Weekly Neil: Love In Mind
I got nothing to lose I can't get back again
“Love In Mind” is not a song a 28-year-old would write. Neil released it on the live album Time Fades Away in 1973, the year he turned 28, but the performance dates back two years prior. He would’ve been 25. The perspective he inhabits on the song seems like that of an even younger man. But then again, it’s important to remember that 25 is still pretty young.
“Love In Mind” is a diary entry sung over a piano. Neil has woken up thinking about a love so potent it seems to shine through a rainstorm and the lonely corridors one occupies before boarding an airplane. He knows the folly of such a feeling, how it’s let others down in the past, how love simply can’t be trusted. And he’s still all in.
He’s also feeling guilty. “Churches long preach sex is wrong,” he sings. “Jesus, where has nature gone?” In those lines, all the warm atmosphere he’s created with stripped-down arrangement and tender vocals briefly disappears. The airport terminal is robbed of its romanticism. The lonely traveler open up his trench coat. Standing before you now, just for a moment, is a horny dude unpacking his own religious neuroses. And then he surrenders, almost self-consciously: “What am I doing here?”
At his famed Massey Hall show in early 1971, Neil introduces the song by way of mentioning its geographic origin: Detroit. Or Chicago. “Maybe it was Detroit and Chicago,” he says. This context sheds light on that church vs. sex line, which is the fulcrum of the entire enterprise. How does a sleepy little song that sounds like the aural manifestation of a layover build up to a mini commentary on coital dogma?
I dunno, man. You ever just daydream while traveling? A lot of idle time. The mind wanders.
I used to rank “Love In Mind” in my Neil Top 10, but I almost had to disregard that pair of lines. Hard to do when it’s the climax of the entire song, the one the piano chords slowly build up to over the course of a few minutes. Nowadays I can’t in good conscience assign such a high value to the song — unless I focus on the warm love glow the rest of the song simply vibrates with. I have a friend who once claimed his favorite band was “pre-new millennium Weezer.” Same rules here. Top 10 Neil? “Love In Mind” without the climax.
(Of course it’s impossible and the song can’t exist without it. As The Tragically Hip’s Gord Downie sang, “We live to survive our paradoxes.”)
I like “Love In Mind” a lot because I used to do a lot of solo airplane travel. After the 2016 election, I partook in some self-care that included purchasing the seminal Neil records on vinyl and listening to them exclusively for a little while on wax and streaming. (He was still on Spotify then.) “Love In Mind” soundtracked many New York City subway journeys and quick jet trips from JFK to Buffalo at 6 a.m. I had just turned 26. I had love in mind, too.
The feelings I associate with this song from this time exist in amber. Every time I hear it, I’m back in a pre-dawn Uber en route to TSA or on the AirTrain passing the Aqueduct Racetrack with Neil’s voice to keep me warm until I’m back home.
A parting thought is that Neil sings the first verse twice, to bookend the performance, on that Massey Hall recording. But on the Time Fades Away version, captured just over a week later, he lets the final words be: “It kept me warm ‘til my plane touched the sky.” (He does this, too, on a show from mere days later, and one from a few weeks after that.)
What does that mean? Probably nothing. A final image of a 747 disappearing into the horizon. The other option was to end on a callback to earlier optimism: “I got nothing to lose I can’t get back again.” The attitude of a playboy? An enlightened pilgrim? An itinerant musical road dog scribbling lyrics on a notepad somewhere in the Midwest?
At 25 years old, Neil was all of the above.
“Love In Mind,” written by Neil Young, from Time Fades Away (1973)
Neil Young: vocals, piano