Silver & Gold – Neil Young

If you want to get technical, the 2000s for me started in downtown Buffalo, NY.  I was in pleather pants and a long-sleeve purple velvet shirt, smack dab in the middle of 18,000 people at a Barenaked Ladies concert.  I was neither drunk nor high, despite my choice of apparel.  I was barely 21, surrounded by most of my best old friends who’d I known since middle school or earlier.  I’d recently broken up with Ashley, a member of that group, the sister of one of my best friends.  Doug Flutie, the football hero, namesake of his own cereal, and midget quarterback of the Buffalo Bills, was on stage playing drums.  The Y2K scare was all the rage, the impending doom of what could be the end of the world, or at the very least the assumed possibility that the free world would suddenly go dark at 12:00 a.m.  It didn’t happen of course; Armageddon never seems to come when it’s supposed to.  Always entertaining the previous five times I’d seen them perform, beyond getting pelted by a monsoon of uncooked macaroni and cheese during the “We wouldn’t have to eat Kraft dinner” refrain of “If I Had a 1000000 Dollars”, nothing was out of the ordinary for a BNL show.  We went, we saw, we came home.  But that night was one of the last nights, if not the last, we’d all be together at the same time.  Nobody died.  As people do we just sort of grew apart.  Before that night the signs were on the wall.  Something had to give with my breakup with Ashley; it was either her or me.  I didn’t much care if it was me.  In fact I wanted it to be me, my eyes had been on the door for a while; I was ready for it.  But when things happened the way I expected them to I didn’t know what to do.  My cell phone was silent; my pager didn’t vibrate with sweet cryptic nothings past midnight like it had for so long.  I was lost, my routines and livelihood things of the past.

People say taxes and death are the only guarantees in life, but the weather in Rochester, NY four to seven months out of the year is just as predictable.  Freaking cold.  Lots of snow.  During those months if you’re not a skier or snowmobiler, you become a virtual turtle, at the movies, at home, nestled away somewhere warm.  I spent a lot of time at home in the months following that concert.  For a social life I turned to chatrooms on the internet.  It was a means to no particular end.  But it was something.  The people weren’t real in any physical “I can see you” sense of the word.  But the conversations passed time; misery was company, and I was content to use it for what it was worth.

After a while though I wanted something more.  Something that was real.  So I decided to wing it.

In Rochester, when the weather finally breaks, people look like birds that have just hatched.  In a moment of weakness—or it could have been clarity, sometimes it’s such a fine line between the two—I decided to meet up with Karen, a girl who I’d “met” on the internet.  Karen was about my age, seemed to have enough of the same interests as me, and she thought I was cute, or at least she said she thought the picture that I emailed her was.  The night before I was supposed to meet Karen, the nervous energy driving me crazy, I drove out to Media Play and thumbed through the CDs for an hour or so.  I came upon the new Neil Young CD, Silver & Gold.  The cover looked like a sepia-tinted pixilated guy with his hands on his hips.  For some reason—perhaps for no reason—that cover made sense to me and I dropped $15 for the album.

My generation’s Neil Young was the especially grungy one; always clad in some tired-out plaid, every time you saw him—which for a while, all you had to do was turn on MTV—he was on stage with Eddie Vedder rocking out “Rockin’ In The Free World” like it was his job.  Well, I suppose it was his job, but still, for a back catalog like that man has you only really ever heard him sing one song, and he never really sang his song as much as he shared it.  As much as I loved Pearl Jam I never cared much for grunge—the sound, the scene, the smell—and Neil Young, “The Godfather of Grunge” as the MTV vee-jays called him, exemplified everything that I could do without.  I liked my relics just fine—grew up on classic rock—but I just couldn’t be bothered with the ones who, by their own doing or that of their record company, were trying too hard to be relevant.

But Silver & Gold was different.  Immediately it was different.

That first night that I purchased Silver & Gold I took the long way home.  Part of the rite of passage from winter to spring in Western, NY is the return of one’s ability to aimlessly drive the endless miles of backcountry roads.  A major component of those drives is music, and it just can’t be any music, it has to be the right music.  Silver & Gold was it.  Heavy on harmonica and the harmonious highs of Harvest-era Neil Young, Silver & Gold is an album built of tunes that sound like they would write themselves on such a drive.  There are songs of longing and outright loss, yet they all share the commonality of love, what it feels like to relish in the highs, what it feels like when love leaves you behind.  You ride long enough on those roads and you’ll see just about everything Silver & Gold: hay piled high against the faded red barn, the broken fences fronting overgrown yards where peoples’ possessions, rusted and tattered, have blended into the landscape, the splattered remains of lives that ended too abruptly, the For Sale sign in front of a dream that died the death of a dream not worth believing anymore.  Happy or sad, all of it is somehow endearing if for no other reason because all of it is true.  On Silver & Gold, Neil Young doesn’t sound like a man who is trying to say something like he does when he sings a song like “Rockin’ In The Free World”; he’s just saying what he sees, what he feels.  When he sings, “I’m looking for a job,/I don’t know what I’m doing,/My software’s non-compatible with you” it says enough.  Taking in the sights on the outside of my fog-covered windows, I knew that feeling.  I was less than twenty-four hours from meeting Karen, a girl who for all intents-and-purposes was a complete stranger, and I didn’t know what to say, how to act, let alone what to wear.  It’d been seven or so months since I’d had a girlfriend and those seven months felt like an eternity.  I felt thirteen again, my own freshly-hatched bird covered in so much gunk that he couldn’t see the world, let alone observe the ways in which it worked.  It felt as if I’d never experienced the touch of another; the prospect of a kiss was as perplexing as trying to figure out a Rubix’s Cube with your eyes closed.  I was terrified.

Music has always been a voice of reason for me.  In a world that could otherwise be completely silent—and I’ve always hated silence—music’s been consistent, a comforting whisper, an embrace, something that I could invest myself in.  The best music makes you think, not always about what they’re saying, but often about what you can’t for one reason or another bring yourself to.

“Horseshoe man’s been working his magic

Fixing heartbreak everywhere

He’s the one we all can count on

When we’re lost and don’t know where love is

He takes the pieces in his hand

Shakes them up like he doesn’t care

He says there will always be heartbreak

Because love is everywhere.”

Going into that first meeting I wasn’t necessarily looking for the “Horseshoe Man”, and I definitely wasn’t expecting a ringer—a leaner perhaps, but not a ringer—but hearing about his existence helped put me at ease, it helped me remember what I thought I’d forgot; love, the whole journey leading up to it, the peaks and valleys, all of its aimless backcountry roads, it’s more or less a crapshoot, a horseshoe toss into a head-on wind.

The first meeting with Karen went well enough where we decided to have another.  It was a good forty-five minute drive from where I lived to where we’d meet up after that first night; a drive that more times than not Silver & Gold served as the soundtrack to.  And for the most part, whenever we did hang out, it consisted of us aimlessly driving around.  Where we were, there wasn’t much to do other than drive.  Gas hovered around $1 per gallon, the weather was good enough to crack the window at night, and the pavement felt right.  We gave each other the tour of the roads, and fields, and woods of our youth, we’d talk about life, and what exactly those roads, and fields, and woods, meant growing up.  We talked a lot about music: Bob Dylan, Ani Difranco, Bob Marley, and The Beatles.  One night, Karen told me about this college that she was enrolled at, a place I never heard of.  I told her that I was thinking about going back to college, that I was really looking for a change of scenery, a way to get away from everything I’d known.  Karen said I should look into it.

