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Neil Young: Albums
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By 1975, Neil Young was the redneckiest hick in Alabama and Stephen Stills was a coke-snorting L.A. lounge jazz adulterer. What good did they think would arise from this collaboration? While Neil was in a pasture literally writing all of his lyrics on piles of hardened cow dung, Stephen was hanging out with Steely Dan, balling strippers in a rooftop jacuzzi and lighting joints with hundred dollar bills. The resultant album is so schizophrenic, you'll sure it was sexually brutalized dozens of times as a young 7". This isn't helped by the fact that it goes Neil song/Steve song/Neil song/Steve song like the producer was making them sit boy-girl in the studio or something (though I'm not denying there were likely hundreds of daisy chains taking place during the sessions).
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Neil Young is ... known to be anti-business, a fact made clear by his song, This Note's for You. This Note's For You was an album that railed against the commercialism of rock and roll and tours that were sponsored by big business. Clearly, Young doesn't realize that the consumer doesn't know if something is good unless big business tells them it is.
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Neil Young flips genres so often that his record company once sued him for failing to release "Neil Young music." He experimented with orchestral accompaniment in the '60s and techno in the '80s. But the folk-country-grunge rocker's latest project makes those early forays look like adolescent angst. The 58-year-old has transformed the songs on his latest album, Greendale, into an opera that plays in every medium but PowerPoint (so far): There's a CD and bonus DVD; a live concert tour, which boasts three stages filled with 30 lip-synching actors; a Web site that streams every song on the album; and finally, a movie opening in Los Angeles February 27. Taken together, they tell the Faulkneresque tale of a fictional rural California family, the Greens, who get caught up in a media frenzy. Given Young's penchant for simple statements, Greendale's scope may seem like overkill. But that might be just what it takes for an aging rocker to survive in the MP3 era.
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Neil Young turned 60 last year. It was not his easiest year. His father died, a man very dear to Young, the man who really started Young on his long musical career when he gave him an Arthur Godfrey ukulele when he was seven or so. To make a grievous year worse, Young was discovered to have a life threatening cerebral aneurysm and required two surgical procedures to correct it, operations that were sandwiched in between recording sessions for his newest album, "Prairie Wind." Nevertheless, he came back and, surrounded by his longtime favorite musician friends and others, gave a whale of a pair of concerts on August 18 and 19, 2005, at Nashville's fabled Ryman Auditorium, home to the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974. Jonathan Demme and a first rate camera crew shot the show, and this film is the result.
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August 22, 2007 (Burbank, CA) — The new album by Neil Young, Chrome Dreams II, will be released by Reprise Records on October 23rd. Speaking from a vacation retreat with his family, Young says it's "an album with a form based on some of my original recordings, with a large variety of songs, rather than one specific type of song." It comes at a creative peak for the artist, following the Greendale, Prairie Wind, and Living With War albums, and a summer 2006 tour by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young that concert audiences are still talking about. In many ways, Chrome Dreams II is the ultimate example of what Young does best: most of the songs were written recently and came quickly, and the "live" recording sessions in northern California were over before they were announced. The album includes all kinds of music, and taken together, offers a complete picture of where Neil Young is today.
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Maybe it was his 2005 aneurysm, or maybe it just happens when you're 62 and entering your fifth decade of recording, but Neil Young has been looking back a lot lately. He's released two archival concerts in the past year and now comes Chrome Dreams II, a sequel to an unreleased late-seventies album (some of whose tracks were later released). No surprise, then, that it sounds like vintage Neil -- a little bit country, a little bit rock 'n' roll, with a side of cranky Canadian soul. Unlike Young's recent rock opera Greendale or the protest album Living with War, this one doesn't tell a story or have a theme. As a result, it's less focused but more accessible. (You won't need the recent Greendale graphic novel to understand the lyrics.) Weirdly -- or perhaps not, considering the artist -- the longest tracks are the best.
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