MUSIC: NEIL YOUNG, GIFTED AND BACK

Men resemble their cars. Or do cars resemble their men? Either--or both--might hold true of rocker Neil Young as he folds his lanky, cranky frame into the driver's seat of his rust-pocked 1958 Lincoln Continental convertible. The car's been through a lot, and so has Young. The graying, semi-reclusive singer-songwriter was a member of the countrified '60s rock group Buffalo Springfield; one-fourth of the vocal quartet Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; an anti-Nixon protester in the '70s; a sometime Reagan sympathizer in the '80s. Now in the '90s Young is a father figure for a new generation of alternative rockers. He turns the ignition key. The engine roars, tires spin and the Northern California roadhouse where his car was parked quickly fades in the rearview mirror. "Age," says the 49-year-old rocker, "makes no difference with music."

These days Young is running on a fresh, full tank of gas, and not just in his Lincoln. His new album, Mirror Ball (Reprise), is one of the most consistently rewarding works of his long, winding career. It features an extraordinary backup group, Pearl Jam, the youthful, populist, alternative-rock megaband. Even though Young is two decades older than any of the group's members, the pairing isn't some demographic gimmick--Sean Connery guest-starring on Friends. It is a natural coming together of rockers with a shared commitment and passion. "Actually, in many ways, I feel like Pearl Jam is older than me," says Young. "There's an ageless thing to the way they play." Their recording session in Seattle last winter was "all off the top of our heads. The goal was to record whatever was happening."

Judging from the thoughtful, involving songs on Mirror Ball, something good must have been happening. Most of the songs are burly rock 'n' roll, with operatic guitar solos and propulsive drumming. Thematically, the CD portrays a world too hurt to feel, too overloaded with information to think. On I'm the Ocean, Young, in his nasally tenor, sings "Need distraction/ Need romance and candlelight/ Need random violence/ Need Entertainment Tonight." Several songs appear to allude to the suicide of rock star Kurt Cobain. On Peace & Love, for example, Young performs a duet with Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder that deals with mourning and the morning after. "I saw the dream/ I saw the wake," Vedder sings, and later adds, "I had it all once/ I gave it back."

The line could just as easily have been sung by Young, who throughout his career has shown a willingness to cut things loose and make new starts. He was born in Toronto, where he was a folk singer in the early '60s before moving to the States. Although he came of age as a man and a musician during a chaotic era, he claims that times are tougher now: "It was a breeze in the '60s to grow up, compared to [the '90s]. The '60s were so open-ended. The dream was still there, the no-matter-what- you-could-make-it feeling. Kids today feel, 'No matter what, I'm probably not going to make it.'"