Go Forth into the Sun, Voyager – The Record Aesthetic of Neil Young’s Decade

My freedom is as spectral as the night bird’s cry

Osip Mandelstam

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose

Janis Joplin

Embracing the spectrality of freedom whilst courting the mythology of the rising sun, Neil Young embodies the metamorphosis of man as he becomes light. He opens us up to the vistas of boundlessness that are accessed when the imagination is left to wander upon the wind. Through the portal of the dawn, Young accesses a creative vision that is embedded in the natural form of the prairie-scape, and then transcends it, entering into a game of tag with the eternal and the formless, the true wellsprings of creativity. 

Young is in open rebellion with the temporal limitations of life, so he makes a wager with time, and captures a moment of eternity for himself. Our moment here is, after all, as wistful as a beam of light, or, to borrow a phrase from The Youngbloods ‘we are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass.’ 

Folk rock is aptly named, steeped as it is in the folkloric – borrowing thematic tangents from fables and massaging simple truths out of time worn myths. With his guitar case plastered with  the ephemera of the wandering minstrel, he carves out a space to indulge in a moment of heartening solace.

The horizon looms large in the distance, trackless and indecipherable. The golden hour reflects the emergent, sublime sensation of surrender. A surrender to the mysterious forces upon the horizon, and a surrender to the waking hour, to all that lingers beyond the field of vision. Ultimately, Young surrenders to the creativity that lies when freedom is embraced, with all its demands and expectations.