Neil Young and Crazy Horse offer enigmatic storytelling on Barn

Neil Young is still making albums with his old compadres, Crazy Horse. Barn is their latest outing, a comfortingly familiar set of new songs recorded in an old wooden barn in the Rockies. Performed live, mostly at a mellow pace, it was made during the summer but has an autumnal feel. You can sense the creaking beams and soughing breeze.

“Song of the Seasons” sets the tone. Harmonica and accordion ruffle the air, set against a simple acoustic guitar strum and restrained drumbeat. The quaver in Young’s high voice has a faintly frail tone. The 76-year-old sings about looking through “a wavy glass window” at leaves falling over a lake. Then the perspective shifts to the view through a “clear vinyl window”. This time Young is looking at a city scene full of people walking around in masks.

“It’s humanity in my sights,” he sings, an ambiguous phrase. But the hint of misanthropy is banished by the sight of a loved one in the crowd, a soulmate with whom he feels a natural oneness. The earlier contrast between nature and humanity is resolved: “Like the wind in your hair/We’re so together in the way that we feel.” 

Disillusionment resurfaces in “Human Race”, which cranks up the guitar distortion for a rumbling screed about adults failing children over climate change. Solace is sought here in the heavy tread of Crazy Horse’s ceaseless toil, accompanists to Young since 1968. Bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, both 78, are joined by E-Street guitarist Nils Lofgren, a longtime Young collaborator, who replaces the retired Frank “Poncho” Sampedro.

“Heading West” is a midtempo stomper about the “good old days” of a childhood road trip with his mother. The detail that it came after his parents’ separation adds a speck of emotional grit. “Shape of You” isn’t the curveball of an Ed Sheeran cover, but a genial barroom rocker about a woman “who changed my life for the better” — presumably Young’s wife, the actress Daryl Hannah, who shot the cover photo of the titular barn.

Amid these straightforward numbers, two standout tracks revert to the opaque lyricism of “Song of the Seasons”. “They Might Be Lost” is about a couple waiting at their porch on a snowy day for a truck to arrive to pick up an unspecified consignment. The music drifts along atmospherically with a plain drumbeat, bass, piano and acoustic guitar, while a harmonica wheezily tries to fill the sails. Young mixes vivid descriptive details with a larger sense of confusion, as though his character were suspended in the limbo of a time to which he doesn’t belong. It’s a fascinatingly enigmatic piece of storytelling.

“Welcome Back” is the longest song, a mesmerising slow-burner. Guitars intertwine like smoke from a fire, with flecks and flickers of distortion. Young’s voice seems to waver in the middle distance, singing about computers turning on their human owners. He beckons us outside and invites us to turn our gaze upwards into the starlit sky. It’s not quite an off-grid moment, otherwise he and Lofgren would be playing acoustic guitars and the microphones wouldn’t be working. Instead, it plugs us into an alternative source of power, antique but still functioning, the electrical grid of Young and his faithful retainers, Crazy Horse.

★★★★☆

‘Barn’ is released by Reprise Records