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List Price: $18.98 | | Label: Reprise Records
Salesrank: 17042
Released: April 7, 2009 |
| Our Price: $5.15 |
| Used Price: $3.29 |
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| Media: Audio CD |
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Fork In The Road Track Listing:
1. When Worlds Collide
2. Fuel Line
3. Just Singing A Song
4. Johnny Magic
5. Cough Up The Bucks
6. Behind The Wheel
7. Off The Road
8. Hit The Road
9. Light A Candle
10. Fork In The Road
Editorial Review:
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Neil
Young is stirring things up again. This
time he is rolling on down the road not only with an auto-centric concept
album but with his own electric ride.
Fork In The Road, whose largely ecocar themed songs he debuted in
concert during the past year, will get a promotional push from the 1959
Lincoln Continental Young has
converted to hybrid technology and
which he plans to drive to Washington, D.C. With Fork In The Road as current as today's headlines, the controversial and mad-as-hell Neil Young is still rockin' the free world and once more is taking the road less traveled.
Fork In The Road Reviews:
Nothing Mind-Blowing, Nothing Too Hideous 
2009-12-14 - If you like Neil Young chances are you'll like this at least a little bit. It's your basic, standard, old-school rock n' roll. Totally predictable chord changes that just don't do it for me (and haven't for quite some time). This really does sound like it was bashed out in an afternoon. But an afternoon bashed out by these guys could put plenty of bands to shame.
Young has put out an astonishing amount of music (I could spend a lifetime listening to his latest box set) and he's still making great tunes. I just don't hear anything close to greatness here.
The first track, "When Worlds Collide," is a chugging slab of meat & potatoes. Neil cuts loose on guitar a little bit. If this song doesn't do it for you, I wouldn't recommend the rest of the album cuz I think it's the best track. "Just Singing a Song" (won't change the world) is another highlight, a bit lethargic but the music is interesting. And "Johnny Magic" is catchy. I enjoy listening to FORK IN THE ROAD although I rarely reach for it now. I wouldn't recommend this album to anyone just starting to get into Neil Young. Rating: caution
Neil goes off in a cloud of musical smog 
2009-12-08 - Neil Young has long ceased being the Neil that we would like him to be, the Neil of his 60s' albums and even of his enthusiastic genre explorations that were criticized then but sound great today. Somewhere about two thirds into his long and extraordinarily prolific career, it all began to unravel and has been a long slide down ever since, and yet until now, he has never produced a truly, thoroughly bad album. Well, with "Fork in the Road" he has finally achieved that.
Even at his sloppiest or most misguided, Neil Young has always shown signs of brilliance, or at the very least of true talent. Granted, he had begun borrowing more and more heavily from himself, his guitar solos that blew me away when I was a kid sounded suspiciously trivial once I actually learned to play the guitar, and after all the voyages in different directions he eventually ran out of new things to amaze us with. We know to expect a country Neil, a rockabilly Neil, a grunge Neil, and so on. But even the least inspired albums always had three or four gems on them, a sign that here was an artist whose muse had not left him. He was always an absolute master of the melody and the melodic riff or chorus, and he managed to use that even in places where you'd least expect it, such as "Mirror Ball." And there was always that electric energy, the feeling that old Neil was having a whale of a time, even if we weren't necessarily amused.
Not so with "Fork in the Road." No memorable melody, no energy, no nothing. Assuming that this one falls somewhere in his industrial/grunge catalog, it is fitting only in the sense that everything sounds like tar-logged machinery going nowhere. We plod through the songs that evoke no imagery and leave no trace in the mind. In spite of titles such as "Just Singing a Song" and "Johnny Magic," everything sounds about the same, even the two ballads. And while once he could get away with doing the same song over and over because the song was excellent, he's got nothing here that would support that. "Cough Up the Bucks" is a prime example of ugly monotony. There is no hook to sing to, it's mostly a flat, two-chord exercise, the choruses try but are too poorly conceived, the playing is amateurish, Neil's voice is going the way of all things (and, faithful to his allegiance to spontaneity, he lets all the cracks and squawks be--that concept, too, has pretty much worn out its welcome), and the lyrics are embarrassing.
The irony is that Neil is trying to fire us up, but seems to have no fire left in him. He has very often espoused topical themes, sometimes through bizarre lyrics that confused us as to where exactly he stood on an issue, but it was always good, effective involvement on his part. I, for one, liked "Living with War" very much, and still listen to it with pleasure. He had churned that one out in a day, raw as you please, yet everything worked, and the typically simple, not to say simplistic, Neil lyrics were spot on. All of that, the rawness and the lyrical simplicity, bog him down on "Fork," into some ideological morass he can't get out of. I applaud the efforts to get rid of gas guzzlers, but if we had to lobby with Neil's words, we'd die from cringing before we ever reached DC. Perhaps if he delivered wisdoms such as "It's all about my car, it's all about my girl," with the bounce of a teen singing a surfer tune, we could smile and remember cruising on a summer's day. But in the context, sung with cranky gravity, this epiphany makes you pause and think, "wha?..."
For the past decade, Neil has been including one song per album that speaks about his spiritual thoughts and feelings. It's generally a soft ballad sung in the touching way of a wide-eyed child, and while the sentiment doesn't move me, the song usually does--how could it not? Neil has perfected the intimate, soulful ballad over forty years! But "Light a Candle" is pedestrian, and will appeal only to the true believers. The album is a misery, and whether Neil comes back with something better or not, he is as of now officially irrelevant. Any pearls that come from him will be exceptions, not the rule.
Save your money
2009-05-20 - This is without a doubt one of Neil's most embarrassing efforts, ranking even lower than "Living With War" and "Landing On Water." Although I am a die-hard Neil fan and I buy everything he puts out, this "work" is nearly unlistenable especially when he has so much other fabulous music. Buy this one only if you insist on having a complete Neil Young collection. I promise you will only listen to it once.
Free World Rockin' 
2009-05-10 - Very "transportation" oriented. Still; rockin' good music, strangely enough, especially if you are listening in a car.
Neil at his best
2009-05-06 - As a lifelong Neil Young fan (since 1980), I always wait in trepidation for a new album. Sometimes they are great and sometimes they are rubbish. Thankfully this time, it is great. Unlike the previous album Chrome Dreams II (which was awful) this has 10 songs which all stand up individually with decent melodies, lyrics and guitar rifts. Sometimes you cant tell one NY song from an other (Greendale). The sound is very much like Cortez or Like a hurricane, that sort of electric sound your familiar with. The only acoustic song is Light a candle which is great little song. My personal favourites are Just singing a song, fork in the road and light a candle. This is definitley his best album for me since Freedom 20 years ago. Praire wind and Harvest moon weren't too bad either. If your a real Neil Young fan you will really like this album, if your a casual Neil Young fan you may also like it
