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 Talbot and Billy Molina 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.
