Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Neil Young’s song “Comes a Time.” StoryWeb celebrates stories of all kinds: novels and short stories and films and memoirs, of course, but also poems and songs and visual art that tell stories. Neil Young’s song “Comes a Time” doesn’t tell a story – not by a long shot. There is no main character, no narrator, no plot, no action. But sometimes a work of art lives with us in such a way that it takes on the role of story. It becomes a part of our personal story. For many of us, songs play this role, becoming part of the narrative of our lives. “Comes a Time” is such a song for me. In fact, it is the song above all others that has become part of the soundtrack to my life. I listened to it often in college. It was on one of the cassette tapes my boyfriend kept in his silver Fiat 128. I listened to it at my friend Genia’s apartment, as she showed me how she was trying to teach herself to play Neil Young songs on her guitar. I listened to it one long day in Alaska, as my college boyfriend slep