simplicity of the songs, makes Talkin To The Trees feel as immediate and topical as Living With War. Unlike that Iraqi war missive, this is decidedly not a news bulletin. This is a journal entry, a reflection of Young’s state of mind: mad at the world, he finds nourishment in his family. Despite the din of the Chrome Hearts, Talkin To The Trees is anchored in homespun folk. Its keynote song is Family Life, a tune where he celebrates his offspring by name before singing the praises of his “best wife ever”. His cornball enthusiasm is tempered by First Fire Of Winter and Bottle Of Love, a pair of songs that recall the fireside intimacy of Will To Love. Young doesn’t deliberately conjure the spirits of the past so much as settle into a comfortable groove with his band. Whenever the group suggests a detour, he won’t turn them down: Dark Mirage galumphs through the garage until it gets subsumed by the ominous undertow of its chorus, while its cousin Movin’ Ahead is driven by a fuzz bass that threatens to cleave it in two. These are passing squalls: he spends the album grateful for such acts as shopping at the farmers market or singing a new song for the first time. Fittingly, Talkin To The Trees is one of these simple pleasures, a port in the storm in these troubled times.