No one ages better than Neil Young does

Anyone who spends even five minutes with me these days quickly becomes aware of what an unabashed Neil Young fan I am.

Much like last April’s massive oil spill with the gulf, my interest in Neil Young has spread to many facets of my life, from fashion sense, plaid shirts and sideburns, to how I spent the night I graduated from college — seeing Young in concert. My family was not thrilled when I told them that I planned to spend my graduation night alone at a geriatric Canadian’s concert.

The thorough line for Young’s career is that he follows his own muse, no matter how erratic and uncommercial the resulting music might be.

As Young put it in the liner notes for his career retrospective, “Decade,” “‘Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride, but I saw more interesting people there.”

Young’s approach to live performance is no different. Young could have played it safe on Saturday night by focusing solely on his 1970s output, but that would have been atypical of an artist who was once sued by his record label for making music that didn’t sound like previous efforts.

Young focused mainly on material from his 2010 album, “Le Noise.” It was clear to me Saturday that Young was still very much invested in the process of making music, despite being in the sixth decade of his career.

I found it awe inspiring to watch Young lose himself in the music.

Far too often, many of Young’s contemporaries play it safe when they hit the road, relying on a war chest of old hits to placate inebriated crowds of baby
boomers.

While it’s fantastic to finally hear a song that has been part of the fabric of your life for years and years, nostalgia acts just aren’t that interesting as
performers.

It’s quite obvious when they phone in a performance of a song: the words ring hollow and you can tell, that like Brian Eno at the end of his tenure with Roxy Music, they’re likely thinking about their laundry.

It’s not entirely the artists’ fault when they become complacent. Audiences expect the songs to sound exactly the same way they did on the record.

Unless you’ve built a career on not meeting the expectations of your fans, changing the songs even a little bit is guaranteed to elicit derision from concert-goers who are more concerned about boozing it up than listening to the music.

When it comes down to that point, an artist should probably call it quits. The money is good, but what’s the point of it if you’re not enjoying what you do?

“It’s better to burn out/than to fade away,” as Young put it in one of his greatest songs. It’s not an endorsement of nihilism — that couplet is about avoiding complacency, continuing to move forward even if that means failure.

Most of the time we’re happy to fall into routine, and what was once pleasurable becomes as automated as an assembly line, drained of all emotion.

— ajcrowle@indiana. edu