1.        

I saw a Neil Young show the other night. I’ve loved his music all my life, but aside from my high school years in the seventies, when I hung on every word of his apocryphal lyric like it was some strange gospel of the American Heart, I hadn’t spent a lot of time thinking about him.

2.        

It was a solo show; Young shared the stage with a retinue of gorgeous old guitars, a handful of harmonicas, two pianos and a calliope. Nearly every song he played was thirty years old or older, from chestnuts like “Tell Me Why” to darker offerings, like “Cortez the Killer.” In short, nothing new – and yet every song felt fresh and genuine. Somehow he managed to instill each one with a palpable, edgy anxiety, like he was still trying to work out the squall of emotion that had driven him to write in the first place. I think it left all of us profoundly unsettled – and that made it one of the most moving performances I’ve ever seen. I was expecting an evening of nostalgia, some dilute version of a once mighty rock star. Instead of James Taylor, I got David Lynch.