Young finally releases album kept in a vault for 41 years
FORTY-ONE years ago in August, Neil Young rode a convertible Cadillac to a studio on the Pacific coast and over one full-moon night, recorded 10 songs reflecting on human cruelty and self-discovery.
Several of the tracks became the folk rock legend’s signature songs. Yet the album itself, remained in the vault, a source of fascination to Young’s fans but inaccessible in its original form.
Now, at age 71, Young ( right) has finally released But after more than four decades, the question emerges – why now?
Certainly, it is not for a lack of new material, with the ever-prolific Canadian-born artiste putting out six studio albums since 2012.
Or could – raw and lonesome, exploring the individual’s journey against adversity and injustice – be an album well-suited for 2017?
Young has revealed little on the timing of the release. But he said his business side back in 1976 had been unenthusiastic about seeing it not as a proper album but as a collection of demos for later recording.
And that’s what he did. The bestknown songs off – its first two tracks, Pocahontas and Powderfinger – came out in 1979 on Young’s album accompanied by his band Crazy Horse.
Recounting the session at Malibu’s since-closed Indigo Studio, Young said the versions that night were the “true originals”.
“I always knew the original album would find its place and surface. That time is now,” Young, reading handwritten notes, told the Colorado public radio station KOTO in a recent on-air appearance which he streamed on Facebook.
“A long time, a long wait – but worth it. This music is the essence of those times, pure and undisturbed, just as it was 40 years back.”
Powderfinger is especially striking in its original. A meditation on the use of violence, Young strips back the 1970s rock vibe of the better-known version, singing acoustic.
Pocahontas, while always an acoustic-driven song, also becomes more intimate on the album as Young relates a massacre of Native Americans and jumps to a modern America dotted by mammoth constructions such as Houston’s Astrodome.
Young performed solely on a Gibson guitar, harmonica and the studio’s piano. He was accompanied only by his longtime producer David Briggs, who mixed on the spot, and by a friend, Dean Stockwell, the actor later known for Married to the Mob.
You ready, Briggs? is the album’s opening line, the studio banter remaining for the historical record.
The references occasionally reflect the era. On Campaigner, Young quips: “Even Richard Nixon has got soul” – a line, one wonders, if the activist-singer would say about Donald Trump, even ironically.
Yet his solitude – and his incredulity on the direction of the world – ring contemporary.
On Human Highway, Young describes a journey into real life and he wonders aloud: “How could people get so unkind?” – AFP