Life is, as this song reminds, full of strange delights — like finding Neil Young amongst pizzicato strings.
From the first violins’ ebbing, “Tumbleweed” makes clear Young’s broader goals for Storytone — to challenge himself to find a new voice outside of the roaring fury of Crazy Horse. When Young finally approaches the lyric here, you realize he’s done just that. He matches the arrangement’s cottony pliability, letting “Tumbleweed” unfold like a child’s lullaby, as tender as it is guileless.
When he admits, in one of his clearest highs on “Tumbleweed,” that he’s bearing his soul — it doesn’t feel like an easy rhyme or a cop out. Young stands there, emotionally naked, on “Tumbleweed.” There’s no guitar, no piano, nothing to hide behind on Storytone, which was conducted, arranged and co-produced by Michael Bearden and Chris Walden.
That makes Young’s approach with the lyric — one of unaffected care — all the more crucial. These lines would never have been heard alongside the likes of Poncho and Ralph.
Unlike “When I Watch You Sleepin’,” however, “Tumbleweed” doesn’t draw a line backward to any of his earlier guises. Instead, this is Neil Young as mid-century crooner, or as close as his sweetly earnest whine can get him.
More particularly, the gorgeously revealing “Tumbleweed” is everything that the stringent, audience-splitting “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” wasn’t. That advance single had an uncomfortable way — and this was Neil Young’s purpose, of course — of making you think, of making you choose sides. “Tumbleweed,” on the other hand, plumbs something more universal: That moment when we simply let go to the wonder around us.
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