Storytone - Neil Young

Typical Neil Young review: “Neil Young does whatever the hell he wants, so even though there’s little point in criticizing him, here goes.” Typical Storytone review: “I have immense respect for Neil Young’s singularity as an uncompromising artist of high ideals, but I wish he would have pared this down.” Translation: “I wish he had made Harvest again.” Storytone, which finally this week had a second pressing on vinyl, is a difficult record. It is idealistic. It is flawed. It’s motives are unclear. The old tropes of Neil being a stubborn and impulsive artist do not seem to explain it, at least not entirely. It is the reason I started this blog. Somewhere there needs to be a space to discuss how a piece of art can transcend its flaws precisely because of them. Think of the Beatles’ White Album. The greatness of some works is that they generate questions instead of answers. And so, we keep returning to them.

Before I get too far ahead of myself, Storytone is not Neil Young’s White Album; it is not his greatest work, although it is his greatest work of 2014 (with apologies to A Letter Home, which is a fine record that received much more praise from most). Because this is a work that thrives on uncertainty, it invites individual interpretations of its aims and whether or not it succeeds in them. I believe Young & Co. have left clues to this effect. The packaging, for example, with its typewriter font and no-frills, no-graphic-designer-necessary watercolor painting by Young himself, seems to indicate that we should think of this album as a) old-fashioned and b) personal, and that we should know that these two are linked.

I believe Neil Young knows what we all want from him: a stripped down, intimate, solo, acoustic record - his own American series. And he gives it to us, not only seemingly in the packaging, but on the entirety of disc one. Yet he almost seems to be daring us to prefer these versions of the ten songs of Storytone. How else can one explain the muted, almost inept steel guitar playing of “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” and “All Those Dreams,” or the languid, timid, and seemingly embarrassed blues of “I Want To Drive My Car,” or the pitchiness throughout that, for me, is unfortunately especially noticeable on “Tumbleweed?” Of course, one alternate explanation is that Young’s record company, Reprise, forced this disc out of him as a compromise for his very un-2014 orchestral concept. I chose to abandon this line of thinking not only because this has never happened to the great artist, even during well-known (and highly publicized) conflicts with his record labels, but also because it’s simply more rewarding to assume Young knows what he’s doing. What if he understands the “raw” country, blues, or folk album concept as a cultural construct that has done at least as much to stifle creativity as to encourage it, going back to the “discovery” by the record companies of so-called hillbilly and race records? What if he is making the argument that recording live with an ensemble of living, breathing musicians (it becomes so easy to forget), even one as oft-vilified as an orchestra (God forbid), is at least as “authentic” an expression as the aforesaid aesthetic.

And so he goads us on. I like to think Neil is somewhere laughing at the multiple reviews that criticized the orchestra as “Disney.” He knows, as I do, that this is a meaningless and lazy criticism. Neil Young is a musician, and, as we all know, an appreciator of sound. How can the lush harmonization of “I’m Glad I Found You,” the Nashville-sound-but-better-beause-it’s-live (with amazing bass work by Mike Valerio amidst so many other great textures) take on “When I Watch You Sleeping,” the brilliant harp (by Katie Kirkpatrick)-ukulele interplay of “Tumbleweed,” or the tumultuous rhythmic movement and dynamic swells of “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” on disc two not be an improvement? Only in the place where people stop listening to the sounds themselves but focus instead on their supposed implications and contrivances (“Disney”). Of course, in the world of popular music, if you want to find the most contrived record, you need only look for the one proclaiming loudest to be “authentic.”

4/5