Comes a Time is Neil Young's gentlest record since After the Gold Rush….

At first listening, the simplicity of the music makes Comes a Time seem wimped-out. It's not. Usually, Neil Young is most compelling for his musical excess…. Comes a Time, though, stands on its songs, not on the sound; Young has substituted a lyrical chaos for the musical one. What keeps you listening is not so much what's here, but what's left out of the half-realized sentences and shifting imagery.

Comes a Time was originally called Human Highway—a much better title for an album so concerned with passages of life and the ties that bind. Young seems to be a traveller on some two-lane umbilical cord; one direction carries him back through the womb to the beginning of time "when fire filled the air"; the other leads him to the uncertainty of love and permanency...