File Under: Re-reaping the Harvest

by Daniel Durchholz

Thanks to his influence over the Grunge Nation in the early '90s, Neil Young's penchant for raging rock is often celebrated at the expense of his softer side. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Indeed, fans of Young's feedback-drenched electric music got an earful in the last 10 years, thanks to a pair of loud, live double albums and individual hard-rocking triumphs such as Ragged Glory and Mirror Ball, his collaboration with Pearl Jam.

Over the course of his long career, though, Young has become equally famous, if not more so, for his acoustic-based albums, typified by 1972's Harvest, which contains his biggest hit, Heart of Gold. Young has returned to the format time and again, on albums such as Comes a Time, Harvest Moon, and Unplugged. Switching gears has served him well over the years and has kept his fans on their toes to boot.

Silver & Gold is the latest in an acoustic vein from Young, and on first listen, it seems somewhat slight. One of the songs is about nothing more than his dad going for a walk and gathering wood (Daddy Went Walkin), while another is just a tuneful invitation to his former Buffalo Springfield bandmates to come over and jam (Buffalo Springfield Again). Once you clean the feedback from past efforts out of your head, though, a deeper and more impressive work begins to emerge.

Young's acoustic albums have often been explorations of deep, abiding love. On Harvest, he was searching for a heart of gold. Once he found it, albums like Harvest Moon and now Silver & Gold have had to do with its care and maintenance. And so we have the hushed, intimate title track, on which Young croons, "Our kind of love never seems to grow old." But individual people do, and songs such as Good to See You, The Great Divide, Horseshoe Man, and Razor Love show that love can hang on through years and sometimes difficult circumstances. With hushed arrangements that feature little more than acoustic guitar and piano over bass and drums, plus the occasional steel guitar or pump organ, the album is Young at his simplest and most easygoing.

Young remade the album several times over the past three years, pulling some of the songs off it to complete Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 1999 album, Looking Forward. You can easily hear how the title track from that album, as well as Slowpoke, Out of Control, and Queen of Them All, would have fit nicely here. Instead, Buffalo Springfield Again and Without Rings, in which a relationship misfires, seem out of place here, and in the latter tune, the line "My software's not compatible with you" stands out as Young's most strained metaphor in, well, perhaps ever. Nevertheless, Silver & Gold is a lovely album and is worth some close attention.