‘Home Before Dark’: Neil Diamond Lets Loose With Rick Rubin

After the success of 12 Songs, Neil Diamond’s first collaboration with producer Rick Rubin, a follow up was clearly in order. Released two-and-a-half years later, Home Before Dark is in some ways a classic-model sequel: Rubin is back with some of the same studio crew, and it’s once again a stripped-down production with Diamond’s voice and guitar right upfront. And once again, Diamond did every bit of the songwriting on the album’s standard edition. But it’s also a very different, more ambitious album. The songs are longer (five tracks top six minutes), deeper, and more varied. If 12 Songs reminded folks that Neil Diamond was a world-class songwriter, Home Before Dark found him fully turned loose.

There are moments where Home Before Dark sounds like it could be Neil Diamond’s final album: The very first line is “If I don’t see you again, it’s been a hell of a ride,” and the closing title track feels like a grand wrapping-up statement. But that’s all countered by the warmth and optimism of the tracks in between. Home Before Dark is no farewell: To quote an earlier Diamond hit, it’s more a “hello again.”

Listen to the digital deluxe edition of Neil Diamond’s Home Before Dark now.

That opening track, “If I Don’t See You Again,” shows how high he’s reaching: It wraps all the details of a longtime love affair into an epic seven minutes, building drama through its alternation of two different melodies. The couple in this song apparently manages to stick together – unlike the one in “Another Day That Time Forgot,” a duet with Natalie Maines, which ranks with his more heartbreaking ballads. “Another Bite of the Apple” concerns a different kind of love affair: His lifelong one with New York City. And “Whose Hands Are These” mixes earthly and divine love: It purposely leaves you guessing whether the healing hands he mentions are those of God or a flesh and blood lover.

Though there are no drums anywhere on the album, there’s still a healthy amount of rock and roll. Rubin was a fan of Diamond’s early Bang label singles, and this album’s “Forgotten” and “No Words” both revive the sound and the swagger of that era. On “Forgotten” a hard-strummed acoustic guitar stands in for percussion and on “Don’t Go There” – a sly warning about choosing the wrong partner – the big guitar solo is sung, not played. The most playful touch of all is on “Slow It Down” which opens with Diamond rapping.

Home Before Dark was a milestone for Neil Diamond: It was officially the first Number One album of his career. According to Billboard, none of his previous Top Ten albums had reached the top slot. It made Diamond, at age 67, the oldest artist ever to have a Number One album, and served as yet another reminder that Diamond’s type of songwriting never goes out of style.

Listen to the digital deluxe edition of Neil Diamond’s Home Before Dark now.