Tonight's the Night

Sometimes songs have a way of immediately snatching you by the neck. Within a few bars you are hooked, strangled and left at the mercy of a few guitars and a rough voice. These songs come on like a strong infatuation; you spin them endlessly for hours and days and then suddenly drop them, feeling like a gigolo or a foolish mistress.

Then there are the albums that take ages to sink in. You toy with them, play coy, place them on the turntable on and off for months waiting for a message, a secret, a code. Sometimes it never comes. But sometimes the moon eclipses and the tide roars in and suddenly it all makes sense.

This past week the second scenario hit me hard, like a dagger in the gut. The album in question is Neil Young's Tonight's the Night. Written in the wake of the death of two friends, the album is melancholy and introverted, filled with sideways allusions to desolation. The music loosely thumps and jangles, but the vocals maintain a pointed aggression that belies its seemingly laid-back nature. Here, every beautiful country road dead-ends into hopelessness, disaster and suicide. In "Tired Eyes" Neil mutters:
I mean was he a heavy doper
or was he just a loser?
He was a friend of yours.
What do you mean,
he had bullet holes
in his mirrors?
He tried to do his best
but he could not.

There was a distinct moment when this album finally grabbed me by the collar. I was riding the bus out of downtown on a gloomy, rain-spitting morning when "Albuquerque" came on my headphones. I listened to the lyrics unspool while I stared at the grey world through those filmy, mud-flecked windows, and my heart leaped when I came to the line ... and I've been starvin' to be alone.

I have never spent more time alone then I have in Nashville. A week's worth of hours staring out a bus window, long afternoons washing dishes in the sink or watching flocks of birds congregate and disappear. And yet the more I am alone the more I crave it. I fall deeply into my mind, into a poisonous preoccupation with ideas I can't explain, and have little occasion to. At that moment, on a morning where I had yet to say a word aloud, there was nothing I would have liked better then to drive myself even further away from civilization and sever the cord.

Neil Young's voice, thin and hungry and wolfish, is the voice in my head most days these days.