Dear Rev,
I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard of a major commercial rock tour with a name like Love Earth. How serious is this? And where is the audience’s head with it?
Chris
Boston
Dear Chris
When we perform in the Love Earth Tour, we are singing and shouting into a rounded landscape of thousands of humans who are negotiating the Earth’s crisis with their personal habits around rock and roll. (But we are all adjusting our old habits with the climate chaos, right?) Neil’s Earth-loving songs like the ‘natural anthem’ Mother Earth in 1990 – have created a green background for his fans, so no-one is that surprised. The Earth holds together so many of the songs. The earth lyrics are everywhere like wind. Examples: “…feathers falling all around you, the overhanging trees make way/see the sky about to rain, broken clouds and rain/ocean girl with the sea and the sand/Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970’s”
Neil Young is like the author Alice Munro, using the part of the Earth where he came into life – as the paint for his art. All to say, the thousands that are coming to his amphitheaters are not surprised by the Love Earth theme. What’s growing different over the years is the intensity of the Earth’s crisis. The new song “Love Earth” – a perfect singalong and antidote for the over-the-top radical lyrics of our opening act… also ends on a line that is like a doorway from the poetic to the activist: “We can bring the season’s back/Can you imagine that?” See, bringing the seasons back is a impossible-sounding idea that would probably take actions more radical than your average climate legislation. But once your imagination kicks in, you can start taking that dream more seriously and think of practical solutions. And hum a tune while you do it.
Love Earth!
Billy