If you live long enough with a rock roll heart you find that dreams occasionally come true. One of the oldest dreams for many Neil Young fans has been that the prodigious folk-rocker would somehow find his way back--even once--to the youthful bruised majesty of his epochal 1970 album After the Gold Rush. Silver Gold comes very close to evoking the same dreamy suggestiveness as that first solo masterpiece in Youngs long career but for obvious reasons from an autumnal perspective. A video companion to the CD of the same name Silver Gold is actually a longer fuller experience of Youngs stirring acoustic concerts than the album represents. The hushed intimacy of Youngs playing and singing sans backup in such a setting can be unforgettable and this widescreen presentation captures that delicate beauty.While the play list has its share of familiar gems the emphasis is on a group of thematically and musically related songs Young had been arranging just prior to the CSNY reunion. Among them are gentle double-edged reflections on childhood ("Daddy Went Walkin") elemental odes to mature love ("Silver Gold") and richly imagistic allusions to loss and rediscovered innocence. These and a number of other new titles are largely of a piece 30 years later with After the Gold Rush and its blend of melancholy stateliness crosscurrents of pure emotion and touches of the mystical. The difference is in the experience of time: After the Gold Rush confirms the shifting glorious colors of a sensitive young mans constant immediacy while the new material on Silver Gold blurs all boundaries between past and present.

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Music