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Watch Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s 17-Minute ‘Ramada Inn’ Video

Neil Young and Crazy Horse's 'Ramada Inn' video

Neil Young and Crazy Horse can’t be accused of mild-mannered conformity. The iconoclastic rockers’ first album of the year, Americana, reworked old folk standards as gnarled guitar workouts. Their second, Psychedelic Pill (one of SPIN’s 25 Fall 2012 Albums You Gotta Hear), is due out October 30 via Reprise, and it’s an eight-song double album, with three tracks clocking in over the 16-minute mark. The first video from the set chops one of those ramblers, “Walk Like a Giant,” down to a kaleidoscopic four minutes and change, but the video for wistful gnasher “Ramada Inn,” which arrived today via Pitchfork, shows no such restraint. Interspersing archival footage (of highways and lovers) with whirling psychedelic imagery, it’s 17 minutes poignantly and smolderingly spent. “She loves him so / She does what she has to,” Young coos one last time in the closing seconds, as the scenery shifts to what looks like the present. Sometimes it is better to fade away, and here Young is nonchalantly making the most of his time, and ours.