Are You Passionate?

If you found yourself swooning over the folky love songs on 2000’s Silver & Gold, you may fall even harder for 2002’s Are you Passionate?. The tunes here are just as memorable and amorous, but this time Neil landed the seminal Stax Records house band Booker T. & The MG’s as his backing ensemble, which accounts for the warm and familiar grooves that abound. Where Silver & Gold would well accompany a romantic walk in the California countryside, Are you Passionate? sounds meant for hot southern nights on a porch swing. Neil’s trusty Les Paul blends amazingly well with the legendary Memphis band on those classic soul rhythms — right out of the gate, the opening “You’re My Girl” plays as timeless as “Green Onions,” though the riff is a lax take on Otis Redding’s “I Can’t Turn You Loose.” The sludgy stomp that makes “Let’s Roll” was inspired by the last words of Todd Beamer — the passenger of Flight 93 who overtook the terrorists on 9/11. But this album has already aged far better than Neil’s more politically active tunes born shortly after the George W. Bush occupation of Iraq.