Long May You Run Album Review

by Ken Tucker

Long May You Run is like an old World's Finest comic book: the team-up of Superman and Batman always drained each of his most interesting characteristics. Like Superman, Stephen Stills is a rather muscular lunkhead of a personality; Neil Young's Batman is less heroic - shadowy and darkly mortal. The music on Long May You Run is a collection of each man's puffier and less autobiographical new material.

Young contributes five compositions, Stills four, and each track is solely its author's creation; there is little collaboration here, even few vocal duets (not that the combination of Young's yowl and Stills' sonorousness is a special treat).

For both, this is a less personal project, and the straightforwardness such objectivity provokes makes the album very accessible. Less a series of inner explorations than of California observations. Long May You Run includes a diatribe about a hotel, "Fontainebleau," proof that Neil Young can be entertainingly misanthropic about almost anything. There also are no fewer than three songs about the beach, Young's "Midnight on the Bay" and "Ocean Girl" and Stills' "Black Coral"; Long May You Run even includes a sarcastic reference to the Beach Boys. Weaker moments include "Guardian Angel," Stills' cautionary tale about protective spirits set to cocktail jazz, and the sappy, singalong title tune.

Both authors are plagued by bloated images and occasional simplemindedness: the chanted refrain to Young's "Midnight on the Bay" consists of "Midnight on the bay... sure feels good to me"; in "Black Coral" Stills feels content "'cause heaven just might be the sea."

But Young plays some fine raw guitar on "Ocean Girl" and especially "Let It Shine," and avers, in a non sequitur in this song of religious romance, "My Lincoln is still the best thing built by Ford." And "12/8 Blues (All the Same)," a rigorous song about obsessive love - always Stills' most rewarding theme - contains his best writing in a good while.

In terms of their recent solo output, Long May You Run represents a holding action for Young (nothing nearly as potent as any song on either Zuma or Tonight's the Night), and an encouraging boost for Stills (all his stuff here is superior to the criminal Illegal Stills). It's not an important record, but it's certainly interesting.