At the age of 72, Neil Young has forgone most of his contemporaries’ chosen tenures. For the most part, he still operates exactly how he has since the 1970s, with new work arriving constantly and chaotically in bursts of inspiration, with little logic dictating what gets released and what doesn’t. Over the last decade, reuniting with Crazy Horse has proven as likely to inspire new music as, say, buying a new car, or hanging out for an afternoon in Jack White’s recording booth. Even if his hit-or-miss ratio has tipped, it’s hard to think of an artist who’s stayed truer to their muse for so long. When visualizing the span of his career, Young landed on the image a messy filing cabinet—cluttered and spilling over with information.
The Visitor, Neil Young’s 39th record, is a sprawling and boundless project. Teaming again with Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah and their band Promise of the Real, it harkens back to records like 1989’s Freedom, when Young’s wandering interests stood proudly in defiance of cohesion. As evidenced by its first single—the artfully awkward cut-and-paste stomp “Already Great”—The Visitor often plays like Young’s impassioned response to the first year of the Trump administration. The president’s slogans and catchphrases are lobbed back at him in songs like “Already Great” and “When Bad Got Good,” while “Stand Tall” takes aim at a “boy king” who refutes scientific fact to spew hate.
While its topical lyrics stand out, The Visitor isn’t so easily summarized. This is not simply a collection of protest songs, and even its more pointed tracks tend to zoom out, incorporating political observations as stray thoughts, not thesis statements. In the lapping “Almost Always,” Young addresses a “game show host who has to brag and has to boast ’bout tearin’ down the things that I hold dear.” But the mood passes; by the end of the song, he’s urging us to consider instead the mating pattern of birds. If Young’s recent work has felt like a series of hard-headed dives into his pet obsessions—more interesting for simply existing than for actually listening to—then The Visitor is more all-encompassing, and as a result, more centered.
After backing him on 2015’s The Monsanto Years and its semi-live companion album Earth, the members of Promise of the Real seem palpably relieved to no longer be dealing with songs exclusively about food justice. Despite their tendency to ham up every song (contrast Neil’s recent solo rendition of “Stand Tall” with the album version, where his bandmates resort to chanting along with him after certain words), it’s clear that they have a deep reverence for and understanding of his work. One can imagine these twentysomethings are to thank for deep cuts like “Winterlong” and “Western Hero” appearing on recent setlists.
While Young remains hell-bent on moving forward, Promise of the Real are happy to revisit his past glories. They bring back the opening riff from Harvest Moon’s “Unknown Legend” periodically through “Almost Always.” And in the excellent closing track, “Forever,” they transport the haunted chill of his 1974 classic On the Beach to Neil’s current worldview—one that depicts our planet as a “church without a preacher,” where “the people have to pray for themselves.”
That particular song spans ten weary, heart-worn minutes, gliding by with a gentle pulse. That patience lasts the entire record, flowing at an effortless, even pace despite its varying moods. With the exception of a strange meandering vamp about the circus called “Carnival,” genre pastiches—like the bluesy “Diggin’ a Hole”—are mercifully brief, while more fruitful ideas like “Forever” get the space they deserve. Its freewheeling energy highlights two of Young’s greatest strengths: his continuing restlessness and the wisdom that grounds it. The Visitor might not offer any definitive answers to the questions it raises about our planet or our country, but Young seems okay with that. “I’m not gonna work it out right here and right now,” he admits in “Almost Always,” “But I’ll get back to it.” No matter what he returns with, it’s comforting to know we’ve still got him on the case.
