Harvest Moon

About

One way to hear <i>Harvest Moon</i> is as an echo of 1972’s <i>Harvest</i>—a leap made easier by the fact that many of the same musicians played on both. But <i>Harvest</i> was made by a recently divorced 26-year-old still negotiating his creative path, and <i>Harvest Moon</i> by a multiplatinum legend who’d secured the privilege of doing more or less whatever he wanted. The same person, maybe, but separated by a Rubicon of experience. So, while the feel of the albums is similar—gentle, plaintive, romantic—the experience is different: one, a catalog of romance according to youth, and the other according to the reflections of middle age. The poignancy isn’t just in the latter album’s tenderness—the string section, the country lilt, the pedal steel guitar—but in the way that Young slips between past and present: how a memory of then becomes a vision of now (“Unknown Legend”), how circular time stirs feelings we think we’ve forgotten (“Harvest Moon”). The effect is like looking at a hologram, or a trick image that changes when you tilt the card back and forth: The object is fixed, but what you see in it flickers—and both feel equally real. The album’s most touching moment is on “Old King,” where, in the course of eulogizing a beloved dog, Young mentions having kicked him when he was bad: a moment of violence neutralized by time and made strangely beautiful by the fact that Young knows it won’t ever happen again. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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