Neil Young: Prairie Wind

Neil Young has an ambivalent relationship with his own footsteps. On this album, you can feel him trying to avoid slipping too neatly into one of his standard genres and tropes. He's exploring a space between the acoustic and electric, between fine and rough, between solo troubadour and ensemble playing. Yet, he also enjoys referencing his past explicitly. I catch different examples of this each time I listen, but just a couple to explain what I mean: Far From Home steals part of its melody from Little Thing Called Love from Trans (at least I think that's the right song; if it's not that, it's another old one of his); while Here for You begins, "When your summer days come tumblin' down", echoing "When the winter rains come pourin' down" from Journey Through the Past, 34 years earlier.

It's an ambivalent relationship for us long-term fans, too; that first unpeeling of each new album, when your ears slip into familiar habits and start bracketing the new material with the old familiar. That's probably why I enjoy, as well as admiring, the odd leftfield shock to the system like Greendale, which shows that Neil can still break out of any rut you might think he's got caught in.

I've seen some people compare Prairie Wind to Harvest Moon, but to me it's broader than that in its range. More like Comes a Time.

The National Film Theatre announced they were going to show the UK premiere of Neil's Heart Of Gold film of the first live performances of Prairie Wind, in July 2006, accompanied by a talk with its director, Jonathan Demme. As NFT members, both Guy and I put in our orders for tickets as soon as they went on sale. First we were told it had been postponed or cancelled. Then it was back on again, without Demme. Four or five of us paid double the already-extortionate ticket price for the privilege of seeing the film a few days before everyone else… And we weren't even that excited about it. Long before, Guy had coined the term Heart of Gold Toe Tappers (with its wonderful abbreviation of HoGTiTties) to refer to the fairweather fans who just like to hear Neil's melodic acoustic 'hits'. We thought the film might just be a warm bath for them. But of course we enjoyed it, and didn't carp (much) about the cost. Each premium-priced Neil Young event is another opportunity to prove to each other that we are the real, true fans. In fact, the extra expense serves its purpose in sorting the, errr, sheep from the goats.

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