After Neil Young’s wife Pegi concluded her opening set, while the stage crew arranged a myriad of guitars in a circle in the middle of the Constitution Hall stage, a portly man in a bright red blazer and straw hat worked on a painting of a horse towards the back of the stage. Later on, he came back to paint the words “The Loner” in the top right corner, and placed it on an easel right up front to introduce the first song of Neil’s second set. He continued the trend with each following song, bringing a new painting up with the title of the song just before the band launched into it. Seemed a bit bizarre to many of us, I’m sure, but really it was just a good example of Young doing something that sounds pretty cool to him but that no one else really gets.

Of course, it’s well-documented that Neil’s hard to get a handle on. Hell, a simple look back at his most recent recorded work can tell you that, running the gamut from introspective country-folk to romantic R&B tunes to eco-political rock operas to the latest, Chrome Dreams II, a re-imagining of an album Neil initially started laying down 30 years ago. Any die-hard Neil fan has a couple stories about the tour when he welcomed his fans at every stop to “Miami Beach”, the night he refused to play any of his hits, or the night he did the aforementioned rock opera in its entirety – before the actual album had been released.

But last night, the only real surprise was that Neil – celebrating his 62nd birthday – was about as amiable and crowd-pleasing as Neil gets. He started off with an all-acoustic, hour-long set, seated, playing with that familiar bent-knee shake and cooing through his harmonica. Opener “From Hank to Hendrix” set the tone – nostalgic, pretty, plaintive — before he broke out “Ambulance Blues”, a meandering, wistful cut from On the Beach.