LYCOS RETRIEVER
Neil Young
built 622 days ago
Neil Young is one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters and performers. In a career that extends back to his mid-Sixties roots as a coffeehouse folkie in his native Canada, this principled and unpredictable maverick has pursued an often winding course across the rock and roll landscape. He’s been a cult hero, a chart-topping rock star, and all things in-between, remaining true to his restless muse all the while. At various times, Young has delved into folk, country, garage-rock and grunge. His biggest album, Harvest (1972) , apotheosized the laid-back singer/songwriter genre he helped invent. By contrast, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Young’s second-best seller, was a loud, brawling masterpiece whose title track, an homage to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, contained the oft-quoted line “Better to burn out than it is to rust.”
Source:
Neil Young is a gruff sentimentalist who has been making records like "Are You Passionate?" for more than 25 years. The centerpiece of the new record, the nearly nine-minute "Goin' Home," is a direct descendant of "Like a Hurricane" or "Cortez the Killer," a midtempo guitar workout that has been a Neil Young stock-in-trade since the beginning of his solo career. It's ... the only track on the album recorded entirely with his raucous, long-standing accompanists, Crazy Horse.
Source:
Neil Young has a pessimistic message: Music has lost its power to change the world. The 62-year-old singer brought his new movie, "CSNY Deja Vu," to the Berlin film festival Friday. The film was shot during the 2006 Freedom of Speech tour by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young, who directed the movie under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, wasn't making any big claims about its effects. MORE
Source:
Neil Young: Heart of Gold had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Its director and star were both in attendance in Park City, Utah. The film begins playing in more cities on Feb. 17.
Source:
Willie Nelson, Neil Young and John Mellencamp organized the first Farm Aid concert in 1985 to raise awareness about the loss of family farms and to raise funds to keep farm families on their land. Dave Matthews joined the Farm Aid Board of Directors in 2001. Farm Aid raises awareness about the critical role of family farms and has raised more than $29 million to build and strengthen family farm food production. Between 1985 and 2005, 80 percent of Farm Aid's total expenditures were spent on programs to benefit family farmers, exceeding charity watchdog standards. Through public education, program activities and grants, Farm Aid promotes food from family farms and sustainable agriculture, fights factory farms, advocates for fair farm prices and provides disaster assistance and credit counseling to farm families.
Source:
After Neil Young left the Californian folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in 1968, he slowly established himself as one of the most influential and idiosyncratic singer/songwriters of his generation. Young's body of work ranks second only to Bob Dylan in terms of depth, and he was able to sustain his critical reputation, as well as record sales, for a longer period of time than Dylan, partially because of his willfully perverse work ethic. From the beginning of his solo career in the late '60s until the late '90s, he never stopped writing, recording, and performing; his official catalog only represented a portion of his work, since he kept countless tapes of unreleased songs in his vaults. Just as importantly, Young continually explored new musical territory, from rockabilly and the blues to electronic music. But these stylistic exercises only gained depth when compared to his two primary styles: gentle folk and country-rock, and crushingly loud electric guitar rock, which he frequently recorded with the Californian garage band Crazy Horse. Throughout his career, Young alternated between these two extremes, and both proved equally influential; there were just as many singer/songwriters as there were grunge and country-rock bands claiming to be influenced by Neil Young.
Source: