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Classic Album Reviews
Don’t Be Denied
Reviewing Neil Young’s Time Fades Away
In 1973, the year Neil Young’s live album Time Fades Away was released, I was struggling through my senior year of high school. Not struggling academically; rather, it was a slog to want to stay in such an unchallenging environment, and this time I am speaking academically.
This morning, as I dusted off the time and refuse of an album I bought the day it premiered, I kept thinking that Neil was refusing to let us get comfortable, which was fine with me, because I was anything but comfortable anyway, wondering how these last months at home would go, and where I might be next year and whom I might be spending that time with.
That’s a reckless thought — where I’ll be, who my friends will be, and will I finally have a lover? It feels funny writing this, the fears of an almost eighteen year-old guy who fell in love with Neil when he released After the Gold Rush, but didn’t know how expansive love could be until he released Harvest. I still think “Out on the Weekend” is one of Rock/Folk/Country’s greatest tunes.
And not that Neil didn’t rock on that album — his politically attuned “Alabama” and another fave, “Words (Between the Lines of Age),” kept proving how strong and distorted his sound was. Just like time: