Old Ways is the 14th studio album by Canadian-American musician and singer-songwriter Neil Young, released on August 12, 1985, on Geffen Records.
Background
Young first made an attempt at country album in the 1980s in January 1983. He recorded several songs at producer David Briggs' Nashville recording studio House of David with longtime collaborators Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Karl T. Himmel, Spooner Oldham and Rufus Thibodeaux, who had all previously backed Young on Comes a Time from 1978. The songs "Old Ways", "Depression Blues", "California Sunset", "My Boy", "Are There Any More Real Cowboys?" and "Silver and Gold" all date from these sessions. After turning in Trans and the unreleased Island in the Sun in 1982, Young's record label, Geffen, objected to a country album, asking Young for a "rock 'n roll" record, which Young would give them in the form of 1983's Everybody's Rockin'. "Depression Blues" would later appear on Young's Geffen-era compilation Lucky Thirteen, while "Silver and Gold" would later appear as the title track of an album in 2000. Young describes this first effort in an June 1988 Rolling Stone interview with James Henke:
"There was a whole other record, the original Old Ways, which Geffen rejected. It was like Harvest II. It was a combination of the musicians from Harvest and Comes a Time. It was done in Nashville in only a few days, basically the same way Harvest was done, and it was co-produced by Elliot Mazer, who produced Harvest. There's Harvest,Comes a Time and Old Ways I, which is more of a Neil Young record than Old Ways II.Old Ways II was more of a country record – which was a direct result of being sued for playing country music. The more they tried to stop me, the more I did it. Just to let them know that no one’s gonna tell me what to do. I was so stoked about that record. I sent them a tape of it that had eight songs on it. I called them up a week later, 'cause I hadn’t heard anything, and they said, "Well, frankly, Neil, this record scares us a lot. We don't think this is the right direction for you to be going in." The techno-pop thing was happening, and they had Peter Gabriel, and they were totally into that kind of trip. I guess they just saw me as some old hippie from the Sixties still trying to make acoustic music or something. They didn't look at me as an artist; they looked at me as a product, and this product didn't fit in with their marketing scheme."[5]
In 1984, Young toured with the band from the 1983 sessions. The tour would include an appearance on the Austin City Limits TV show and would eventually be chronicled on the live album A Treasure in 2011. Young saw country music and his adopted country music persona as a respite from his then-waning career in rock music, the demands of his record company and his struggles to record the rock album that would become Landing on Water. He would explain to the Melody Maker's Adam Sweeting in a September 1985 interview:
"In some ways rock 'n' roll has let me down. It really doesn't leave you a way to grow old gracefully and continue to work. If you're gonna rock you better burn out, 'cause that's the way they wanna see you. They wanna see you right on the edge where you're glowing, right on the living edge, which is where young people are. They're discovering themselves, and rock 'n' roll is young people's music. I think that's a reality, and I still love rock 'n' roll and I love to play the songs in my set that are sort of rock 'n' roll, but I don't see a future for me there. I see country music, I see people who take care of their own. You got 75 year old guys on the road. That's what I was put here to do, y'know, so I wanna make sure I surround myself with people who are gonna take care of me. 'Cos I'm in it for the long run. Willie Nelson's 54 years old and he's a happy man, doing what he loves to do. I can't think of one rock 'n' roller like that. So what am I gonna do?"[6]
Writing
Many of the songs on the album reflect a sense of contentment with family life. "Once an Angel" is a tribute to his wife, Pegi while "My Boy" is an ode to his son, Zeke. In a 2020 posting on his Archives website, Young describes "My Boy" as "probably the most soulful recording I have ever made." The outtake "Amber Jean" celebrates the birth of his newborn daughter. Another outtake, "Silver and Gold" also reflects his seeming satisfaction with family life, while "California Sunset" is dedicated to his adopted home.
"The Wayward Wind" is a cover of a 1955 Gogi Grant song that Young admired in his childhood in Ontario when was beginning to discover music. In a 1995 interview with Nick Kent for Mojo Magazine, Young remembers:
"When I was growing up, I remember guys like Frankie Laine. See, around the same time as Elvis, there was also Rawhide and all that cowboy stuff. I loved that stuff - I even covered one of his songs on the Old Ways album, "The Wayward Wind". It was one of his biggest hits up in Canada. See, I used to walk by a railroad track on my way to school everyday. There was even a real hobo's shack there. The song and the image have always stayed with me. When I hear it, I always think of being five or six walking past that old shack and the rail-road tracks gleaming in the sun and on my way to school everyday with my little transistor radio up to my ear. Another song from that period that I loved, and also ended up doing a version of with Crazy Horse and Jack Nitzsche on piano, that's going to end up on Archives. It's a country waltz called "It Might Have Been" recorded by Joe London. It was a big hit in Canada though it didn't mean anything in the States. Great record. Real, real soulful rendition. Unfortunately on my version, I screwed up almost all the words."[7]
He further explains in an interview for the biography for Shakey:
"Way out there. It’s just real simple. Straight ahead. I just have this one image that keeps coming to mind with that song—where I used to live in Pickering, there’s the Brock Road Public School. Just a two-room school and it’s still there. I’d walk there every day from our house, and that song was on the radio at that time. The railroad track used to go right behind the school, and the trains would go by, and there’s somethin’ about that song—I always think about that one area. There was a little shack back there, a toolshed or something...I see it when I hear "The Wayward Wind." I always remember that same stretch of road, the railroad tracks, the whole thing—every time I hear that song, it comes right back. That feeling when you’re young and open, you have all these ideas. Real wide view. I dug the song a lot. You can really get lost in it."[8]
"Misfits (Dakota)" offers surreal lyrics about space station astronauts and Muhammad Ali. Young explains in a 1985 interview with Adam Sweeting for the Melody Maker:
"There are a lot of science fiction overtones, time travel overtones, in Misfits at different places geographically, it could all have been happening at exactly the same time. All of the scenes in that song could have been happening simultaneously, and yet they're also separate. It's an interesting thing...I dunno, it only took me a few minutes to write it. I picked up my electric guitar one night in the studio, I was by myself and I turned it up real loud and started playing and, I wrote it just that night."[9]
"Bound for Glory" is a ballad that tells the tale of an affair between a long distance truck driver and a lone hitchhiker. Young recounts in a 1986 interview with Bill Flanagan: "I wrote that one on a little word processor in the back of my bus while I was rolling. I wrote it with a couple of beers and a little smoke. The bus was rolling down the road and I typed it out and I knew the melody in my head already. That's my favorite one on the Old Ways album."[10]
Recording
In Spring 1985, Young returned to the studio to record a country music album. During sessions at various Nashville studios, over a dozen new songs were recorded with both his longtime collaborators and local studio musicians as well as Waylon Jennings. The sessions featured many of the musicians from the earlier Harvest and Comes a Time albums. Additionally, Willie Nelson added vocals and guitar to the 1983 recording of "Are There Any More Real Cowboys?" at his Lake Travis recording studio, making the song into a duet. Outtakes from the 1985 sessions include "Amber Jean", "Beautiful Bluebird" and "Let Your Fingers Do the Walking", among others.
Promotion
"Are There Any More Real Cowboys" was released as a video with Young performing the song as a duet with Willie Nelson.[11]
The partnership with Willie Nelson and Young's delve into the country world would have a lasting impact on the artist's interest in the financial plight of small scale family farmers. Young, Nelson and John Mellencamp would found the Farm Aid organization, performing benefit concerts almost every year in the subsequent decades. Young made plans to release an EP to promote the Farm Aid cause, but the idea was rejected by Geffen Records.[12] Some of the songs from the project were eventually released on A Treasure.
