Maybe it’s not a tune you even care about maybe you’re imagining you’re seeing a parade somewhere, and this is what the band is playing. You might be taking a walk with the dog or something, and you start whistling a tune. I came up with the melodies for eight or nine of these songs while going on walks. It’s not really relevant to the last record or the record before. One thing that many people have said about this record is that it sounds like it’s coming from another place or time. How do you purposefully cultivate that feeling in the studio? records-most early recording artists had just one three-minute shot in front of the microphone, and sometimes things got a little wild, a little free. It reminds me a little of listening to old 78-r.p.m. “World Record” has a looseness and a spontaneity that’s rare in new recordings. In a post on NYA Times-Contrarian, Young’s Web site, he wrote, of the sessions, “Real magic lasts and we think we have it.” This conversation has been condensed and edited. “World Record,” which was co-produced by Rick Rubin, was recorded live and mixed to analog tape. Perhaps “imperfection” is too judgmental a word the performances are real. There’s a visceral spontaneity to all of Young’s music, which has now become the hallmark of his work-a very deliberate, very human embrace of imperfection. He was simply in the right place to receive the songs. “A different melody with a different feeling must be coming from a different person,” Young said. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a drawing of a human heart on the front. ![]() “It seemed to me like each one came from a different spirit, as day after day I walked through the trees and the snow with my two dogs running around,” he told me recently, on a Zoom call from an office in Santa Monica. Young described the experience of writing it as almost supernatural: he was taking daily walks through the Rocky Mountains, where he spends time with his wife, the actress Darryl Hannah, and found himself whistling unknown melodies, which turned later into stories. Last week, Young released “World Record,” his forty-second studio LP, and an album focussed almost exclusively on how to combat climate change. It sounds like both a lament and a warning. ![]() My favorite version of the song was recorded live at Carnegie Hall, and features just Young’s voice and piano. On the title track of 1970’s “After the Gold Rush,” he dreams of a climate apocalypse, spaceships zooming across the Earth to gather and repurpose its bounty: “Look at Mother Nature on the run / In the nineteen-seventies,” he sings, his voice high and splintering. Young has spent most of the past fifty years arguing for environmental causes, even (or especially) when nobody was keen to listen. On occasion, he has veered toward tenderhearted folk rock, as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and on records such as “Harvest,” his fourth LP and the best-selling album of 1972. Since 1968, Neil Young-who was born in Toronto in 1945-has been making raucous, astringent guitar music, both as a solo artist and with his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |