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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 Young's 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 Young's stirring acoustic concerts than the album represents. The hushed intimacy of Young's 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 man's constant immediacy, while the new material on Silver & Gold blurs all boundaries between past and present. Young doesn't fail to stoke our affection with his absent-minded strolls and sloppy prepping of his instruments, but his emotional concentration on standards such as "City of Brotherly Love," "Harvest Moon," and "Long May You Run" (played on pipe organ and sounding like the church hymn it was meant to be) is something to behold. --Tom Keogh
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