My, my, hey, hey. It's something special when Neil Young teams with Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme not to make a movie of his life but to sing and play the hell out of it on a stage. Demme and cinematographer Ellen Kuras set up eight cameras in Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, where Young and his band did two gigs in August. The first half consists of songs from Prairie Wind, the album Young recorded last year after a brain aneurysm threatened to call him out before he hit sixty. Screw that. With a voice that still stands up to the country-rock throb he coaxes out of his guitar, Young lets his new songs of hard and high living on the Canadian plains bleed into the classics he wrote for Harvest and Harvest Moon. Demme is there to catch every note of bruising beauty. You don't just hear it in the music, you see it etched in Young's face. This is more than a movie, it's a privilege.

“The Pretender”

This song wasn't part of the planned track listing for 2007's Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, and was put together in a day. "It happened after we recorded a lot of stuff," said Dave Grohl. Yet it ended up as the album opener and the lead single. Grohl called it "a stomping Foo Fighters uptempo song with a little bit of Chuck Berry in it." The singer hinted at the lyrics' political overtones: "Everyone's been f---ed over before and I think a lot of people feel f---ed over right now and they're not getting what they were promised."