Neil Young : Healing through the Raw and Tender

It was one of those inevitable mornings where I woke up and all I wanted to do was hear Neil Young's " Harvest ". I first heard the 1972 album when I was 22, and it seared itself into my soul from that moment on.  From then on, when I am in the grips of a deep blue funk, where it feels like my soul hangs around me like melting lead, the only way I can exorcise the spell is to hear Neil Young sing some of the first songs I ever heard him sing as a naive college kid in Texas, battling homesickness and cultural alienation and confusion as a foreign student from Belgium. There is an urgency and visceral
quality to his voice, his words, that turns my soul upside down, and inside out, but in the most healing and immediate manner. Songs like " Old Man ", and "A Man Needs A Maid", " Heart of Gold " and the haunting " Words ( Between the Lines of Age)". When I feel disconnected form this huge, contradictory and complex country, discouraged by its at times maddening extremes, I go back to Neil Young's music, and it feels like a tonic, that rehydrates my heart, my mind and reassures me everything will be okay, even if it's not, because his raw guitar melodies and his painfully tender voice drive away my dark mood as were they coming from a medicine man pleading my case to the distracted gods. There is both a mercy and a ruthless honesty in Neil Young's music, he is both an observer and a participant in the malaise that often plagues this nation's soul. At the same time, his love and passion are full of the poetry of hope, of determination, of searching feverishly for what beauty and innocence is left to retrieve, to celebrate, to heal and safeguard. He loves this country  with eyes wide open, scolding and caressing all in one, willing it with his fierce instrumentals and aching voice to submit to his desire for its wholesomeness, its redemption, time and again. His music is timeless, but always very relevant. The immediacy of his concerns, his sarcasm, his anger is tempered by his longing time and again to see this country live up to its promises, its possibilities. The tension his music creates is hypnotic to me, the profound melancholy fused with the bare knuckle fight it puts up against all that his poetic being absorbs as so much bitter water transcends all preconceived notions of predictability. Neil Young's music is a surreal experience to me because it melts away the existing norms of Americana with a machete wielding iron will that insists on dignity, on fair play.