Neil Young: ‘I sound like an old hippy, right? Well, that’s who I am!’
Neil Young’s new album, World Record, begins with a gentle lullaby of a song called Love Earth. “We can bring the seasons back,” sings Young in a reedy tenor as his on-off backing band Crazy Horse do their loose, shuffling thing. “Can you imagine that?” It is a vision of a return to an ecological Eden, and like the rest of World Record it addresses the two big concerns Young has been singing about his entire career: the environment and war. It is, I say to the singer, activist and self-described rich hippy, a rare glimpse of positivity when generally conversations on the environment are overwhelmingly negative.
