Weekly Neil: Walk With Me

I feel your faith in me

Bruce Springsteen famously likened the experience of hearing the snare drum that opens Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” to having somebody “kick open the door to your mind.” I’ve long felt the same about hearing Neil strum a distorted drop-D guitar. “Cinnamon Girl” awakens something deep within me. So does “Cortez The Killer” and “Fuckin’ Up” and of course “Ohio.” The sound means freedom and adventure as much as it provides comfort. I know that sound and I know how to make that sound.

I don’t play guitar much anymore, especially not electric guitar, but as a teen, there was something primal and immediate about the sound of a fuzzy down-tuned guitar in Neil’s hands. I couldn’t play like John Frusciante or John Mayer, the contemporary gods of the mid-2000s. But I could play like Neil. A $100 Squier and a Fender practice amp could emulate the spirit, if not the precise sound, of Neil’s guitar.

The opening strum of Le Noise, his 2010 album recorded with Québécois producer and friend of U2 Daniel Lanois, kicked open the door to my mind. It does every time I hear it.

The song “Walk With Me” begins with a single downstroke that Neil lets ring out for a few seconds. Then he starts strumming. “I feel your love,” he sings. “I feel your strong love.” There are echoes of his words lingering in different channels like camera flashbulbs after you close your eyes. Questions begin. How many guitars are on this track? Are those overdubs or some kind of advanced studio reverb? He sounds old and wisened but not cracked or straining. He was 64 years old when he laid down this track.

An artist well into his fifth decade of making music conducting one of his more experimental recordings doesn’t necessarily grab the youth right away. Yet at 20, I heard urgency. I felt that strong love.

“Walk With Me,” like the entire Le Noise album, is an experiment, if you want it to be. Neil and Lanois (Le Noise… get it?) worked together in Silver Lake, California and captured a specific and completely unique sound. Wikipedia has a terrific sentence that describes this, paraphrased from an interview Lanois gave to Sound On Sound:

A distinctive guitar sound was achieved by Young playing a Gretsch White Falcon with stereo pickups through two Fender Deluxe amplifiers, and treated with Eventide H3500 subharmonic generator.

I couldn’t possibly break this down for you (not a #gear guy) but I know that it means preparations were made to find a particular sound that both satisfied and inspired these guys during recording. And that’s exciting to hear as a listener, particularly if you were 20 years old and had loved Neil for years already and had considered him the master of both chunky but homey acoustic guitar playing (“Old Man”) and electric muck (“Down By The River”). “Walk With Me” was some real shit to behold.

I’m older now, and I can parse meaning from the sparse, declarative lyrics as well. Religious meaning, romantic and devotional meaning, and friendship — all foundational concepts that mean more to me now than they ever have. Neil mentions unconditional love, feeling both “a strength” and “your faith in me,” which conveys confidence in his role as a leader. But his words become more harried and desperate the longer we listen:

I’ll never let you down no matter what you do
If you just walk with me and let me walk with you
I’m on this journey, I don’t wanna walk alone.

And so he instructs: “Walk with me.”

By the end of the song, his potential motivation for putting out the ask is clear. “I lost some people I was traveling with,” Neil sings in a cloud of his own reverberating voice and guitar squall. “I missed a soul in the old friendship.” It makes me sad to think of his great collaborator David Crosby, who died in January. It also ties directly into “Hitchhiker,” another track on Le Noise, that Neil initially wrote and recorded in the mid-1970s. He’s a pilgrim, a searcher, and by the end of the updated version, an Aztec or Inca constructing beautiful monuments to meaning. At 64, he admits, “Now many years have come and gone like friends and enemies. I tried to leave my past behind but it’s catching up with me.”

“Walk With Me” is a gesture of Neil holding out a hand and seeing who comes to offer theirs in return. It doesn’t end with a 14-minute crunching guitar solo. Its simplicity, tied to its big open sound, lets it become another way into Neil’s work and therefore his life.

“Le Noise is one of my favorite albums because of its originality,” he wrote on the Archives in 2020. Nothing else sounds like it. But that sound, instead of being frightening and foreign, still invites me in.

The coolest part about that big open D is that it is not, in fact, the chord that begins “Walk With Me,” according to Lanois. “That chord is about halfway through the song when he really got a lot of power in his stride,” he says in a video interview on the Archives. “I decided to start the song halfway through and build it in such a way that it would leave me some room for an aftermath.”

“Why did we get into this to begin with as kids?” he continued. “We got into this because we love what somebody else did. We were driven by rock and roll because rock and roll promised a message.”

It’s cool to know the doors inside Neil and Lanois’ respective minds got kicked in, too.

“Walk With Me,” written by Neil Young, from Le Noise (2010)

Neil Young: electric guitar, vocals