For an artist who once proclaimed (mid-career) that it’s “better to burn out/ than to fade away,” Neil Young has now successfully thrived as a singer-songwriter in five consecutive decades. Who else can boast such longevity? Never one to boast, he has cause: of McCartney, Wilson, Robertson, Mitchell, Diamond, Dylan (or even your own favorite), none matches Young in terms of consistent quality output. Last August, having recently buried his father and harboring a potentially fatal aneurism in his brain, Young stepped onto the legendary Ryman Auditorium stage for a two-night debut of the songs constituting his latest collection since the 2002 film/music project Greendale, 2005′s Prairie Wind. Sensing history, veteran filmmaker Jonathan Demme was on-hand to capture the evenings for a feature documentary — had Young not survived the surgery that would ultimately alleviate his condition, these might have been the last songs he shared publicly. Now in February 2006, Young is still with us.

Despite all the foreboding personal baggage behind Young’s wily visage, the performance is rich, worthwhile, and life-affirming. The lighting and “set” design are sentimentally warm, glowing variations on the wheat-hued horizons backdropping the songs of Prairie Wind. Buoyed perhaps by the presence of friends and family on stage (Stray Gators Ben Keith and Spooner Oldham, for example, or wife Peggi Young), Young and his songs betray not one shred of bitterness at the foot of life’s twilight. In a revealing bit of banter, after mentioning his daughter’s recent 21st birthday, he jests at how he once wrote love songs for girls her age. Never indulging beyond a few sentences between songs, he nonetheless makes genuine recognition of the memories behind his new material (his Canadian hometown, his father, his influences), most notably a song written ostensibly for the very acoustic guitar slung from his shoulder in the film — former owner: one Hank Williams, Sr. A poster of country music’s progenitor grinning mug shows up in the film’s introductory shots, and Young’s outfit (in addition to his guitar and the stage he commands) is worn in homage to Nashville’s great forefather.

Demme having already crafted perhaps the quintessential rock movie (Stop Making Sense, with the Talking Heads), does not make any bold directorial moves, and wisely lets the performance stand for itself. While the aesthetic of Byrne et al. circa 1985 certainly involved high-concept, postmodern smoke and mirrors; a Neil Young show in 2005 brings an entirely different agenda. The presentation of concert is straightforward, unpretentious, even obvious — fitting the feel new tunes like “The Painter”, “When God Made Me”, and the album’s title track.

So, if the set opens with over forty-five minutes of music from Prairie Wind only, why title the film Neil Young: Heart of Gold? Considering that, to many diehard fans, Young’s greatest hit (and Harvest, the biggest selling album whence it came) is considered an over-played and merely mediocre number, why not just call the film Prairie Wind? The answer is also the reason why the film merits being released as a feature and not just as a DVD component to a limited edition release of the album: performing in Nashville, where he cut Harvest, with the musicians who helped craft some of his most enduring songs, where the greats of American music soared and fell, Young completes a circuit of work capturing the effect of time on human perspective he began when he first composed “Old Man”. When the lights come back up on the stage nearly an hour in, and the chords of that song ring from Williams’s guitar, the moment is soulful, shattering, human to the core. Here is Neil Young singing to himself from 1970 in 2006, simultaneously the young hippie and the hexagenarian spook, as if he had planned it from the start. He closes the concert with oldies: “The Needle and the Damage Done”, “Harvest Moon”, “Heart of Gold”, and an incandescent rendition of the aforementioned “Old Man”.

Although he already revisited Harvest in the 90s with the critically favored Harvest Moon, this re-revisiting of the country-rock sound and country-rock personnel (minus Taylor and Rondstadt but plus the ageless Emmylou Harris) that gave him his one big commercial success debunks the idea that swan songs need always be swan songs. With two under his belt, we anticipate what this visionary will see as he moseys toward seventy, and how he will turn those visions into music fashioned from the bottom of his golden heart.