Forgotten Favorites: 'Comes a Time'
Some albums are just too good to let slip away beneath the sands of time, so each week Bill Melville pulls one out, dusts it off and offers it up for your renewed consideration ...
Who has more lost, scrapped and overlooked albums than Neil Young? No one.
Only he could release Chrome Dreams II when he never properly issued the first.
After all the heavy drugs and Crazy Horse power chords of the mid-1970s, Comes a Time finds Young closer to After the Gold Rush and Harvest than at any point before his triumphant Harvest Moon in 1991. Nor is this a precursor to Old Ways, his 80’s failure to recapture Harvest glory.
Since he dropped this album after his Decade, leaving Comes a Time without representation on that monumental compilation and receives much less renown despite its solid trove of songs (the title track does appear on 2004's Greatest Hits).
Goin Back hints at a Neil Young ready for a simpler time without the pathos of Out on the Weekend or Tell Me Why. In spirit, it's closest to Good to See You from 2000's Silver and Gold.
If he hadn't established his return to the country yet, the title track announces it with a sharp blast of fiddle. Comes a Time is undoubtedly a message song, ushering Young past the drug excesses which consumed Bruce Berry and Danny Whitten while threatening to take Young as well.
The best-known song on the record, Lotta Love, has everything to do with Nicolette Larson and has little in common with Young's original. Stripped down under Young's arrangement, it pairs up well with Look Out for My Love.
Peace of Mind finds Neil in heartwrenching mode, its soft delivery skillfully contrasting melancholy verses.
Human Highway and Field of Opportunity are also simpatico, solid country ballads kept from becoming too vanilla by Young's delivery.
This could represent fallback territory for Young -- he writes this type of song with such great ease, the depth of the craft embedded in them can become obscured.
Motorcycle Mama blows a tire pretty quickly, built on a generic Young lyric and riff that never breaks out.
Canadian law practically requires all the nation's musicians to cover Four Strong Winds at some point, but Young's cylinders fire straight out for Mama. He instills a hope in this song not everyone can grasp. After all he endured in the 1970s, the thought of Alberta in winter might not feel like so great a labor for Young.
Lacking the country music talent that fleshed out Harvest and Harvest Moon, Comes a Time should appeal to fans of either, with its stripped down songs often the equal of better-heralded chunks of his repertoire.
Comes a Time might not be top-tier Neil, but it's worth hunting down for someone wanting to expand beyond the classics.
Got memories of your own from this hidden gem? Share them in the comments section below ...
Although Neil does it faster, the unique thinkg about COMES A TIME is Neil's version of "Four Strong Winds".
The song was first featured as the first track on volume 5 of the "Genuine" Basement Tapes Dylan and the Band did back in 1967.
I think it's interesting, or maybe a nod to the old Americana, "Canadian style", by Neil.
Posted by: David S. Owen | October 22, 2008 at 02:28 PM