Artist: Neil Young
Album: Fork in the Road
Worth Buying: Yes, every song is great.
You will be interested in this album if you are a fan of: Neil Young during his Garage Rock/Hey, Hey, My, My/ Grunge rock periods
I've always said that it's great if you have a message to convey with your music, but you still have an obligation to write a good song first. And by good, I mean a song that is enjoyable to listen to, if you are aware of the message or not.
You still have an obligation to entertain your audience. Otherwise you are just preaching.
This brings me to Neil Young's latest album "Fork In The Road". Like his prior Living With War album, this is a concept album. This time tied the theme of cars. It is an album about a nation that is at a fork in the road regarding its love for the automobile vs. it's need to remove it's dependence on oil (foreign or otherwise) as a fuel source. It is an album about how that fuel source drives our economy and what happens when that economy starts to tank (no pun intended).
Neil himself is an auto enthusiast and I am sure that there are a more than a few of you reading this, that might be aware of his LinkVolt project which has converted his 1960 Lincoln Continental into a green vehicle (a process that he wants to make practical and affordable to anyone). This album is about that journey too. So the album begins with Neil beginning a road trip (with us riding shotgun In the song When Worlds Collide:
Taking a trip across the USA
Gonna meet a lot of people along the way
Far and Wide
Floating along on the Rio Grande
Coca Cola in my hand
In the promise Land
Now at first glance the idea of this album sounds like it would yield more preaching than enjoyable songs, but I found myself very quickly entertained by this album.
Neil Young described his prior LWW album as a kind of Metal meets Folk music. This album is the grungy guitar heavy Neil Young to be sure, but it is much more Blues and even echos a little bit of his often misunderstood ( and fun)rockabilly album "Everybody's Rockin".
On the surface many of the songs on this album can be heard as great road songs. They work on that level. But dig deeper and there is so much more here than a simple "We gotta go green message". Neil understands this is easier said than done. That it won't happen without a real revolution of commerce and industry. In fact, three songs into the album he eschews the whole hippie mentality of songs changing the world in the aptly titled: Just Singing A Song (won't change the world). The song comes complete with Neil's own version of a "We are the World" style chorus. And while singing a song alone can't change the world, he does take the time to say that singing a song can inspire you to start working to change the world.
For me a lot of songs on Fork in the Road become enjoyable very quickly. It's almost impossible to listen to the chorus of "Cough Up The Bucks" with it's changy distorted guitar line and almost rap/spoken chorus and not already be singing along with it before it's even over. But then even more amazingly, is that after that chorus we get the contrast of the Folk Neil Young singing a beautiful melody on the verse accompanied by angelic background vocals (with guitars still distorted).
Another standout track is "Light A Candle". Here he have the Harvest Era Neil Young. The song is beautiful and is a prayer of hope.
Instead of cursing the darkness,
Light a candle for where we're going,
There's something ahead, worth fighting for.
When the light of time is on us,
You will see our moment come,
And the living soul inside will carry on.
It's a chance to give new meaning to every move we make,
In the cavern, in the cave, where we come from.
When the light of dawn is on us,
We will see what we can be,
And the ancient ones can sleep an easy sleep
In the hallways of the ages, on the road to history
What we do now will always be with us
It was not hard to enjoy this album and I am enjoying Fork in the Road more and more, with each listen. Never did I feel like I was being preached at or preached to. I think this is one of his stronger albums.
What about the packaging? Neil loses a few points with me here (although over all I like the packaging). The album comes in equivalent of a mini gate fold LP sleeve (which I like). There are two versions. One with a bonus DVD that features live footage and an ultra higher quality version of the album for your DVD player. All this is good, but where it looses points is in the almost indecipherable way that the lyrics are printed. Some of us like to read the lyrics while we listen and he makes it very hard to do this. But this is still a great album to get.
Buy the CD /DVD Version of Fork In The Road for the same price as the CD version here
Listen to samples and buy in mp3 format here
What if I am not ready to buy the whole album? Try downloading Light A Candle
or Cough Up The Bucks
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