There is a moment somewhere in the middle of Greendale where you stop waiting for the songs to start and realize the song has been happening to you for twenty minutes already.
Neil Young wrote this thing as a concept album about a fictional California town, a murder, a media circus, a granddaughter named Sun Green who chains herself to a power company executive at an awards show. It sounds ridiculous typed out like that. It isn’t.
The Ranch Sessions
Greendale was recorded at Plywood Digital, the makeshift studio Young built inside a barn at his Broken Arrow Ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains. No one was flying in from Los Angeles. No one was booking time by the hour. The Horse — Poncho Sampedro, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina — had been playing with Young since 1969, and here they sound like it. Not in the polished, well-oiled sense. In the sense that they know when to drag the tempo half a step and let a riff breathe until it becomes weather.
Ben Keith, Young’s steel guitar player and arranger since Harvest, is present and essential. He keeps the whole thing from drifting into pure garage murk. The audio wasn’t mixed so much as allowed — Young produced it himself, with John Hanlon and L.A. Johnson engineering, and the sound has that quality of a tape left running in a room where something true is being worked out.
The album is almost eighty minutes long. Ten songs, some of them ten minutes long. This is either the appeal or the obstacle, depending entirely on you.
Slow Burn Storytelling
Young has always been a novelist trapped in a songwriter’s body, but Greendale is where he stopped pretending otherwise. The Green family — Grandpa, Earl, Sun — accumulates detail over the course of the record the way a Steinbeck character does. You don’t get hooks. You get scenes.
“Devil’s Sidewalk” opens the whole thing like a garage door rolling up on a gray morning. “Carmichael” is nine and a half minutes about a cop shooting and a media pile-on that sounds, twenty years later, like Young was watching a news channel we haven’t turned off. He wasn’t writing about the future. He was writing about a pattern.
The performances are shaggy in the exact right way. Molina’s kick drum sounds like a boot on a hardwood floor. Talbot’s bass sits in the room rather than the mix. Sampedro’s rhythm playing is the thing that somehow holds the whole sprawling construction together — not tight, just present, the way a good band always is when the material demands they show up honestly.
Young has made better albums. He has made albums that will hook you faster, that will give you something to hold in the first thirty seconds. Greendale will not do that for you. But I’ve returned to it in ways I haven’t returned to the celebrated ones, and I’ve stopped trying to explain why. Some records work on you rather than for you.
The simultaneous film Young shot — him directing, actors miming the songs in tableau — got more attention at the time than the record. That’s worth ignoring. The record is the thing. Put it on late, don’t watch the clock, let Sun Green chain herself to whatever she needs to chain herself to. The Horse will be there when she’s done.