Review: Neil Young brings his hits - and his worries - to the Hollywood Bowl

"The jeans. The flannel shirt. The silvery mutton chops peeking out from beneath a weather-beaten train engineer's cap. Neil Young had dressed perfectly for the part of Neil Young on Monday night at the Hollywood Bowl, and he'd brought just the right songs too, among them "Harvest Moon," "Ohio," "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)," both "Southern Man" and "Old Man," as well as "Cowgirl in the Sand," the last of which he punctuated by telling the audience that he'd first played the hillside amphitheater with Buffalo Springfield in 1966."

""I heard screaming and bullwhips cracking," he sang in "Southern Man," about the importance of remembering slavery's brutality; "Soldiers are gunning us down," he sang in "Ohio," about Americans under the rule of their own military."

"About halfway through the gig, Young sat down behind a piano and played "Long Walk Home," an elegiac ballad from the early '70s that he originally wrote about soldiers returning home from Vietnam before updating it in the late '80s to take in that decade's wars in the Middle East; here, he tweaked the song's lyrics again to wonder why we "broke our word" to Ukraine and asked, "America, where have we gone?""

Neil Young concluded a three-month Love Earth tour with a two-hour Hollywood Bowl performance that blended familiar hits and pointed commentary. He wore weathered, iconic attire and performed songs including "Harvest Moon," "Ohio," "Southern Man," "Old Man" and "Cowgirl in the Sand." Several songs foregrounded historical and contemporary injustices, from slavery's brutality to military violence. Young adapted "Long Walk Home" to reference veterans and later conflicts, altering lyrics to question broken promises to Ukraine and to ask where America has gone. The tour follows the summer release of the "Talkin to the Trees" LP.

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