As a title, Before and After can refer to a couple of things. The most obvious is the temporal aspect. Young, at 78, is entrenched in the late period of his career, and rerecording a clutch of songs spanning his nearly 60 years of remarkable musical activity is a necessarily retrospective move: He’s showing us what this material from before sounds like now, in the after. But Young being Young, Before and After has another, trickier meaning. These solo reinterpretations of deep cuts and left-field favorites comes in the form of a single 48-minute-long track, one song leading directly into another. It’s more than a wistful look back at a long career or a wised-up reappraisal of Young’s youthful dissatisfactions and middle-aged ideals. It’s a thematically linked sequence, with each song changing the meaning of the one that follows, or at least casting it in a different light.
This isn’t the first time Young has released an album consisting of a single track. The notorious Arc, a collage of feedback, noodly improv fragments and crowd noise befuddled fans in 1991. While Before and After is far more traditional, it shares certain similarities with its polarizing predecessor: A focus on hidden connections and larger meanings, a vision of the past as a residue of ghosts, a devotion to stymying industry standards and a determination to shake up ways of listening. Before and After contains snippets of crowd noise as well, which, along with the buzzing, wobbly rawness of the production values, strongly suggests that most, if not all, of these songs were recorded live, most likely during Young’s recent West Coast solo tour, as Morgan Enos pointed out in an article for the Grammys website. Of the 13 songs stitched together, Young draws most from the Arc era, with four tracks from the ‘90s represented. (The ‘60s and ’70s have three apiece, the 21st century has two and there’s one lone outing from the ‘80s, for those keeping score at home.)
The album begins with the charging “I Am the Ocean,” from the 1995 collaboration with Pearl Jam, Mirror Ball. Stripped of the original’s burly electric guitar and — let’s admit it — monotonous rhythm section, it somehow sounds even more aggressive. The line, “People my age/ They don’t do the things I do” lands a lot harder, for example. But the direction of the song has shifted. Where Young once sang, “I got my friends/ And I got my children too/ I got her love/ She’s got my love too,” now he’s addressing a specific person: “I got your love/ And you’ve got my love too.” It’s a small change, but it transforms the song’s energy, turning brashness into a personal declaration that verges upon the heartwarming.
If you’re worried that age and domesticity have made Young soft, the songs that follow quickly complicate that newfound glow. “Homefires,” recorded during the mid-‘70s Homegrown period and released in 2020 as part of his ongoing Archives project, begins, “I’m not the same man/ I was a while ago,” and while this exploration of the difficulties of long-haul relationships and the temptations of the road may have once referred to Young’s wilder rock-star excesses, here it might be seen as an answer to the uxorious swagger of “I Am the Ocean.” “Homefires” segues into “Burned,” one of two Buffalo Springfield songs that Young dismantles, removing its crisp late ‘60s verve and replacing it with his distinctly radiant melancholy. Its lyrics about mental turmoil and conflicting emotions previously suggested a typical hippie drug crash; now they read like a confrontation with old age. “Been burned, and with both feet on the ground” used to sound like a description of coming down after a chemical high; on Before and After, “both feet on the ground” most likely indicates stability, and as for what’s doing the burning, well, it could be the flames of the previous “Homefires,” but it’s more likely the coruscations of time itself. “No time left and I know I’m losing” hits a little different coming from someone pushing 80 than from a kid barely old enough to drink.
But if the primary focus of Before and After is the weight of time’s passage, it’s never directly addressed. Instead, Young, never all that subtle a songwriter in the past, now attacks his subject obliquely, letting ambiguous thematic connections and the echo of intervening years speak for themselves. Most of these songs deal with love, in one fashion or another. “If You Got Love,” an outtake from the deliriously digital Trans (1983), loses its smooth Rundgren-infused Tropicalia and takes on a straightforward earnestness courtesy of a charmingly laborious pump organ and Young’s reliably dodgy falsetto. “A Dream That Can Last” and “My Heart,” both from 1994’s Sleeps With Angels,are quaintly tinkling piano-driven ditties whose lilting melodies conceal a startling level of ambivalence. “My Heart” is at first a lament: “When life is hanging in the breeze/ I don’t know what love can do,” but it ends as a rallying cry: “I gotta keep my heart/ It’s not too late.” It’s hard not to notice how flatly this sentiment contradicts the temporal pessimism of “Burned.” And “My Heart” gets called into question in turn, on “When I Hold You in My Arms,” from 2002’s Are You Passionate?: “If I only had a heart/ it would beat all night for you/ If I only had a heart, I would cry the whole day through.” Has Young held on to his heart or lost it? “If you got love,” is the “world you’re walking in/ … at your command,” or is love powerless “when dreams come crashing down like trees”? The songs on this album are in some cases a lifetime apart, but Young has revealed them to be a continuous and ongoing conversation.
“A Dream That Can Last,” for its part, purports to be a vision of heaven, but it’s a place where “The cupboards are bare but the streets are paved with gold.” This sounds a lot more like a critique of America, which connects it to the other soapbox song included here, “Mother Earth,” from 1990’s Ragged Glory. And a droning organ and harmonica-led version of “Mr. Soul,” the second Springfield chestnut on offer, links up with the youthful surliness of “Burned.” But the obvious pairings, while interesting, are less important than the traces of all of Young’s eras and modes that linger in every song, revealed by Young’s careful juxtapositions – the political rancor amid the romance in “When I Hold You in My Arms,” the ardor for nature and creation in “Mother Earth.”
In the press materials for Before and After, Young calls this suite a montage, which is partly correct. (Young has directed several movies under the nom de plume Bernard Shakey.) In film, a montage collapses time by showing a quick series of scenes that actually take place over a long period – think the training sequences in the Rocky movies. Before and After does that too, but going in both directions instead of one, journeying to the past as well as the future, erasing the present tense and showing life as a nebulous continuum instead of a rigid arrow. As he sings in “I Am the Ocean”: “I am a Cutlass Supreme/ In the wrong lane/ Trying to turn against the flow.” And even more tellingly, from the same song, summing things up at the very start: “I’m not present/ I’m a drug that makes you dream.”
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