Neil Young’s Epic Reckoning With Mortality

At first listen, Neil Young’s new song “Soon I Might Be Going” comes across like a sad shake of the head at the hot and Trumpy 2020s.

Electric guitars fizzle with the slow majesty of a dying campfire; Young’s rooster-crow voice sounds tired and hoarse.

He sings of a president on TV tearing down the old White House.

He describes a Christmas in the Rockies that’s warm as summer, during which “the clouds that used to pour the rain / Are billowy and strange.” He notices new cars on the street, new buildings in his town, and feels like reality is starting to resemble fiction.

But this is not a lament for the present—or at least not only that.

One line references a “new” movie, The Crimson Pirate , which was released in 1952, when Young was about 7 years old.

Back then, the president on TV would have been Harry Truman, who oversaw his own gut renovation of the White House.

The 80-year-old Young could be remembering a warm Christmas from childhood.

He’s cataloging similarities between his early days and now—including a sense that a “revolution’s coming / Like a fighter with a fist.” Young himself is an icon of a revolution that pitted the Baby Boomers against their elders—but all along, he was more interested in the links across generations.

In a voice blending choir-boy innocence and weathered-cowboy experience, he captured feelings of recognition between the young man and the old man , the child and the parent , the modern and the historical .

His discography, filled with sequels and callbacks, has moved between folk quietude and rockin’ raggedness in a manner that’s felt less like the progression of a story than the cycling of seasons.

As he once famously said onstage, his music is “all one song.” Now his latest studio album, Second Song , offers a particularly moving experience of time travel.

At a time when many of his contemporaries have slowed their output, Young’s maintained teenage restlessness.

The past 10 years have brought at least 13 new albums—some with freshly written tracks, some with unearthed ones, some with live recordings—as well as a number of reissues and nonmusical projects.