Music Arcades: Neil Young: Are You Passionate?

I've seen three European tours by Neil Young with Crazy Horse, and 2001 was definitely the best of the bunch. I was lucky to see two shows, a week apart. The opening date was at Sheffield Arena on 9 June, and I arranged my US West Coast trip to be sure I got back the day before. I think Neil had been moaning not long before that he didn't feel like doing new songs live any more, because recordings were all over the Internet within days. Whether I'd heard that at the time or not, I was thrilled to be treated to four new songs, including one, Goin' Home, that sounded like an instant classic. If you ever hear a bootleg of that performance, listen out just after the end of that song, and you might hear one wag in the crowd shout, "Play it again!" Yep, that was me, about eight deep back from the stage. In When I Hold You in My Arms, the lines "The older generation, they got something to say / But they better say it fast, or get out the way", and I turned to my friend David Kay to offer a bet that those lines would be quoted in the reviews. He didn't take the bet, but I wasn't wrong.

Are You Passionate?, meanwhile, is a patchy affair. The version of Goin' Home seems curiously lacklustre. Then there's Let's Roll written as an immediate response to the 9/11 attacks and from the point of view of one of the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93. I've got no problem with the intention behind the song, but it's so clumsy musically and lyrically that I think it's a contender for his worst ever (along with Lotta Love, and any others you care to nominate).

The rest of the album is a kind of soul/blues/rock amalgam with Booker T and the MGs (minus Steve Cropper) backing Neil. They were going to record an album together after their 1993 tour, but it got shelved when Duck Dunn (I think) became ill. Nine years later, it just doesn't sound so convincing somehow. I wonder if any of these songs were written back then and held on ice, or if they were all written 'to order' for the later sessions.

Last week I said I thought the shapelessness of Ragged Glory might be down to the fact that artists and producers were still getting used to the 60+ minute CD format. It's hard to make the same argument for Are You Passionate?, coming twelve years after Ragged Glory, but shapeless and overlong it surely is.