„… I’m like a singer on the stage
With the golden lights
and liquid rage
Down from the mountains
to the sea
Cool running love
keeps cleansing me …“
I always loved this „ambient song“, la audio verite – the singer seems to be on the verge of falling apart, the words (nearly part of the air that surrounds them) seem to be in danger of getting burned or at least swallowed by the smoke moments after they left his mouth, it’s a seductive kind of loneliness (if there is such a thing). He added a few notes on a vibraphone, as unreal as his ghost organ that makes a short appearance in the middle of the song. Recorded solo and acoustic on a two-track cassette in front of a crackling campfire in his garden, Young enthused about WILL TO LOVE to the writer Bill Flanagan in 1990, „I was all alone in my house and I was high on a bunch of things. I was really out there and I wrote the whole thing and put it together. None of the verses are exactly the same length. They’re all a little different. I never sung it except for that one time.“ This isn’t strictly true. Young had attempted to rehearse the song for the Long May You Run album, but complained that he kept „forgetting what I was doing, losing it totally and getting all pissed off because it didn’t sound right.“ But, in that night at the campfire, everything was right, even the oblique lyrics, even the loneliness. (m.e. a. o.)