This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
It’s easy to see why Neil Young appears to be in a nostalgic mood on his new album Silver & Gold: The living legend has spent a tremendous amount of time reconnecting with his past lately.
For several years now, he’s been toiling away on a mammoth series of Archives box sets chronicling his entire career (the first of four instalments — an eight-CD, two-DVD box set — is due for Christmas). Plus he’s been working on a Buffalo Springfield box with Stephen Stills — and that, of course, led to the recent Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young reunion, which spawned last year’s Looking Forward CD (whose four Young tunes were originally slated for this disc, according to reports) and their just-completed tour.
So if Neil’s in a reflective frame of mind here, well, he comes by it honestly. And heaven knows, if anybody’s earned the right to take a good long look in the mirror and indulge in that mixture of pride, sorrow and regret we all feel with the passage of time, it’s restless workaholic Neil.
Of course, when Neil Young does it, it tends to sound a whole lot prettier than when you or I do it. “Working hard, every day … Never notice how the time slips away,” he observes on the title track, a gentle declaration of love over materialism that Young penned back in 1982 and has performed live for years. Played here as a stripped-down, solo acoustic folk ballad, its forthright sentiment serves as a perfect thread connecting Silver & Gold’s sombre, introspective country-folk tales about distance and connection. “People come, seasons go,” he says. “But we got something that’ll never grow old / It’s better than silver and gold.”
Thse sentiments are carried over into the back-porch ballad Daddy Went Walkin’, a downbeat ode to Young’s father and parenthood in general; The Great Divide, a quiet rumination on lovers separated by an emotional gulf; Good to See You, a country-pop charmer about coming home from tour; Razor Love, another ’80s-vintage ballad about “love that cuts clean through”; and Distant Camera, in which Young concludes that “If life is a photograph fading in the mirror, all I want is a song of love to sing to you.”
Well, maybe that’s not quite all he wants, judging by Buffalo Springfield Again, his gently rocking and surprisingly moving tribute to his seminal ’60s outfit that broke up in 1968. “I’d like to see those guys again and give it a shot,” he admits. “Maybe now we can show the world what we got … But I’d just like to play for the fun we had.”
Looks like Neil is ready for another journey through the past.
