Old Ways (1985)

Old Ways (1985)

This head-scratcher of an album finds our hero suddenly patriotic, and though its roots are in folksy classics like Comes A Time and Harvest, with which the album shares many musicians, the hokey material on Old Ways doesn’t come close reaching the vaunted heights of those earlier works. Another large problem is that Old Ways would be the first all-digital Neil Young album, a trend that would continue throughout the decade, until a swift 180 in the nineties. Pandering to flyover country with patriotic clichés and vaguely jingoistic platitudes, not even appearances by Waylon and Willie can legitimize this drab, formless album. Several songs from Old Ways would appear over 25 years later, on 2011’s archival release A Treasure, which documents the Old Ways tour and finds Neil backed by a short-lived band of session musician royalty called The International Harvesters. The hot-shit versions of “Bound For Glory” and “Get Back To The Country” found here are almost enough to pardon Old Ways. Almost.