CD Review

Thankfully once ever decade or so Neil Young gets back together with his most underrated band, The Stray Gators (in this case the surviving members of the band), and releases an album that is an immediate masterpiece. Young ditches his electric guitar and gets back to a rootsy, acoustic sound with songs that seemed ripped from some small Midwestern town that has tumbleweeds blowing down the street, and an old man on every porch with a story to tell. Completing the trilogy that started with 1972’s Harvest and continued with 1992’s Harvest Moon, Prairie Wind instantly joins the ranks of those hallowed albums.

Recorded shortly after Young suffered a life-threatening brain aneurysm, Prairie Wind harkens back to its predecessors both in spirit and sound. The opening song “The Painter” seems to be a direct invocation of “Heart of Gold” off of Harvest with it’s up-tempo, poppy feel that latches on to you with it’s unforgettable groove, and won’t let go. “This Old Guitar” a simple song, that finds Young reminiscing about an instrument that has served him so well, is powered along by a guitar riff that seems completely lifted from the title cut from Harvest Moon, and only deepens the connection between the three albums.

Chugging along at Young’s patented 4am drawl, “…when everyone gets tired enough to play at my(Young) speed,” Prairie Wind invokes an Americana sound born of a simple life, rising from the dust on the farms, just as Harvest and Harvest Moon did years before. The addition of Emmy Lou Harris’s pure country voice on “Far From Home,” “This Old Guitar” and “No Wonder” give the album a stamp of approval with her sweet authentic Nashville sound. It seems to find the soul of rural American, in much the way that The Band did on their first two albums and begs to ask the question, “Why do Canadians seem to play ‘Americana’ music better than Americans?” While some questions require much thought and deep pondering, this is not one of those questions. In this case one should just be thankfully that it was time for Neil Young to release another masterpiece.