Most pop concerns itself with romantic love. Three songs into his latest album, prolific Canadian songwriter Neil Young exudes frustration at how his metier has become so safe. “People wanna hear about love,” he croons ruefully, backed by a new band in which two of Willie Nelson’s sons star.
Young, though, wants to sing about seeds and bankers “too rich for jail”. He wants to talk about how family-run shops are being driven out of business. Young’s not entirely deaf to people’s need for succour – love songs “make us feel all right”, after all. But The Monsanto Years – the elder statesman’s 36th album – is the latest in a line of releases in which Young lays bare his dismay at how we are hurtling towards some arid hell in a gas-guzzler. Young recently upbraided billionaire Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for his unauthorised use of Young’s song Rockin’ in the Free World for his campaign launch – a PR gift for the musician that could not have been better timed.
This is Young in quasi-punk mode, curt of chord, brief of noodle, filled with purpose, marshalling tunes – and whistling, and harmonicas – in the service of the singer’s public service. Often, The Monsanto Years hits home squarely. If I Don’t Know, the album closer, is a moving meta-song, in which Young examines his efforts to get people to give a shit, while his guitar gently weeps. “If the melodies stay pretty/And the songs are not too long,” he reasons, he might restore some respect to the Earth.
Country and folk have long tackled injustice. Here, the rambling Workin’ Man tells of farmer Vernon Bowman, sued for taking seed from GMO soy without paying Monsanto a royalty. Young’s issue isn’t with intellectual property rights – musicians like royalties – but with how agriculture has been taken over by corporate McSeed, further impoverishing farmers (a Young concern since Farm Aid). By contrast, you question the lasting artistic merit of ditties such as A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop, which squares up to Monsanto (and Starbucks) with all the elegance of a combine harvester.
Love, though, isn’t absent here. Young’s record company might, indeed, consider remarketing Young’s protest music as an album of love songs. You could argue that this whole enterprise is a love song for Young’s partner, the activist-actor Daryl Hannah. She appears on the cover with Young in a parody of Grant Wood’s iconic painting American Gothic that is as pointed as a pitchfork. Songs such as Wolf Moon, a loping duet between the wheeze of harmonica and Young’s falsetto, however, are love songs for the elements. Young is laid low by their beauty and resilience, vowing to defend them.
