Coastal (2025)

Back in 2023, Neil Young did a solo tour on the West Coast. It was his first tour since COVID and I went to see it. At the end of the year, he released the album Before and After, which was strangely not positioned as a live album, despite the music from it coming from that tour (with crowd noise removed). Both the tour and the sibling album were beautiful to me. I'd encourage reading the reviews I linked to for a little background. Neil has been teasing a documentary film from the tour for a while now and it finally came to theaters in a limited showing. If you didn't get a chance to see it, there's a somewhat strange accompanying soundtrack album.

The film is directed by Daryl Hannah (Neil's wife) and filmed by her and Adam CK Vollick. They've chosen to present it in gorgeous black and white, which I think really works for the contemplative vibe of the film. So much of it is filmed on the road or at night and there's something about the monotone veneer that sells one aspect the film: touring is a bit lonely and grueling. I'm not able to calculate it, but I'd estimate half the film is Neil and his bus driver, Jerry Don, shooting the shit in the front seats. Jerry answers Neil's inquiry about Howard Hughes with more information than expected, relates adventures from his other driving gigs, and talks about how "Love Earth" is stuck in his head.

From this passenger seat (no seat belt...), Neil makes wry observations about music, cars, oil rigs, traffic. His dogs lounge around under the little dining table. Neil takes a leak once in awhile. It's hilarious mundane for the most part, even down to Neil's warmup routine in the back of the bus. Just the life of an aging singer-songwriter finding his way back into touring after COVID. You hear Hannah in the background talking to him as she films and she relates how people keep coming up to talk to her while she's filming. In one touching moment, Neil and Hannah reunite after being parted for a day/night and Neil immediately says how much he missed her.

As for the musical moments, they give a pretty good overview of the tour, including a lot of soundcheck footage, as well as Neil playing on the bus. Some of that music winds up on the soundtrack as instrumentals, which is a very curious choice. We rarely get instrumentals of Neil. I think I would have rather they picked complete performances for those songs on the soundtrack (would have been particularly happy to get a complete "Song X," for instance), but appreciate the variety. Neil's onstage banter is pretty familiar to me since I saw one of the shows (Berkeley gets a couple moments) and have heard a couple audience recordings. Overall, though, I wish Neil Young Archives had left up their pristine original recording of the first night of the tour. Having a full show from this tour would be nice.

One of the most beautiful and impressive performances in the film and soundtrack is Neil's dual-instrument take on "When I Hold You In My Arms" (from Are You Passionate?). Instead of just making it a piano or guitar song, he ably switches between instruments with musician Bob Rice keeping the beat on a second piano whenever Neil swings Old Black around for a solo. Strangely, this is a more poignant, more fragile version than the one on Before and After, which leads me to think that previous version was massaged a bit.

As the black and white film turns to color in an ode to Wizard of Oz, Neil plays Bob Dylan's "Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right" and gazes down the road to the next stop. It's a nice little ending. I'm looking forward to seeing this film again.