Raw

Pegi Young' s powerful new album, Raw, gets right to the point. Opening cut "Why" kicks off with Young' s impassioned alto, demanding, "Why'd you have to ruin my life? Why'd you have to be so mean?" Over the soulful Americana rock of her band the Survivors - led by legendary keyboardist/songwriter Spooner Oldham - Young taps into a surprisingly primal force. There' s a reason for that. Young wrote most of Raw in the wake of her 2014 separation and divorce from Neil Young, to whom she'd been married thirty-six years. Over the decades, the pair had raised a family, made music together, and worked to support northern California' s Bridge School for severely disabled children. Pegi founded the Bridge School in 1986 after being unable to find the right kind of care for their son, Ben, who has cerebral palsy. "[Raw] was very cathartic for me," Young says. "What happened was real, but I also look at this record as having a universal quality to it. I' m certainly not the only one to go through a late-in-life divorce, and I'm not going to be the last. But in my case, it was so painful because we'd shared so many years building a life, together, weathering it's ups and downs. Yet the songs- most co-written with guitarist Kelvin Holly and Oldham - aren' t all expressions of anger. The first track released from the album "Too Little Too Late," a raw and poetic psalm of regret, the truth-tellin' "Gave My Best toYou" and a rockin' update on "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" convey resilience and sass. A gorgeous, stripped-down version of Don Henley' s "The Heart of the Matter" explores the grace of forgiveness. As a whole, the album is a journey from shock, to rage, to sadness, to strength, but not necessarily in that order. Young sees Raw as the soundtrack to the seven stages of grief. "It' s not a linear process," she says. "You bounce back and forth. And each song could be sung by either party."