This was Neil Young's first album in two years. In those two years, from summer 1983 to summer 1985, I graduated from quite liking Neil to being a heavy duty fan, so I was looking forward to this album a great deal. I remember the time it came out: I was working for a month (a vacation job) at Stephenson Harwood in the City, and I may even have bought this record from the small record shop at the bottom of Cheapside in my lunch-break.
I always felt a great kinship with what Allan Jones of the Melody Maker wrote about Neil Young, and his review of Old Ways at the time said, "Neil adopts the superficially sentimental posture of bucolic redneck values only to savagely undermine the existing platitudes and potential psychopathy of Reagan's troubled America." But that describes the album that Allan, and I, wanted to hear — not the one we actually got.
Old Ways has a lot of platitudes, and it's unconvincing to say that they're meant ironically, let alone savagely. If the album had included Nothing is Perfect — performed by Neil at Live Aid in July 1985, but still unreleased to this day — Jones would have had at least a small bit of evidence to cling to.
Anyway, the sting of disappointment has long faded for me now. You don't last long as a Neil Young fan if you can't take occasional disappointment in your stride. Old Ways will never be a great album, and it has some weak songs (particularly the one to his wife, Once an Angel, and to his son My Boy, though it's uncharitable to say that given the harsh years they'd just lived through). But I love the production and the arrangements. I love the way the strings sweep in at the start of The Wayward Wind. I love the singing by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Denise Draper. And I love Misfits, which is one of those stand-alone enigmatic classics that Neil pulls out of the bag every now and again.
I wrote something about Bound for Glory in Broken Arrow magazine and that's how I got myself a mention in a Neil Young biography. If I say that the mention was a surprise, it was not an entirely unanticipated or unwished-for surprise. Whenever I got a book about Neil Young, I'd go straight to the index to see if I was in it… I'd asked for the latest biography as a 29th birthday present from my parents, but they wouldn't post it to me, because posting books just wasn't something you did in those days; it would have cost a quarter as much again as the book. So I had to wait until I next visited them, which turned out to be the night before Hilary got married. Naturally there were a lot of people staying that night, so I was demoted to sleeping on a camp bed in the living room. It was when everybody else had gone to bed that I had my first chance to look at the book properly. And there, between Jefferson Airplane and Jennings, Waylon in the index was my name. I hastily checked to see if the reference was indeed to me and not to someone else who shared my name (Google shows how depressingly common such people are). It was to me. I wanted to wake everyone else in the house and tell them straight away, but I couldn't; I had to wait until breakfast.
There I announced that something I wrote had been cited in a book, and my parents asked, "What book?" "Oh," they said when I told them, "a music book" — not some academic research about Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Bless her, it was Hilary — who could have been excused for being preoccupied that morning — who was most supportive, and recognised that a hundred times as many people read Neil Young biographies as read Computer-Supported Cooperative Work research books.
 MusicBrainz entry for this album
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