Neil Young and Crazy Horse, “FU##IN’ UP.”

There’s a moment on FU##IN’ UP, the new live album from Neil Young and Crazy Horse, when a snarling squall of distorted guitars subsides momentarily, ringing out like the golden rays of a brilliant sunset. Young’s voice – tender, fragile and now slightly ragged with age – smolders like embers in the dying light.

“At night when the sky is clear and the moon is shining down/ My heart goes running back to you/ I love the way you open up and let me in/ So I go running back to you over and over again,” he sings.

The powerful juxtaposition of overdriven mayhem and placid love occurs at the outset of “Broken Circle,” the fourth song in a live set by Young and Crazy Horse recorded live in 2023; a sprawling nine-minute version of “Over and Over,” from the band’s 1990 album, Ragged Glory.

The first song on the new live album, a fuzzed-out barnstormer listed as “City Life,” is actually a rendition of the first song from Ragged Glory, “Country Home.” But FU##IN’ UP  isn’t a track-by-track live version of Ragged Glory as there are other songs from other albums, also renamed. “Farmer John” is a song originally done by Don Harris and Dewey Terry in 1959 (and was covered on… you guessed it: Ragged Glory. That album had a song called “F*!#in’ Up.” It’s confusing, but it injects an air of mystery into these songs, many of which have already made it into the American rock cannon. But the setlist isn’t the draw here, folks.

I know a lot about overdriven guitars. I am therefore more than qualified to speak to the album’s single most important quality: the guitar tone. Young, who’s backed on guitar by Willie Nelson’s son Micah Nelson and at times by the E. Street Band’s Nils Lofgren, is known as the ultimate tone hound. He spends hours with his guitar techs, switching guitars, fiddling with knobs and even swapping out tubes in his vintage amplifiers, so that when he launches into one of his signature solos, there’s air, fuel and fire sufficient for his guitar pyrotechnics.

The first thing about the album is that you have to turn it up very loud. If that’s a problem for you, I can recommend any number of easy listening selections to serve as the soundtrack for your slow loss of vibrancy. But on this album, the guitar tones positively bloom around the volume level sufficient to reach your neighbors several doors down. At that level, the music opens up and sparkles in ways you simply cannot hear at less than jet-engine volumes.

It’s that singular overdriven tone, when paired with the luminous rust and sadness in Young’s vocals, that conjures the musical magic that is Neil Young and Crazy Horse.

Brian Eno, one of rock and roll’s great philosophers, wrote, “The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”

Young’s overdriven guitar tone is the overloading of our lives with too many and too much of everything. Every stressor in our modern life, every grumble we carry from the past, every indignity we are forced to endure in the 21st century is present. And Young’s voice, delicate and patinaed with the sage wisdom of someone who has witnessed the best and worst of the human condition for longer than most people have been alive, resides in that sonic squalor to reassure us that it’s only rain and pain, and that storms always give way to new days, which are always beautiful and sad in equal measure for that very reason.

FU##IN’ UP is out on vinyl for Record Store Day, with the digital and CD versions out next week.