Neil Young: Are You Passionate?

After the Sept. 11 attacks, it seemed only natural—and welcome—that some of music's elder statesmen would offer songs of comfort and support. Still, it's tough to think of two less-liked songs than Paul McCartney's inane anthem "Freedom" and Neil Young's "Let's Roll." The latter, a tribute to Flight 93 told from the perspective of its terrorist-foiling passengers, doesn't sound any better on Young's new Are You Passionate It's too sincere to qualify as exploitative, but still too tacky to have much impact. (The cell-phone sound effects and the echoes of David Bowie's "Fame" don't help.) While it's a minor effort by Young's standards, the rest of the album fares better. For his backing band, Young enlisted occasional tourmates Booker T. Jones and Duck Dunn of Booker T. & The MG's; the music never tries to hide that fact, and several songs quote liberally from Stax classics. Stax energy, on the other hand, seems never to have factored into the equation. For the most part, Are You Passionate feels like an after-hours session, its songs weary and a little lost, but at times, Young makes those qualities work for him. The album takes a hairpin turn from the domestic pleasures of 2000's Silver & Gold, letting loss seep into almost every song, whether it's a father letting go of a daughter ("You're My Girl"), love slipping away ("Mr. Disappointment," "Quit"), or the past growing further out of reach ("When I Hold You In My Arms," "Two Old Friends"). To keep the wolves at bay, Young can scare up little more than affirmations of the "hold on / be strong" variety as Jones and Dunn lay low in the mix behind him, but the cumulative effect of the mournful confusion proves more powerful than any moment of "Let's Roll." "The world's changed since I first met you," Young sings on "Two Old Friends," assuming the voice of a resigned, befuddled God. In a strange way, it's comforting to find him as troubled by the changes as everyone else.