Weekly Neil: Will To Love

I'm swimming in my sleep, I know I can't go back again

Do you know the band Big Thief? Not to get into a whole thing here, but I find their great success puzzling while at the same time remain in awe of certain songs. “Cattails,” that’s a good one. “Shark Smile,” a song that’s been hardwired into Spotify’s indie rock algorithm for years, is also pretty solid. I like “Not” as well. Big tune, that one.

Then there’s “Vampire Empire,” an El Scorcho-fied slice of horny self-reflection that, to me, sounds incredible in its studio recording released earlier this summer. (Some fans preferred the much more insufferable flute-led Colbert version from March. Not me.)

One reason why I like “Vampire Empire” is because it’s got a huge chorus where Adrianne Lenker confesses that she’s simply falling. In love. In over her head. In a spiral. She’s just falling.

Love is weird, obviously, and can make you do strange things. The Colbert version of “Vampire Empire” features Lenker singing a line wisely excised from the studio cut: “I’m a fish and she’s my gills.” It arrives after a string of rhymes — “You give me chills, I’ve had it with the drills, we are nothing with the pills, I am empty ‘til she fills, alive until she kills.” Presumably, love made her write the silly line that comes next. After all, if she’s the gills to your fish, then you can’t exist without her. It’s moony and sweeping if also a bit misguided and not exactly romantic.

Part of me wants to embrace the novelty of that line, but the rest of the song perfectly blends vulnerability and acknowledgement that sexual attraction is animalistic and primal without having to resort to fish analogies. It’s not needed. You might think I likewise have no patience for Neil doing the same thing, and doing it even more egregiously on the seven-minute “Will To Love” from 1977. Here’s a shocker: I love it.

“Will To Love” unspools a metaphor so fishy I have a hard time writing about the song without taking a less than serious tone. It’s arguably not even a serious song, though Neil’s exploring a universal concept in the lyrics. He’s got the will to love, but for various reasons, love eludes him. About a minute in, when Neil begins imagining himself as a fish in a stream dodging nets and harpoons and bears, a vocal effect makes his voice turn watery. It’s a bit on the nose, but since “Will To Love” is effectively a late-night home demo — not technically, but spiritually — it works.

The length of the song points to Neil’s overall message here, that he’ll never stop trying to find love and, crucially, to keep it. The life-and-death stakes he introduces via the fish metaphor clearly lay out how much value he places in that search. By the second verse, he’s beached. But he’s not giving up: “I’ll keep swimming ‘til I stop.” He’s got the will to love.

Neil brings in other analogies, too. He’s like a fire that shines too bright (comes on too strong). He’s like a singer caught in a spotlight — a theme he explores quite a bit in his ‘70s work — filled with liquid rage (drives people away despite beckoning them closer). And once again, he’s back to being a fish whose gills are cooled by love. But even as that love gives him life, it messes up his own vision and clarity of his surroundings.

Famously, Neil has never played “Will To Love” live. How could he? It’s a fever dream with a shape-shifting melody and instrumentation competing with an actual crackling fire in the background. “Sometimes I ramble on and on,” he sings, “and I repeat myself ‘til all my friends are gone, get lost in snow and drown in rain and never feel the same again.” It’s like “Desolation Row” with the surrealism replaced by a David Attenborough sojourn. Its inclusion on the recently (finally) released Chrome Dreams, alongside an alternate version of “Sedan Delivery,” reveals Neil likely never revisited it after he captured it on December 3, 1976 at his ranch and later added overdubs in Indigo, California. Even on its original album, the ‘77 grab bag American Stars ‘N Bars, “Will To Love” stands out as a curio. Alongside the likes of “Pocahontas” and “Star Of Bethlehem,” two fully realized and potent folk songs, “Will To Love” sounds like a broadcast beamed in from elsewhere in the cosmos.

That might be why I tend to reach for “Will To Love” as a means of soothing. When I worked in an office building in Lower Manhattan, I used to sneak up to a less crowded floor and work in an otherwise forgotten phone room. There, I could listen to songs like “Will To Love” in peace and actually, finally, for real this time finish that piece I’ve been trying to write all day. The crackling fireplace behind Neil’s voice made the moment cozy.

There’s another reason I seek out “Will To Love.” It makes me feel a specific way that I find hard to describe. Like I’m intruding on a private thought the songwriter is nonetheless beckoning me closer to examine. Wilco’s “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” is like that, too. When Jeff Tweedy announces he’s an American aquarium drinker who assassins down the avenue, I don’t really know what that means literally, but I get it. He’s hiding out in the big city blinking, you were so right when you said he’s been drinking, what was he thinking when he let you back in?

“Will To Love” and “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” have some cool musical similarities, too. Sounds move in and out of view without warning, creating an atmosphere around the actual framework of the song. Neil uses a vibraphone and an organ and a piano to wrap certain moods around what he sings about: childlike wonder, existential ennui, and so on. Michael Nelson, the former managing editor at Stereogum, once wrote about listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the Wilco album, and experiencing those two different elements — the song and the stuff around it — as, in fact, one and the same. (He picked it up from Sam Jones’ excellent Wilco documentary named after that song, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.) Here’s Michael:

Prior to seeing that, I assumed “the song” was a core thing, and “the sounds you hear when you listen to the song” were superficial or ephemeral things. After seeing that, I realized none of my beliefs were real. There was no distinction: There was one thing, and that one thing was made up of many things, and when I listened to it, my experience as a listener became part of the thing, too.

The Taoists call this perceptual paradox Taiji, which roughly translates as “supreme polarity” and is most commonly illustrated in the philosophical concept of yin and yang. A simple example of this is, like, when you see an object and its shadow. Your brain delineates these things as “an object” and “a shadow” — but they’re entirely interdependent and only exist like that in your perception in that exact moment.

He wrote this as a way to think about experiencing the band The War On Drugs, specifically their masterful 2017 album A Deeper Understanding (my personal favorite from them). You hear a chintzy drum machine and a gorgeously rendered keyboard and you think, how are these existing together? But they are, and they do. Neil is singing about swimming upstream and evading fishermen in the grand pursuit of love as eerie keys and a popping fire dance around him, competing for your attention. Objects and shadows.

“I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” is littered with buzzing, rattling, chiming noises, waving their hands in your face. (Wilco has covered the Neil-penned proto-prog folk-freakout Buffalo Springfield song “Broken Arrow”— they know what they’re doing.) But Tweedy still sings about his own darkness. The thing is many things. Here’s Michael again:

Everything else isn’t even everything else. It’s everything. That’s the song. That’s the thing I’m talking about.

Part of what turned me off to Big Thief’s “Vampire Empire” rendition was the addition of a flute throughout the song that sounded intrusive to me. I didn’t like that it took away from the melody and Lenker’s vocal performance. But that was me separating things that perhaps are meant to cleave together. Object and shadow. Not two things. Everything.

Neil, the fish, and Lenker, the gills, and a flute and a vibraphone and a microphone placed right next to a fireplace. Object and shadow. Yin and yang. Everything.

“Will To Love,” written by Neil Young, from American Stars ‘N Bars (1977)

Neil Young: vocals, guitars, organ, piano, vibraphone, drums