Some artists burn out late in their careers. Others fade away. Neil Young has done neither – and just this year reminded the world that his contrarian streak blazes as hot as ever when he pulled out of this summer’s Glastonbury Festival, an event for which he had not even been officially announced.
Young said he was doing so because of the “corporate control” exerted by that wicked avatar of string-pulling hegemony the, erm, BBC (which has exclusive Glastonbury broadcasting rights, a point that seemingly rankled him).
Twenty-four hours later the 79-year-old revised his opinion and was back on for Glasto. It was a display of turbocharged capriciousness entirely in keeping with a prolific streak that has seen Young release an album every year since 2019.
That a musician of a certain age should mellow into a dignified greatest-hits machine, coasting along on the oldest of glories, is not a notion he has ever given the time of day.
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Young’s latest, the gorgeously laid-back and quietly emotive Oceanside Countryside, isn’t a new LP in the strictest sense. The recordings from which the 10 tracks are assembled were made in 1977, two years before his gnarled, splenetic, brilliant album Rust Never Sleeps.
Young was in a weird place in the late 1970s (although admittedly not as weird as in the 1980s, when Geffen Records sued him for putting out music that was “uncharacteristic” of previous recordings).
As the hippie era gave way to punk, he was in open rebellion against the success of Harvest, his bucolic 1972 masterpiece. Young regarded that album as an interesting departure – but, to his slowly growing horror, a chunk of his fans considered it a defining statement.
For all his resentment of Harvest’s prominence in his hit parade, however, he was not averse to picking up an acoustic guitar now and then. On Oceanside Countryside – as was also the case with his 1978 album, Comes a Time – Young sounds like a songwriter who has given his demons the weekend off.
Meditative, delicate and with a soothing lightness of touch, the album is a joy. The material was partly laid down at Oceanside Studio in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (hence the title); although all of the songs have appeared elsewhere in various guises, these analogue recordings have never been heard before.
It is part of an ongoing campaign of musical decluttering by Young, whose 2023 release Chrome Dreams compiled material committed to tape between 1974 and 1977 (including alternative versions of several tunes that feature on Oceanside Countryside).
Young has rarely sounded more laid-back or at ease. Oceanside Countryside’s economical 10 tracks together deliver a charming snapshot of the sunny side of one of rock’s stormiest musicians.
It begins, as many great Neil Young records do, with a fluttering harmonica and gently lulling acoustic guitar of Sail Away, with Young painting an emotive picture of what he regards as the idealised lifestyle.
“I could live inside a tepee,” he sings. It might be an absurd line from the lips of Bob Dylan or a Beatle. Young sells it as the most natural thing in the world. You could fully believe he had lived entirely happily in one for at least some of the past 50 years.
There is a sense throughout of the North American wilderness as a world of possibility and discovery. For Young, it seems, the great outdoors is not a place to become lost but one where he can find himself.
That is the message of Human Highway, a lilting chugger on which he draws a contrast between nature as a world of purity and civilisation as a corrupting influence. “I come down from the misty mountains ... I got lost on the human highway,” he sings. (He would reuse the title for his self-funded film from 1982, a satire about the apocalypse best known for starring a drug-addled Dennis Hopper.)
Oceanside Countryside takes inspiration from all over. Captain Kennedy is a knotty folk ballad inspired by an encounter Young had with a sailor whose fishing boat was destroyed by a German U-boat in 1941. That sounds more like the premise for a John Wayne movie than for a delicate country epic, yet Young imbues it with a delicate outlaw lustre.
A wonderful record closes with Pocahontas, on which Young mournfully recalls the genocide of native Americans (“they killed us in our tepees and they cut our woman down”). He’s not quite rocking in the free world, but this is nonetheless a keepsake to treasure.
