Like Long May You Run, this is an album that it's easy to pass over in Neil's career. They both sit outside any of the obvious sequences and patterns in his work. But there the similarities end. Neil Young isn't one of his top ten albums, but neither is it one of the worst.
Like After the Gold Rush, it hops around stylistically. But ATGR contains that hopping better through its use of punctuation songs like Till the Morning Comes and Cripple Creek Ferry (a technique Neil repeated on the equally hoppy Sleeps With Angels). Neil Young, meanwhile, feels unbalanced by the way it finishes with the extended (but idiosyncratically fantastic) one-off of Last Trip to Tulsa. I love the sly dream logic of the lyrics.
Aside from Tulsa and the two "hits" — The Loner and The Old Laughing Lady — I've never properly got to know the rest of the songs. Hence when Crazy Horse played I've Been Waiting for You at Sheffield Arena in 2001, it took me a while to be sure it wasn't a new song.
Part of the reason for the stylistic mix must be the large number of different people involved in producing the record, particularly two of Neil's main control room sidekicks, David Briggs and Jack Nitzsche. Nitzsche's own apprenticeship with Phil Spector is evident in the arrangement of I've Loved Her So Long. Neil has never used female backing singers so ornately since. Shame, because the effect is rather touching.
MusicBrainz entry for this album
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