Young's songs often come down to a single moment, a gesture that crystallizes and then breaks the tension, because they depend so much on the vagaries of mood. This undoubtedly is one of the things that Young has found so attractive about folk—the sense it often conveys of being a found music, with tone and atmosphere almost everything. A song could be whipped up on the spot, like a talking blues, and what mattered was not the proper convergence of theme and metaphor, but comic timing. If you were good, the process of making up the song—how long you paused to fit the right word into the rhyme—was as important as the completed song itself. A half-finished verse, a redundant refrain, was valued if it hit the moment. Young has always loved those kinds of throwaways; long after they became passé even in folk circles, he has persisted in dotting his albums with such songs as "Love in Mind," "Till the Morning Comes," and "Crippled Creek Ferry," one- to two-minute fragments that end in ellipsis.
Their open-endedness is the source of their power. The repetition of "till the morning comes" takes on the obsessive double-edge of a domestic quarrel: the impatient threat and the imploring request of a lover who has drawn the line, but secretly wants to see it crossed. The sudden fadeout of "Crippled Creek Ferry" (it's over before the credits roll) leaves us hanging—which is exactly its point. Young doesn't put much stock in resolutions. He has said that in making his first album he learned that "everything is temporary." By themselves, those words are clunky; they drip with supermarket mysticism, but I think that Young means them to be taken at face value: that his albums are about the passage of time. They're like journals—brutal, detailed, ingenuous, trivial, spilling out with all the art and artlessness of day-to-day life. Young has the megalomaniacal belief—and the diarist's faith—that everything he says is important. Which, of course, isn't true. He has never made a perfect album—one that has the conceptual unity of [the Beatles's] Sgt. Pepper or the spiritual unity of [Van Morrison's] Astral Weeks. The closest he has come is Zuma, and even that is marred by the gauzy nostalgia of its conclusion—Crosby, Stills, and Nash harmonizing on "Through my Sails." But you don't expect perfection from journals, even if they are meant for public consumption—by definition they are raw, immediate, and incomplete.
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