Anyone who thinks Taylor Swift’s followers have an expensive time of it keeping up with her new music, rerecorded old music, concerts and films of concerts, should try being a Neil Young superfan. This is the rock veteran’s 45th album proper, but it’s also his 16th release since 2020. In just three years, he's we've had an avalanche of live collections, the long awaited arrival of his lost late Seventies album Chrome Dreams, and a 10-CD “Archives” box set that only covers the years 1972-76.
He wants you to experience all this properly as well – no filtering out your favourites allowed. He removed all of his music from Spotify in early 2022, to protest against Joe Rogan’s podcast giving a platform to Covid misinformation. On this album, any gaps between songs are barely discernible. “The feeling is captured, not in pieces, but as a whole piece – designed to be listened to that way,” Young has said. “This music presentation defies shuffling, digital organisation, separation. Only for listening. That says it all.”
He’s right that the tone is consistent, with his fragile voice backed only by acoustic guitar, piano or pump organ, while he occasionally wheezes into a harmonica. Back in 2014 he released A Letter Home, covering Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and the Everly Brothers in the tiny lo-fi recording booth at Jack White’s Third Man Records in Nashville. Before and After could sit beside that release with its similarly unadorned sound, but this time Young is covering himself.
Only a rabid completist would be familiar with all of it already. His choices range from Burned, one of the first songs he wrote for Buffalo Springfield way back in 1966, to Don’t Forget Love, a hopeful ballad from his 2021 album, Barn. There’s also one song he hasn’t aired before – the melodic, shakily delivered If You Got Love – though it was written in the early Eighties for his album Trans.
This isn’t another live album but it does have a spontaneous, as-live feel, as though he set up a single microphone in an echoey hallway and bashed through these songs in an afternoon. He doesn’t do anything radical to them beyond stripping them right back. A Dream That Can Last maintains the rickety, Wild West feel of the mid-Nineties original. Comes a Time, from the 1978 album of that name, was already a sweet, simple country folk song. The whole collection is valuable as a slim curiosity, but for more casual Young listeners there is no shortage of more exciting places to head first.
