style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">The “Great Spirit”, as Neil Young calls his song-writing muse, has been a generous if unpredictable mistress. Thanks to her the Canadian rocker has amassed a body of work whose combination of the sublime and the erratic is rivalled only by Bob Dylan. But sometime in the last few years the Great Spirit has mysteriously disappeared. “It has been a long time since I’ve written a song,” he tells us in Waging Heavy Peace, “and the visits from the muse seem to be lessened by something.”