In 2001, Neil recorded another R&B/Soul/Blues album, Are You Passionate? Unlike This Note’s For You, which featured a horn section, this album has Booker T & the MGs as Neil’s backing band. As a result, it’s a little more subdued in its genre-jumping, making the album far less interesting/strange. The most noteworthy thing on the album is the last minute inclusion of the song, Let’s Roll, which was inspired by 9/11 – specifically the phone call from Todd Beamer of Flight 93. Those post-9/11 days were an extremely patriotic time for most Americans, and this was one of the bigger feel-good stories of that era. Given Neil’s love for Reagan in the 1980s, one worried how a particularly pro-America Neil would sound. Only a completely incompetent president would be able to sour Neil Young (and many Americans) on the flag-waving in just a few short years. Fortunately, we had the man for the job.
Neil’s next album, Greendale, was recorded with Crazy Horse. This was an odd choice considering the “concept album” is a dreary, intricate soap opera – pretty much the complete opposite of Crazy Horse. Greendale is not just a concept album, it’s a rock opera about a small town and a family living there with Grandpa and an activist teenager, and something happens, but I don’t remember what, because I get too bored to really follow the plot. A lot of songs are way, way too long in order for all the “characters” to deliver all the necessary dialogue and backstory. The tour was a full-on theatrical production of this story with sets and actors. Neil even filmed a movie of Greendale. As horrible as it sounds, Neil just released a sequel, Return to Greendale (or rather a live recording of the album).
After this is another Harvest / Harvest Moon / Silver & Gold-type acoustic album. The lyrics are primarily focused on death as Neil’s father died right before it was written and Neil himself had a near-death scare with a brain aneurysm while recording this album. For an album with such personal and heavy subject matter, it feels surprisingly sleepy and uninvested. Maybe it’s just that Neil has done this acoustic album trick so often that it is hard to get excited about it anymore. Unlike Time Out Of Mind where Bob Dylan used a near-death scare to remind critics that he was still alive, this album has been mostly forgotten in Neil’s discography.
For Living With War Neil started an unhealthy habit of being unable which version of an album to release, and so he released both. The album is a heavy-handed indictment of the George W. Bush administration recorded with a choir and a trumpet/bugle in addition to the traditional rock band. The songs are pretty dated lyrically, but you can tell that Neil is pretty pissed politically. He feels more engaged here than he did last album sing about his and his dad’s deaths. To try and promote the album (and the messages therein) he recruited Crosby, Stills, and Nash to tour with him singing the whole album. The next year Neil released Living With War: “In The Beginning” which is just the same album without the choir and horn taken off. Not sure why that was necessary.
Although he still has not released the original Chrome Dreams album from the 1970s, in 2007 he recorded and released a sequel. Really there seems to be no connection or even relation between the two records. It feels almost like Neil just couldn’t come up with a title and knew that called it Chrome Dreams II will give the album far more attention than it really deserves. The best track on there is actually something from his past, but not from Chrome Dreams but rather This Note’s For You with the Bluenotes. It’s an outtake with that album called Ordinary People. Unfortunately, it’s 18 minutes long, so I didn’t include it on the playlist. None of the other tracks recorded for this album feel related to either its titular predecessor or the horn-driven cornerstone.
Bringing back a track from Neil’s more experimental 80s days was a good harbinger of what was going to come from Neil, although people were going to be a lot less shocked, or even surprised, as he continued to veer wildly across the map in an attempt to follow his muse.