Neil Young is standing on the porch, smoking weed, waiting for somebody else to show up. That’s the basic premise of “They Might Be Lost,” the strangest, loosest—and thus, the quintessential—song from Barn, his latest album. (Young’s discography itself is strange and loose enough that contextualizing Barn in the usual ways seems futile, but if you must know, it’s his 41st studio effort, and the 14th to feature Crazy Horse, his trustiest backing band.) Young wrote “They Might Be Lost” quickly and intuitively and didn’t give the band much time to rehearse it, a first-thought-best-thought approach that pervades Barn.
You can hear it in the three-chord progression that repeats through the song’s entirety, a rickety scaffold even by the standards of 21st-Century Neil, and in his initial contentment to let whatever’s close at hand guide his subject matter: the headlights through the trees, the call announcing that the latecomers have only just now gotten off the highway. This all may be fascinating to those of us who have spent years of our lives invested in Young’s skewed and shaggy psyche, but I wouldn’t necessarily encourage an outsider to check it out. Still, there’s a minor epiphany here, if you’re willing to follow the trail that emerges from the end of his joint: “The smoke that I burn keeps taking me to the old days/The jury’s out on the old days, you know/The judgement is soon coming down.”
“The jury’s out on the old days” is the closest thing Young offers to a thesis statement for Barn, an album that, like much of his later work, has a complicated relationship with nostalgia. “Heading West,” the warmly rousing second song, invokes “the good old days” explicitly and liberally in its remembrances of a first guitar and afternoons spent pulling a wagon through the neighborhood. “Change Ain’t Never Gonna,” addresses people who cling to an idealized history despite the desperate need for progress, imagining a “great conspiracy” to take away their freedom and “stop them from living as they’ve always been living.” Young is critical of these people, but as a guy who’s often wrapped up in his own journey through the past, he’s not entirely unsympathetic. The tonal balance reminds me of Greendale, his 2003 concept album about a young environmental activist whose radical visions drive her out of the idyllic but parochial small town where she grew up. Now, instead of assigning his conflicted views out to a cast of opinionated townspeople, he’s just saying how he feels, allowing the contradictions to speak for themselves.