Sleeps With Angels

NEIL YOUNG: “Sleeps With Angels” (Reprise)

those chords go on forever. They pull on their wiry boots and they trek out over an electric desert. They are loners. They sleep under the stars, if they sleep at all. Their maker is not their owner. He is merely the medium who transfers them from one place in space to another place in time. Travelling, ever travelling. And sometimes he reaches up his mind and the connection is made. And down they come, down his neck, over and down his shoulder, down and past his elbow, down and past his wrist. Then the fingers kiss the strings and out they come, tagged to a song called ‘Change Your Mind’. Out and away and off and away with them, like this man was a junction where they changed tracks, before spiralling away.

Neil Young defines why music is a gift. Listening to him is like not listening to him but rather to the song. Over all these years he has done what he has had to do. He has stayed the course because in the beginning he had that vital courage to set his own course.

Listening to Sleeps With Angels is like tripping back to all those Crazy Horse albums and before. The chords and melodies have signatures of their lineage. The passion and the belief is still intact. The anger and the outrage is still intact. The joy and the humour, the feeling that if it’s worth believing in then its worth singing, is still intact.

Sleeps With Angels covers a wide landscape. It spans everything from spacious ballads, to folk, to rock ‘n’ roll, to punk, to r ‘n’ b, to edgy flavours of experimentation. It is a sort of summary of a career which was high before Woodstock and which, amazingly, is still high today. There are few other artists – certainly in the rock ‘n’ roll arena – that this can be said about. But then Neil Young never hitched himself to anything other than the roots of the land and the expanse of his imagination.

Neil Young still has fire because he has never let the world slip past him. Back in the Seventies, when most of his fans were still hibernating in the Sixties, he acknowledged and celebrated punk by making mention of Johnny Rotten on ‘Out Of The Blue, Into The Black.’ Sadly, it would seem that the Nineties’ Johnny Rotten – Kurt Cobain – took the lines “It’s better to burn out than to fade away” to heart. The title track of Sleeps With Angels is seemingly dedicated to him and Courtney Love: “She was a teen queen/She saw the dark side of life/She made things happen/But when he did it that night/She ran up phone bills…He sleeps with angels (Too soon).”

There is light and sadness on this album, and many of the colours in between. And everywhere there is the sound of a man still hungry for life. ‘Driveby’ is about machine guns that sing death. ‘Piece Of Crap’ is an hilarious punkabilly rant: “Tried to save the trees/Bought a plastic bag/The bottom fell out/It was a piece of crap.” Beginning the album is the soft ‘My Heart,’ where he intones, “This time I will take the lead somehow/This time you won’t have to show me how.” While on ‘A Dream That Can Last’, he seems to be saying that hope and belief, if gathered properly, can surmount the grief and decay. “I saw the distance, I saw the past/And I know I won’t awaken, it’s a dream that can last.”

So, he goes on, forever exploring the past, the present and the future. Forever wanting to make something new. He is those chords. And in this Age, when there is so little firm to hold onto, it’s good to know that some remain forever young.

• Gerry McGovern