WHEN Neil Young cut short last summer’s tour with Crazy Horse – owing, it later transpired, to exhaustion – you could have been forgiven for thinking that one of music’s most restless and hyper-productive artists would finally be forced to slow down. As if. Just a few months later, Young unveiled the Chrome Hearts, a new band who perhaps coincidentally share the same initials as their illustrious forebears. Ostensibly pulled together to honour existing commitments at last autumn’s Farm Aid 2024 and Harvest Moon Gathering benefit, the Chrome Hearts have since become Young’s latest creative allies – rescuing him from a period of writer’s block to produce Talkin To The Trees and, soon, his first world tour for six years.
WHEN Neil Young cut short last summer’s tour with Crazy Horse – owing, it later transpired, to exhaustion – you could have been forgiven for thinking that one of music’s most restless and hyper-productive artists would finally be forced to slow down. As if. Just a few months later, Young unveiled the Chrome Hearts, a new band who perhaps coincidentally share the same initials as their illustrious forebears. Ostensibly pulled together to honour existing commitments at last autumn’s Farm Aid 2024 and Harvest Moon Gathering benefit, the Chrome Hearts have since become Young’s latest creative allies – rescuing him from a period of writer’s block to produce Talkin To The Trees and, soon, his first world tour for six years.
‘New’ band? Well, the Chrome Hearts comprise guitarist Micah Nelson, organist Spooner Oldham, bassist Corey McCormick and drummer Anthony LoGerfo. Oldham, of course, is a veteran of Young’s bands, whose credits include (tellingly, as we shall discover) the Stray Gators lineup who recorded Harvest Moon. As members of Promise Of The Real, meanwhile, Nelson, McCormick and LoGerfo are relative newcomers, having backed Young on 2015’s The Monsanto Years, 2016’s Earth and 2017’s The Visitor.
Those three POTR collaborations were released on the cusp of Donald Trump’s first presidency; Talkin To The Trees arrives early in Trump’s second. The first two tracks released presented Young in full combat mode: “Big Change”, released days before Trump was sworn in as president for the second time, now resembles nothing less than a grim prophesy, howled over banks of roaring guitars; “Let’s Roll Again”, an electric vehicle anthem modelled on Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land”, found Young taking aim at Elon Musk: “If you’re a fascist, then get a Tesla”. Further, Young’s recent activities included an appearance at Bernie Sanders’ Anti-Oligarchy LA rally in April, suggesting that this might be one of his pointedly political records.
As it transpires, Talkin To The Trees finds Young largely preoccupied with matters closer to home. “Family Life” begins as an open-hearted acoustic address to his children – until a jarring reference to his grandchildren, “who I can’t see”. He follows this with “Dark Mirage”, a glowering ball of knotted noise, which heavily implies a falling out with his daughter Amber Jean, following the death of her mother Pegi Young in 2019: “Well, I lost my little girl now / To the darkness inside / Her mama is gone now / And there’s nowhere to hide”.
The mood shifts with “First Fire Of Winter”, a hymn to domestic happiness in Colorado with Daryl Hannah and the first of three gorgeous country tracks on the album. Modelled on “Helpless” – to quote Young himself: “It’s all one song,” right? – its rolling, graceful shuffle is cushioned by soothing harmonica notes and gliding pedal steel. His voice sounds terrific, incidentally: warm and mellow. Never one to miss a trick, Young returns to “This Land Is Your Land” for “Silver Eagle”, a love letter to his tourbus, seen recently in Hannah’s on-the-road documentary Coastal, before the rackety two-fingered two-fer of “Let’s Roll Again” and “Big Change”.
Abruptly, the discordance stops with “Talkin To The Trees”, delivered in a kind of hushed wonder about an arboreal amorata glimpsed by Young, while waiting in line at the farmers’ market, “standing there looking for the breeze”. A reference to “Bob” and “all the songs he was singing / All that time he was wanting to say hello” feels like a big moment for the Rusty/Bobcat crossover fanbase. Slightly underused up until now, Spooner Oldham provides a beautiful organ accompaniment to Young’s acoustic reverie.
Oldham shines further on the next two tracks, which are like nothing else in Young’s catalogue. “Movin Ahead” has the cock-eyed rhythms of a Tom Waits song, with Young yelping in full street preacher mode over Oldham’s stabbing organ, Nelson’s jerky guitar riffs and LoGerfo’s clattering percussion.
By contrast, “Bottle Of Love” is faintly amorphous, a jazz-flecked track complete with a vibraphone. “All your tears are saved in a bottle of love”, Young sings at the top end of his range, his voice wavering during the chorus. The album ambles amiably towards its end with “Thankful”, a close cousin to “Harvest Moon”, where Young takes stock: “I’ve been piling on the years / Full of laughter, sometimes tears”.
As “Thankful” fades away in a bucolic glow, how should we understand Talkin To The Trees at this point in Young’s career? Is it a means for him to communicate with those closest to him – and perhaps find some deeper understanding of his personal situation along the way? Is this Young, who turns 80 later this year, giving us his last hurrah? Or is this simply Young doing what he wants right now, with something else coming round the corner? As Young told Uncut in 2012, “You can’t worry about what people think. I never do. I never did, really.”
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