Neil Young
Unplugged

THE REVIEW

There is nothing more to say about Neil Young and it will never be said enough, there is a splendid album missing from this list. I take the liberty of leaving you with a personal page, a memory, a certain flavor, for me inseparable from this album.

I remember those evenings, we would leave the hotel in the silence of the valley, with only high peaks above us edging the sky. I cannot describe the magic and the intimacy of those mountainous places and those moments. Only the scent of the Alps is my memory, the sound of the river flowing, nothing else
Like the first movements of a feeling, the words up there acquired an echo, resounding, expanding their reach, their meaning. They went beyond, elegiac and solitary words, beautiful just to utter.
We often spent the darkness on wooden benches, at the edge of the fir woods, sometimes throwing stones into a washhouse, sometimes retracing the daily road. Kilometers rolled fast under our wheels, as much in the cool mornings as in the sunny afternoons. Sometimes we were surprised by large clouds swollen with water and melancholy, and the ascents became more tiring and the descents more treacherous.
Rummaging through memories there was also a guitar accompanying us to the top of the woods, I remember it accompanying impromptu bonfires on small gravel roads. And while old brooms stolen here and there burned, the simple complexity of those places re-proposed itself to us, in all its mountain and nocturnal charm. Proud days spent playing with Neil Young's chords, making summers like winters, Neil Young's music can make us lose the sure path of return, can lose traces of us, making us fall ill with an illness as sweet as it is insidious.
And it was precisely on this handful of songs without briar and without thorn that our dreams were pricked, now scattered and lost like that summer.

I don't want to be less fascinating and banal by defining “Unplugged” this evening by Neil Young, not one of the pearls of the MTV collection, but an immediate and vibrant reflection, that touches the heart, a record stretched halfway between the nocturnal countryside of Harvest Moon and the inner dismay of the upcoming Sleep with Angels.
Neil is alone, accompanied in the shadows by his guitar. Alone, with a small bottle of water and the bare chair, bare and uneasy, like the voice that mends the darkest vicissitudes of Young's experience. It will be like this for half an hour, but time bursts in front of all this, the emotional one flees very fast, the material one stops..
And after The Old Laughing Lady, Mister Soul, Pocahontas, The Needle and the Damage Done and Like a Hurricane, here appear the most trusted friends, who even though they are not certainties, provide more relaxation to the dark charm, which underlies nonetheless the pieces that will follow no less austere.
The nocturnal ballads do not only harbor bucolic reflections, but also long shadows in the night and wind blowing from the North, embarrassing the immature ears of wheat and, now no longer quiet, stirring the soul.
On the streets of that little village I could often see the fleeting figure of Neil Young watching over us, descending with the evening on wooden balconies and simple stones, sometimes sheltered behind a bus stop, sometimes sitting on a fence, other times lying in the grass listening to a fountain…