Neil Young's career has never been in doubt; however, during the 1980s, the Canadian musician confused his fans with a series of experimental albums that seemed to stray from his musical philosophy.
During those years, Neil Young released albums in various genres, many of them far removed from his unique and original style, featuring strange experiments that included sounds as disparate as new wave, country, jazz, alarming forays into electronica, rockabilly, and rural folk, alternating them with clearly rock-oriented tracks. All of this baffled his vast legion of devoted fans and, incidentally, his record label, Geffen Records.
In 1989, Neil Young finally broke free from the tortuous chains of that label (in his own words) and signed with Reprise Records, releasing the album "Freedom", which marked the end of his most controversial and polarizing period.
In “Freedom”, Neil Young returns to his rawest and most visceral self, and together with Crazy Horse, he delivers an electric and vigorous album that would culminate in the superb “Ragged Glory” a year later.
As had already happened on the album “Rust Never Sleeps”, the acoustic version of a song is the same one that, in its electric version, serves as the album's epilogue, and it's the one that opens it. This song is none other than one of his greatest anthems, the powerful rock anthem “Rockin’ in the Free World”, but the rest of the album's repertoire is in no way inferior to it. There's the rhythmic and progressive folk of “Crime in the City”, the dense and lysergic “Don’t Cry”, the dusty ballad sung with Linda Ronstadt, “Hangin’ on a Limb”, the hypnotic “Eldorado”, the powerful “On Broadway”, and the atmospheric “No More”, another of its high points.
With "Freedom", the world of rock music recovered the best version of Neil Young and the album that all his fans were anxiously waiting for him to make, but seeing the most immediate precedents, they already doubted that he would ever do it again.
