Road warrior still making driving rock
The backstory on Neil Young’s
umpteenth studio album—rock star works with crazed mechanical
genius to convert a beat-up ‘59 Lincoln Continental into a lean,
green, eco-friendly machine, then drives it across America just to
show that he can—informs nearly every song on Fork in the Road.
There are almost as many references to cars, wheels, and roads in
these lyrics as in the entire Springsteen catalog.
Not surprisingly, all the car
references and metaphors mean more than they seem, and Young has more
on his mind than simple nostalgia for the golden age of the American
auto. Like 2006’s caustic Living with War, Fork in the Road finds
Neil in cub-reporter mode, dashing off hastily scrawled dispatches
that serve as his State of the Union address, circa the desperate
economic spring of 2009. The sloppily played garage rock riffs
complement the slapdash nature of the lyrics, and—as you might
expect—it’s that loose, under-rehearsed and under-written
methodology that is both the album’s strength and its downfall.
There are no winding
godfather-of-grunge solos here, and no hippie poetry. There’s only
Young, living and rocking in the moment, for better or worse; a
pattern he’s followed since the 2005 brain aneurysm that almost
killed him. Maybe when you believe you don’t have much more time
you don’t labor over the results.
Still, there are some jaw-dropping
moments—and not because of the musical majesty, either. Did Young
actually write a saccharine ballad based on that horridly clichéd
slogan that it’s better to light a candle than to curse the
darkness? Oh God, yes he did. Did he steal the riff from Van
Morrison’s “G-L-O-R-I-A” for one track, a riff so familiar and
so overused that most third-rate bar bands know better than to touch
it? Yes, he did that, too. But for every head-scratcher, Young churns
out a sturdy, perfectly serviceable garage rocker that succeeds
because of the passion and conviction he brings to the proceedings.
“Just singing a song won’t change the world,” he opines on one
song, but, unreconstructed hippie that he is, he doesn’t really
believe it. He’s all about changing the world—through song,
through being an ornery prophet and social critic, through driving a
dilapidated car and showing that it’s possible to get a hundred
miles per gallon. It’s hard to do anything but wish him well. There
are half a dozen tracks here, most notably the scalding “When
Worlds Collide,” the darkly pensive “Off the Road,” and the
scathing title track, where it is impossible to separate the primal
roots rocker from the social activist. And that’s when he’s at
his best.
Near the end of the title track, an
otherwise blistering attack on Wall Street bankers and bean counters
without souls, Neil stops to pen a love letter to his fans: “Big
rock star, my sales have tanked / I still got you. Thanks.” Like the
rickety jalopy he drives, there is much more under the hood than
meets the eye. Long may he run.