Neil Young - Fork in the Road
Thursday, April 9, 2009 | midnight
“Singing a song won’t change the world.” The lyric, which arrives three tracks into Neil Young’s latest disc, sounds strange coming from the mouth of a man who denounced the Kent State shootings with “Ohio,” questioned America’s values in “Rockin’ in the Free World” and blasted George W. Bush’s foreign policy on Living With War. Moreover, it makes you wonder exactly why Young constructed Fork in the Road—an album extolling the virtues of his electric car—if not to try to make a difference.
Because it’s pretty apparent that, even at 63, Young is capable of far better songwriting. Whether or not one embraced the conceptual makeups of Greendale or Living With War, both projects featured some undeniably grand musical flourishes. Not so much with Fork in the Road. On virtually all of these 10 tracks directly or tangentially related to his LincVolt hybrid auto, melodies take a backseat to message, as if Young wrote the words and then crafted the tunes—rarely a successful modus operandi.
And it’s not like there are brilliant lyrics guiding the way. Alternating between unironic bluntness (“Some old-timers just wanna stay the same/But they still advertise how clean and green they are”) and clumsy car-as-woman metaphors (“Pull over and put the top down/Check out what’s under the hood”), Young comes off, for one of the only times in his career, as pretty darn lame.
Ultimately, he’s singing these songs because he’s just that committed, which is sorta cool even if the end result isn’t. As for changing the world, Young’s newly acquired pragmatism might be wise this time around; maybe he won’t feel so bad when he hears Fork in the Road from the window of a passing Hummer.
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