It’s fall, and so I’m listening to Neil Young

It must be fall. Autumn. A glorious time – my favorite season of the year – when the air gets cool and the colors change. Some call it “football weather”. Whatever it is, I love it. In Oklahoma, fall doesn’t last long; in reality, it’s summer here at least eight months out of the year. But even in those few short months (or maybe weeks) when we experience fall, I feel more alive than I do the entire rest of the year.

But that’s not why I know it must be fall. I know because I find myself impulsively listening to Neil Young. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another artist whose music screams “fall” quite like his. As I write this, I’m listening to a solo acoustic show of Young at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1971 — one of the live archival releases from Young’s vaults that he’s started issuing in the past year. Every track gives the feeling of natural resignation, from the opener “On the Way Home” to highlights from albums like After the Gold Rush, which he’d just released, and still-in-progress numbers from the then-upcoming Harvest.

On this date, Young played acoustic guitar on most of the 17 tracks, and piano on the others. Some songs, like “Love in Mind”, “Bad Fog of Loneliness”, and the opener, I’d never heard before, and I love ‘em. The others are stripped-down arrangements of some of his classics. You’ve heard “Needle and the Damage Done” on solo acoustic, and possibly even “Cowgirl in the Sand”. But what about “Ohio”, “Helpless”, or “Down by the River”? I hadn’t, and I have to agree with an opinion I’ve heard elsewhere: only when you hear Young play his songs solo have you felt their full impact. Though this album was just released earlier this year, I’ve got to think it will become one of the definitive pieces in Young’s canon.

Young’s songs often look at the decay of things. But just like the message of one of his most autumnal tracks, “Don’t Let it Bring You Down”, after the decline, there’s hope that things will improve. Fall is a time when nature enters a period of decay, as part of the earth moves further from the sun’s warmth. Eventually we’ll get back to spring and summer. Still, with Young’s music and a brisk breeze, I could stay in autumn a while longer.