Fork in the Road (2009)

I don’t know if I’ve properly talked about Neil’s love of cars, but woo boy, it’s a whole thing. If you made him choose between cars and trains, I don’t know what would happen. On top of this, he’s always been interested in environmental concerns. Cars and climate are not the best of friends, so Neil’s way of coping with these competing interests was to convert a ‘59 Lincoln Continental to run on biodiesel hybrid. Or at least, attempt to. You can watch a lot of footage about it on the LincVolt Youtube page, but there is an incredible series of documentaries on Neil Young Archives (see below).

Fork in the Road is a concept album about this project and advocation for greener energy in automobiles in general. The album makes a lot more sense in the context of the project and documentary. He’s basically narrating his journey through this project. For instance, “When Worlds Collide” is all about driving from California to Kansas to work on the conversion and the different people he met (along with friend and collaborator Larry Johnson). The bludgeoning stomp of this song evokes collision and it works on that level, but is overall such a stiff song for Neil. Whatever you say about Neil, his songwriting is usually more flowing. Likewise, “Fuel Line” has Neil’s guitar sounding like a badly shifting gear set while he sings about electricity and batteries. It’s a bit of a ZZ Top style throwback and these two songs aren’t a promising start for me. It’s back to that Living With War/Greendale style where all the songs sound similar because they were all written in the same small period and recorded immediately without much thought. And it’s the same band as Living With War (Rick Rosas and Chad Cromwell plus Niko Bolas co-producing, plus an almost invisible Ben Keith on his last album with Neil). This quick writing and recording seems to be trying to follow David Briggs’ advice of getting closer to the source, but Briggs’ oversaw the recording of songs Neil had been working on for years, not days. Big difference.

That said, “Just Singing a Song” is a good Neil song. Right away, you can hear Old Black floating over the intro in that way that only Neil can do. The lyrics are poignant and delivered with Neil’s customary irony, but the chorus pushes the song a bit into corniness, turning it into a bit of a jingle. “Johnny Magic” is all about the man Neil commissioned to work on LincVolt, Johnathan Goodwin. Imagine that: Neil writes a song about you! It’s about as old school sounding as you can get despite the lyrics at times being a readout of the LincVolt’s modern technical specs. The strangest of all songs on the album, though, is “Cough Up the Bucks,” basically a new “T-Bone.” Like that song, the lyrics are very minimal and very repetitive, but without a frustratingly great guitar jam interspersed throughout. The video is hilarious, though (I don’t usually get into the music videos, but this one is definitely so odd, it should be seen).

Sigh. “Get Behind the Wheel.” Neil fetishizes cars by comparing them to women. Not only is it objectification, but it’s just silly. And the music is another throwback. I get why he’s doing this. It’s a car album, but it’s not going to win anyone over. He went about this project in a very personal way, but he could have tried to make it more appealing if he wanted to express a message. Instead of embracing the future and modernity, he’s trying to make car heads more comfortable by reaching back. Neil takes a step back for the slower, sparser “Off the Road,” almost an elegy for driving. It’s one of the better songs and the slower pace helps it, I think. The lyrics are more poetic, the delivery is sincere, and the melody pretty. The car starts up again with “Hit the Road,” but Neil is back to fetishization. That’s a shame as this song has a cool sound and rhythm. I wish it was about something.

The clear standout of the album is “Light a Candle,” another slower song. Neil wanted this to be an electric album, but, like Living With War, he might have been more successful if he had made a sparser, less electric album with more emotion in it. It’s a lovely song, with a gravely vocal, dreamy lyrics, lilting acoustic guitar and Ben Keith’s trademark slide. Ben plays his heart out on this one and it’s a nice send off for Neil’s lifelong friend and collaborator. It’s too bad this song wasn’t on Chrome Dreams II instead of something else as it fits there better.

As we move on to the closing “Fork in the Road,” it’s almost unfair to stick this song on the end. It can’t compete with “Light a Candle” and sounds like a joke. A retread of other sounds and themes from the rest of the album. Weird album. Important ideas, needed support, worthwhile project. But the music is kind of an afterthought for the most part. What a shame. Neil needed to break his current mode of working which favors quick results over thoughtful songwriting. As we will see soon, he’s about to do it, too.

Top 3:

1. Light a Candle
2. Just Singing a Song
3. Off the Road

Cut song: Get Behind the Wheel

The LincVolt Years is a work-in-progress documentary produced by L.A. Johnson and presented (for now) as five episodes on Neil Young Archives. It’s wonderful. Like Heart of Gold, this is almost a better encapsulation of what Neil was trying to say than the album it surrounds. The first episode sets the stage: Neil found a guy to convert his ‘59 Lincoln Continental to electric. The guy is in Kansas and Neil and Larry Johnson are going to drive there and talk to people along the way. It’s quite an adventure. Along the way, they meet car enthusiasts, dealers, awestruck fans, racists, people who have no idea who he is, and Neil just rolls with it all. Some boss moments include the helpful locals who tell him a joke and Neil listening to a racist, ignoring his admonitions, then putting him on camera behind his back. That’s just the first episode.

The rest of the episodes to date are all about the trials and tribulations of the conversion process. What starts out as a very hopeful, promising project slowly turns into a disaster. They get the electric battery working fine and can drive the car around, but the fuel needed to charge the battery never quite works right. Eventually they find out the electric conversion was bad and dangerous to begin with. Neil is continually optimistic about it, but Larry gets more and more fed up with the team. In the end, Neil sinks about a million bucks into this project. The framing story of this work in progress documentary series has Neil driving around with his now wife Daryl Hannah. The car is working well in that frame story, but that’s at least 5-7 years later (it’s unclear when the frame story is filmed). I know that in 2010 the charging system started a fire that burned down the warehouse the car was in. They then rebuilt it and it uses “Domestic-Green Carbon-Neutral Cellulosic Ethanol from Biomass” to fuel the hybrid system. It’s difficult to find any current information about the car, though, so I hope this documentary is eventually finished and presents a clear picture beginning to end.

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