These ten songs, BARN, are being played everywhere now. We are listening to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, taking a breather from our really confusing lives in the time of Covid.
He starts to sing and weaves a spell around the very ordinary things before us. Neil is a home-spun version of what is called an “animist”. He believes that all things have a life, a spirit – even old wavy glass windows, even the crowded city street – “masked people walking everywhere”, even the banners rippling in the rain at the palace of the queen.
Then very soon – in fact the chorus of the first song on the record, the whole scene that he’s built up in the song is awash in the bright light of his love for a person that he’s singing to: “We’re so together in the way that we feel/that we could wind up anywhere.” So, now the song is in the hands of a fierce love that can change everything, as when Emma Goldman says “Love defies laws. Love is the molder of destiny.” A high impact Love is the ‘threat’ of these songs. Love can come into any of the songs at any time and change everything. And we all know that Neil Young and Daryl Hannah want change.
This happens again and again in Barn. The trust we have for Neil’s voice takes us farther and farther into a story, with the brotherhood of Crazy Horse weaving the spell with him. “When I was a little boy/ Pulled my wagon all through the town” and suddenly we’re invited to have our own companion memory to Neil’s. We can see the adults in the town keeping an eye on us when we were 7 years old, venturing out. So now we are remembering our lives too, except in this song (“Heading West”)we don’t get changed by love, it’s a story about divorce and driving away with Mom. But yes, there’s the love, she got him his first guitar. Then we’re searching for our own first moment of our own weapon of love.
There is a recurring pattern in Barn. Songs will go deep into a personal memory, only to be swept into the change-power of a love song. We go deeper and deeper into the report on Trumpers in “Change Aint Never Gonna” and then the Canadian becomes American in “Canerican” – and in sweeps the incandescent wind of “The Shape of You”. Again, “They Might Be Lost” and “Human Race” run right into white-water rapids of “Tumblin’ Thru the Years”. These switch-ups, these atmospheric changings, are handled by Crazy Horse. The musicians support with their dramatic playing, but then can leave space for their wordman. On this record, Crazy Horse is distinctly three individuals, Nils, Billy and Ralph, you can almost see them there in the barn, better than a YouTube clip.
These songs are important for Earth activists. Each one is a strategy for direct action. The Rust-Never-Sleeps-like “Human Race” is telling us that we only have a few days to get it together. The emergency is at hand and this is hard rock desperation. “Welcome Back” urges us to trust nature: “the stars they only know”, but also to learn from the natural world that we have inside our own bodies. For Neil, nature is in his singing, “I’ve been singing this way for so long/riding through this storm.” And once again, there’s an action looming: “(My singing) might remind me of who we are/and why we walk so lowly.”
If each of the ten songs is a portal to a different kind of activist event, there is an over-arching second sound source that is never far from the singer, making a potential duet, a sound that is full of shouts, speeches, prayers and laughter. I’m talking about the activism of Neil and Daryl, going back to Farm Aid and the Bridge School and South Central Farm and the pipelines and mountaintop removal coal-mining actions where Daryl took the hit, and then right after she’s out of jail she goes on talk-shows defending the Earth.
After the two got hitched, then came the Monsanto Years where they led the (ultimately successful) fight against the carcinogen Glyphosate, the toxin in Monsanto/Bayer’s “RoundUp”. These high risk histories of Neil Young and Daryl Hannah are always nearby. Any galloping beat or righteous chorus can suddenly produce a memory of the two of them standing up to power in the streets, a courtroom, at a microphone.
This record is a giant step toward giving the Earth’s crisis and resistance in songs that people can sing in the streets, as was so important to the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
“Don’t Forget Love” could be that freedom song for the Earth, reminds us of “This Little Light of Mine”
When the storm comes and the lights go out – don’t forget love
When the rains give way to sunshine – don’t forget love
There’s a secret in every story – in the ways that we remember love
Neil and Daryl and their family of artists believe that the fight for earth rights needs a re-discovery of the reality of Love. They talk about Love like it is a solid thing, a practical thing. It isn’t a solid or a fluid but it is material, maybe like radio waves. Suddenly voices come from what you thought was invisible. Love is a medium that carries messages from the Earth. Love gives us freedom to act. Neil Young keeps singing that.
Thanks Reverend! – NYA