Neil Young & Crazy Horse in the 'Barn'

The New Album is Barn. B-A-R-N, Barn.

Did anything ever make as much sense as a Neil Young record called Barn? Almost any album Neil Young has made, solo or with Crazy Horse, over the last the 50 years, could have been called Barn. Except for the blues album, This Note's for You, and probably not Trans, which in 1982 anticipated the computer era we're mud-deep in. But Barn. Let it roll off your tongue. Well, "Barn" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, it just kind of drops, four letters, one syllable. Barn. It was released December 10. Reprise Records.

Think about Talking Heads' album, More Songs About Buildings and Food. The building is a Barn. The food is hay. What's so difficult about that? Remember saying "hey!" in school, and the teacher saying, "hay is for horses?" You knew that. What you were saying was, "hey, man, what's happening?" "Hey" was happening; hay was not happening. "Hey Joe" was always happening. Hay is happening in Neil Young's barn.

In the opening "Song of the Seasons," you can just about smell the hay, hear the horses neigh, smell the long end of the horses' digestive system in the stalls. You don't need sensimilla to make sense of this, but as you listen to Neil sing, play acoustic guitar and harmonica, you might keep your medication handy, in case you have hey hay fever. And, btw, "hey" is not a proper salutation for business email.

There is no song called "Barn" here, although there ought to be, maybe a 27-minute Crazy Horse jam without end, amen, like "Driftin' Back" from Psychedelic Pill. The longest NY&CH get here is the eight and a half minute "Welcome Back," but almost everything else is in the conventional three-or-four minute range. The exception is that six minute-plus opener,  "Song of the Seasons," bucolic and sincere.

Crazy Horse makes its appearance heard and felt when"Heading West" begins, the moment when you look outside and wonder: "Did the power transformer on the telephone poll just explode?" It looks a little gray and hazy and chilly for a lightning storm, but the wire's on fire and the smoke alarm just went off. Check the barn!

When I say that Neil Young could have recorded this any time over the last 50 years, I mean that literally. He may be a little more pessimistic about ecological disaster in "Change Ain't Never Gonna" than he once did, but he's been warning us about our own dangerous environmental detachment since before recycling was a routine part of taking stuff out for the sanitation department. He was working on electric cars when Elon Musk was still riding bicycles. He's been antiwar no matter what the war, he has been anti-colonial since "Cortez the Killer" and "Pochahontas" ("...Marlon Brando and me").

He has always been for equality, for the Native American, for the native Canadian (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis): he's a dual citizen, "Canamerican," as one new song is called: "I am all colors/all colors is what I am/I'll stand with all my brothers/for freedom in this land." True, this song does not have the epic sweep and indelible sound of "Pochahontas," but I think Neil is just trying to be efficient and not try so hard, but we are all older, and if we don't understand now, we never will.

Neil seems to be shadow dancing with Bob Dylan in the barn, with "Shape of You," again mostly harmonica and guitar, like an outtake from one of  Dylan's 80s bootlegs, and "Change Ain't Never Gonna" a concise (under three minutes) doff of the railroad engineer cap to Blonde on Blonde.

Don't forget the name of this album, Barn, lest you wander into the Last Record Store, ask for "the new Neil Young album"; the clerk will look at you like you're wearing a unicorn mask and offer you Illuminati Hotties, Dry Cleaning, or Snail Mail instead. There is also a song called "Human Race," another favorite lifelong topic of Neil Young songs. How are we doing? Not too good, man, not too good. People, we already know that. This should be played over the closing credits of Don't Look Up, the entertaining yet unsettling movie about the end of the world.

But Neil has a particular way of putting this across, always has, always will. Heed him, or clean out the barn, which may or may not be the same thing. It's your choice.

Like many of us, Neil can't help looking back. "Tumblin' Thru the Years" is exactly like taking a tumble through the years. It begins with a man, most likely Neil Young himself, telling us about the setting for the song: "While I was walking down the road . . . I was thinking about this love we share. You and me. It's a complicated thing. This life." That's pretty much the way it goes, and I'm not sure if he is speaking to someone with him, or he's meditating about his reply, as if his baby, she wrote him a letter. But in Neil's case, his baby, Daryl Hannah, is always with him, and she has shot a film called Barn which will be out sometime soonish. Check Neil Young Archives.

Then the fire brigade returns on "Welcome Back," (not you, Kotter) for eight and a half minutes, which is usually really good news. A bunch of these songs on Barn seem to just fade while the band is still playing at around the four minute mark; it's like Neil is bored sitting with the playback engineer and says, "that's enough," instead of letting us hear Crazy Horse stretch their sore muscles. And btw, Nils Lofgren is back, along with Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina, as Crazy Horse.

You've got to love the reflectiveness of "They Might Be Lost." Neil is waiting, perhaps for a pot delivery, or for some people to pick some up: "It's way past 4:20," he sings. Do you think a songwriter of Neil Young's experience was just looking randomly at his watch, or did he choose that time to send a signal to the listener? He sings about "the smoke I burn, keeps taking me to the old days." But Neil sounds like he's already had a few tokes, can't quite decide whether they were good old days, or not so good old days.

Well, the jury is out on the old days, you know
The judgement is soon comin' down
I can't quite remember what it was that I knew

He seems quite aware that Barn is immersed in the old days.  As he acknowledges on "Welcome Back":

Gonna sing an old song to you right now
One that you've heard before
Might be a window to your soul I can open slowly

And then, to show that he's not some detached rock star, he is in touch with where this song from Barn fits in with the rest of his career. "I've been singing this song for so long," consciously undermining any criticism that this song is more than a little familiar, and then noting that he too, has felt isolation: "The world has closed us in."

But Barn ends on an up note. It is Neil Young as advice columnist, offering an answer that's always good for any question. Are you feeling blue, my friend?: "Don't Forget Love." Sure it's pretty. Sure it's true. I mean, the horse is already out of the barn on that one. Don't mistake my sarcasm for criticism, at least not too much. I love this record. It is quintessential Neil Young & Crazy Horse. If you took the entire Neil Young catalog from the last 50 or so years, fed it into the Hadron collider, set it to aggregate 10 songs into almost 43 minutes, you'd get Barn. That's all you really need to know.

All typos are real. I will have a talk with the copy editor.