FILE- A sizable audience takes in Neil Young's 2023 performance evening at Hayden Homes Amphitheater in Bend.

Look up and down Central Oregon’s summer concert calendar and you’ll find musicians and bands who are out there doing what they’re supposed to do: Playing their songs. Playing their most popular songs. Playing the songs people want to hear. Playing the songs that will ensure people have a good time at their shows (and buy a ticket next time they’re in town).

And then there’s Neil Young, who brought his first tour in four years — a solo jaunt called the Coastal Tour — to Bend’s Hayden Homes Amphitheater Monday night.

Young, of course, has never been the kind of guy who does what he is supposed to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. He proved that again in Bend, playing nearly 90 minutes of lesser-known and long-ignored songs, with just a couple of his hits sprinkled into the set.

This was no surprise; Young announced his intentions when he announced the tour. But it was fascinating watching him bring the idea to life, with only a few guitars, pianos, harmonicas and an antique pipe organ at his fingertips. In this format, for example, a dense and crunchy rocker like “I’m the Ocean” — from Young’s 1995 album “Mirror Ball,” a collaboration with Pearl Jam — transformed into a rambling acoustic meditation on going against the flow for a half-century.

“People my age,” Young sang, clear and sharp into the cool evening air, “they don’t do the things I do.”

That was the first of four straight songs performed on acoustic guitar and harmonica (including one of my favorites, “Burned,” from his Buffalo Springfield days), and then Young started moving rather deliberately around the stage, playing mini-sets of songs on the different instruments. He sat at the pipe organ for “If You Got Love” and turned the peppy cast-off from his 1983 album “Trans” into a sort of foggy, lurching march, while two tracks from his 1994 album, “Sleeps With Angels” — “My Heart” and “A Dream That Can Last” — took on a particularly sweet and tender feel as Young imperfectly plunked them out on the piano. “Sleeps With Angels” also provided one of the night’s true rarities, a fuzzed-out electric guitar performance of “Prime of Life,” which he had barely played before this tour.

With Young dressed in work clothes and surrounded by a glowing fireplace and some plants, the show had the vibe of an evening hanging out in the home of an old friend, except in this case that friend is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most revered singer-songwriters. Young made sure to keep things informal, too, at one point saying, “I have a list,” as if to reassure us that there was a plan behind his meanderings. Several times, he stopped to thank the audience for its attention, and it responded with as much rapt silence as I can remember at the amphitheater.

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The Neil Young super-fans on hand no doubt enjoyed every rare sighting in the setlist, but there was also a noticeable stir in the audience when he turned to his electric guitar and wrangled out a sharp crack of feedback as he launched into old favorites like “Vampire Blues” (from 1974’s “On the Beach”), the iconic protest song “Ohio” and, to close the main set, his only No. 1 hit in the United States, “Heart of Gold” from 1972’s “Harvest.” The latter was really the only sing-along moment of the show, with no “Cinnamon Girl,” no “Rockin’ in the Free World,” no “Hey Hey, My My” on Young’s agenda for the evening.

As if to drive home the point, he came back out for an encore and played a new song — “Love Earth” from his 2022 album, “World Record” — and then, as at least four people around me shouted for “Old Man,” he instead covered “Four Strong Winds,” a 60-year-old folk classic written by Canadian songwriter Ian Tyson, who died late last year at the age of 89. Young did encore once more with a lovely version of “Comes A Time” but by then the message was clear: Neil Young was in town to do exactly what he was supposed to do: Be Neil Young.