Neil Young went country in 1985, and he meant it. Old Ways is 10 tracks and 36 minutes of steel guitar, bowed instruments, and plain sentiment, made with Nashville players and aimed straight at a rock audience that did not ask for it. The record wants to be a statement about an older kind of music, not a passing side trip, and it plays that way from the first song to the last.
The Running Order
| # | Track | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Wayward Wind | 3:13 |
| 2 | Get Back to the Country | 2:51 |
| 3 | Are There Any More Real Cowboys? | 3:04 |
| 4 | Once an Angel | 3:56 |
| 5 | Misfits | 5:07 |
| 6 | California Sunset | 2:57 |
| 7 | Old Ways | 3:08 |
| 8 | My Boy | 3:37 |
| 9 | Bound for Glory | 5:48 |
| 10 | Where Is the Highway Tonight? | 3:03 |
The Wayward Wind opens the album on safe ground, a cover that sets the tone without doing much to earn it. Get Back to the Country picks the pace up and stands as one of the record’s better moments, a loose, funny statement of purpose that actually sounds like Young enjoying himself. Are There Any More Real Cowboys? is the album’s strongest track, a plain and direct question dressed up as a song, and it carries more weight than anything around it.
Once an Angel and California Sunset settle into a moderate pace and slip into filler, pleasant enough but easy to forget next to the songs on either side of them. Misfits, at over five minutes, is the album’s boldest attempt, and it mostly lands, mixing space imagery with tavern sentiment in a way that should not work but does. The title track, Old Ways, is fine but slight, a sketch of an idea rather than a finished thought.
My Boy sits at the heart of the record, a simple, direct song about raising a child that earns its feeling instead of reaching for it. Bound for Glory, the longest track here at 5:48, drags where Misfits rose higher, drawing out a thin idea past its welcome. Where Is the Highway Tonight? closes things out on a quiet, gentle note, ending the album in a low, calm way rather than with any real statement.
What Works and What does not
The songs that hold up share a few things:
- A clear idea instead of a mood
- Room for the band to play rather than fill in the space around a voice
- Young’s voice sounding like it believes what it is singing
Are There Any More Real Cowboys?, Get Back to the Country, My Boy, and Misfits all clear that bar. The rest of the record coasts, filling space between the songs that actually have something to say.
Old Ways is not an abandonment of Young’s rock audience so much as a light turn away from it. He had made stranger records than this — Trans, which appeared three years earlier, took bigger risks and, song for song, held better writing. Old Ways plays it safer than that, and safer does not mean worse on its own, but it does mean less worth remembering. Nothing here embarrasses him. Nothing here demands a second listen either, apart from the four songs that do the album’s real work.
This is a careful country record from a man who has never made a fully careful record in his life — attention of that kind was never really the point with Young, and here it shows plainly. The playing is neat, the songs hold together well, and the whole thing runs by without much friction. That ease is as much the problem as it is the appeal.
Verdict
Old Ways is a lesser Neil Young album, not a bad one. It has four songs worth keeping — Are There Any More Real Cowboys?, Get Back to the Country, My Boy, and Misfits — and six that pass the time without leaving much behind. It is the sound of an artist giving himself fully to one kind of music and finding it costs him little, though it gains him little either.
- The Wayward Wind3:13
- Get Back to the Country2:51
- Are There Any More Real Cowboys?3:04
- Once an Angel3:56
- Misfits5:07
- California Sunset2:57
- Old Ways3:08
- My Boy3:37
- Bound for Glory5:48
- Where Is the Highway Tonight?3:03