That night, a warm one, after I dropped Karen off, I rolled down the windows and took the slightly longer than forty-five minute drive back home.  I listened to “The Great Divide”, “Razor Love”, and “Without Rings” over and over, alternating plays of the songs with each intentional wrong turn I took.  I was hung up on couplets.  In “The Great Divide” it was “On the carousel/You’re gonna like the way you feel.”  For the first time in a long time I did like the way I felt.  My mind was free, I felt at ease.  The horizon didn’t seem far off anymore; it wasn’t mythological.  I felt like I was a car ride away from wherever I wanted to go, not too dissimilar than Lewis & Clark or Sal Paradise when they headed west, or Bob Dylan when he set out for New York City.  In “Razor Love”, one of Young’s all-time most beautiful songs, my couplet was, “Trying to find something I can’t find yet/Imagination is my best friend.”  When I first got into writing, when I started to take it as serious as it seemed to be taking me, my imagination was my best friend, and the words came as easy as breathing did.  They weren’t always good together, but they were always something, and even when they weren’t always something prophetic, it felt good enough that I was saying something.  In those first months of 2000 I wasn’t writing at all anymore.  But that night, on that drive, listening to that particular album, my mind started writing.  I could hear it, I could imagine the words coming out, my pen going across sheet after empty sheet in my dusty notebook.  I remember smiling; to this day its one of the few times I remember the physical act of smiling.  And then there was “Razor Love”, a song which since those days has eased its way onto my All-Time Top 150 Song list.  Also one of Young’s all-time best, the song is stripped down to almost nothing but a guitar, a voice, and life.  When he sings, “I’m picking something up/I’m letting something go” I felt exactly the same way.  I was ready and willing to let a whole lifetime of somethings go.  And I finally felt like I had something worth picking up.

That night, when the ride was over, I sat down at the computer and looked up the college Karen had told me about.  A week later my acceptance letter for that college came in the mail.  A month or so after that I had a new home, a new beginning.  I decided it was time to be my own horseshoe man.  I threw caution directly into the wind and I didn’t look back.

On Hold Time, his sixth studio album, Portland, Oregon Indie-rocker M. Ward sounds like a man who is thinking things through, trying to make sense of the proverbial “I’ve been a few places.” On the opener, “For Beginnings, he sings, “When you’re absolute beginners/ It’s a panoramic view,” and from there he’s off to get a closer look at things, from the underground of New York City, to next stop Shangri-La. Faith is on his mind; in “Epistemology” he reveals, “I learned how to hold on from a book of old Psalms”, as is confinement (“Jailbird”), and love (“One Hundred Million Years”, “Hold Time”). He pairs with She & Him co-contributor, Zooey Deschanel on the album’s first single, the toe-tapper “Never Had Nobody Like You” and when he sings, “I trusted liars and thieves in my madness/Honey, I was wasting away in the room/But now that I been through that hell I got a story to tell,” you’ve invested yourself in whatever he’s got to say. Ward’s trademark is that his voice hovers somewhere between a dusty country road and an easy-to-be-a-dreamer star-filled sky summer night, and it’s the perfect compliment to his guitar, which he wields like someone who grew up idolizing George Harrison. The true beauty of both, his voice and his guitar, is the restraint; less sounds just about right pretty much all the time. Hold Time is a fitting title; it’s an homage, or a time capsule of sorts—beyond the obvious parallels of Ward’s breath-of-fresh-air revival of Buddy Holly’s “Rave On”, he and Lucinda Williams beautiful take on the country standard, “Oh Lonesome Blues”, or the Johnny Cash train track chug of “Fisher of Men”—open it and you hear the dusty reminders of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson-like production from time forgotten, when songs could be both worldly colossal and at the same time your closet chum; someone whose hand you just don’t want to let go of because if you do you risk never getting that moment back. Hold Time perhaps isn’t as good as its predecessor, the stalwart 2006 release Post War, but it further solidifies him as the M. Ward of his generation, the same way Neil Young and Joni Mitchell were the Neil Young and Joni Mitchell of theirs; voices worth listening to because hearing them felt so good.