Neil Young News
In 2004 Rustie, Mike "Expecting 2 Fly" Cordova posted a series of articles on his experience listening to all of Neil Young's albums in chronological order. Here is one in the series. For a complete listing, see Albums in Order reviews.
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2004 14:51:36 -0800 (PST) There are a few, major watershed events in my personal
experience that have formed my deep regard for Neil Young
as a creator of art, of music that affects me in a
viscerally fundamental way. My discovery of After The Goldrush and the
catalog that preceded it is one of those. Another is my
first live Neil Young concert in Boulder Colorado on
November 6, 1976. Yet another is the album Time Fades
Away.
Of course, I did not realize this right away. When this
album came out, when I was a high school senior in 1973, I
played it constantly, liked it very much. As a listenable
album, it stands pretty well I think. There are some great
Neil Young songs here. LA is a duplicitous look at the
USA's largest city: "city in the smog" + "don't you wish
that you could be here too". Great tune. The Bridge is a
romantic and sensual song. The title tune and Journey
Through The Past are solid songs in Neil's catalog. Don't
Be Denied is one of the most graphically biographical Neil
songs ever and (I think) one of the most important in his
career.
Yet, this was the first album of new songs after the smash
hit Harvest. Time Fades Away was very different; someone expecting a
continuation of Harvest or a return to the sounds of After The Goldrush was bound to be disappointed. I was aware of the tragic
loss of Danny Whitten and of a sense among many that Neil
himself was a junkie on the fast-track of the has-been
highway because he wasn't making the kind of records the
public expected him to.
But I really dug his artistic defiance. I really don't
know how long it took me to understand the artistic
statement Neil was making but I understand now and was
starting to understand then that Neil Young was not
someone who was going to let a public perception of him as
some kind of laid-back hippie define the art that he was
producing. He was following his muse, not the expectations
of his record company or his fans, or the general
record-buying public. He was making the music he wanted to
make. I just loved that Neil was not in this to cash out
on a few pop-star hits and fade away---he was in this for
the long haul.
Mike - Expecting To Fly
From: Mike Cordova
To: rust@rustlist.org
Subject: Albums in order: Time Fades Away
For more of Expecting To Fly's reviews, see the Albums in Order series.
Also, see more on the album and concert tour Time Fades Away and the Ditch/Doom/Wilderness Trilogy.
Reviews of Neil Young Albums
Neil Young Archives - Thrasher's Wheat