Forever Young

Harvest Moon might seem like the ultimate concession to Young's old fans, but he sees it as a valid, even experimental enterprise. "People had been asking me to do it for twenty years, and I never could figure out what it was in the first place," he says. But when he wrote a batch of new songs and finished some old ones last summer in Colorado, the Harvest sound was what he heard in his head. "That's when I discovered what the hell I was doing, but only because the songs made me do it," he says. "It just happened again, whatever it was the happened back then."

The track "You and Me," a quiet paean to domesticity that quotes from the Harvest hit "Old Man," is the musical link between the albums, according to Young: "That song was started in 1975, but I never finished it. In 1976, [bassist] Tim Drummond heard it and said: 'You've got to finish that, man. That's like Harvest stuff, let's do that.' And that kinda freaked me out, I got spooked by it, because it was like someone said what it was before we did it. I don't want to feel like I'm just filling in the numbers." But along with this new batch of compositions came a new intro and last verse, and the twenty-year-long jump was completed.

In the notes to his 1978 anthology Decade, Young wrote: "'Heart of Gold' put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch." He still expresses ambivalence about Harvest: "When people start asking you to do the same thing over and over again, that's when you know you're way too close to something that you don't want to be near. I can't hold that against [Harvest], which I did; it's certainly got the depth of the other records. But it took a while to get to that. I just didn't want to do the obvious thing, because it didn't feel right."

Obviousness or predictability would be the last things of which Neil Young could be accused. Young asserts that all the disparate styles he has explored — from his Sixties work with folk-rock pioneer Buffalo Springfield to the altered electro-vocals of Trans (1982) to the rockability of Everybody's Rockin' (1983) — are related, that the relevance his listeners find in the more accessible records is of a piece with the weirder, sometimes patently incomprehensible stuff. "Deep inside [the Rockin' band] the Shocking Pinks or Trans is the same stuff that people are hearing now," he says. "It's just buried; it's not on the surface. And some of it is more intense than what people are hearing now."

Nor has Young ever turned his back on any part of his musical past. His tour bus, after all, still has Buffalo Springfield emblazoned on the back (making it hard to miss parked outside the stage door after a show). He doesn't even rule out another go-around with his cohorts Crosby, Stills and Nash. "I'm good friends with all of them, and we could literally be making music together anytime," Young says. "If we had the songs and the circumstances were right, we could do something great. I think the potenial's still there."

Driven, open, restless (he even named the band he took to Europe after Freedom Young and the Restless), Young's primitive guitar screech and yowling voice have served as lasting inspiration for wandering souls and fuck-ups of several generations now. In the 1990s, Neil Young is simply so anachronistic that he's cutting edge.

"I like to walk," he says when asked what he does during a typical day on tour after a lifetime in the rock & roll business. "A lot of times, I'll stop the bus and walk three or four miles and then let the bus catch up with me on the road."

Neil Young doesn't listen to records. "I'm more interested in what the music of the times is," he explains over juice and coffee in the cafe of his Chicago hotel, still wearing the same Chicago Blackhawks T-shirt he put on after the preceding night's show. "If it's on the radio or somebody else is playing a tape, that's how I hear music. It's what I hear in the environment." He must travel in a wide-open environment indeed, for he casually drops references to artists ranging from Trisha Yearwood to Pearl Jam, from REM to Patty Smyth. He flashes a goofy grin on the Harvest Moon inner sleeve bedecked in a Fishbone T-shirt.

Young discusses music — any music — with unabashed love; it's incredible to hear anyone talk about bands without a shred of attitude or exclusion. As one who helped popularize country rock in the Seventies, for instance, he maintains that today's country boom is the result of listeners losing interest in singer-songwriters like himself.

"I drove a lot of people away by singing so loud and abrasive and the feedback and all, and I'm not the only one who's done that to them," Young says. "A lot of people turned to country because it's more like Seventies rock & roll. Pop and rock have just changed their name to country. Garth Brooks — he's a pop star, like what's his name, Bryan Adams. But he sings about things that are more rural, more country values. People like to hear things they can relate to, not just some posey kind of antilifestyle attitude or whatever."