What a better way to deal with a brain aneurysm than to go to Nashville and cut your best album in over a decade? Prairie Wind was the album through which Neil Young combated death, and after an operation in New York saved him, Neil Young: Heart of Gold\ was the way he celebrated. He returned to Nashville to play his latest album at the famous, intimate Ryman Auditorium, and got ""Silence of the Lambs"" director Jonathan Demme to film the concert.
This way, anyone not lucky enough to be one of the 2,000 or so in attendance that night might be able to look back and see that after nearly 40 years in the limelight, a brush with death and the recent loss of his father, Young is as strong as ever.
""Neil Young: Heart of Gold"" is everything one would hope it to be: it reveals Young's undiminished musicianship and his strongest set of songs since the similar-sounding Harvest Moon over a decade ago. Best of all, it gives a warm, personal face to one of rock's most famous recluses. Young never shunned the press like Dylan or hid from it like Harrison, but somehow his public persona has remained even more mysterious. So when he opens up between songs to talk about dealing with his father's dementia, to tell a cute kid story or to explain the history of the beaten guitar he played that night—the same one he used on Harvest and the same one Hank Williams played more than 50 years earlier on the same stage—it's a dream come true for fans.
Though almost the entire film is made up of straight-on shots of Young's stage performance—think Demme's concert film of Talking Heads' ""Stop Making Sense"" minus the big suit and members of Funkadelic—the entire film retains the off-hand, rural humanity of Young's asides between songs. Demme's direction is expert and unobtrusive. Instead of wowing us with camera antics, he makes subtle commentary on the solitary nature of some songs in Young's repertoire while pointing out the high value Young places on community and family in others; by alternating between close-ups of Young's weathered face and extreme long shots of the entire stage, Demme gives us images of Young as a loner and Young as part of the familial group effort that makes so much of his best music possible.
The nine songs he plays off Prairie Wind sound nearly identical to the studio versions, which means that just like the album, the film is mostly satisfying but occasionally trying. The country-soul meditation on death ""Far From Home"" sounds just as jubilant as it did on record, perhaps even more so given that his wife Pegi and country legend Emmylou Harris provide backing vocals, and the reflective ""The Painter"" is also stellar. Unfortunately, ""It's a Dream"" and ""Falling off the Face of the Earth"" retain the meandering dullness they did on record, though Young does well by not playing Prairie Wind's cheesy Elvis tribute ""He Was the King.""
The concert and film close out with similarly-themed fan favorites from Young's vast back catalog, like ""Old Man,"" ""The Needle and the Damage Done,"" ""Comes a Time"" and, of course, ""Heart of Gold."" Each version sounds nearly identical to the one he put on wax three decades ago, which is somewhat disappointing but overall reassuring. True, Young seems to have consigned himself to play faithful versions of the hits and to stay strictly within his stylistic limits, but given that his voice, words and persona are as human and moving as they have ever been, it is impossible not to sit back and simply enjoy the rich catalog of music Young has given us.
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