MAKING HAY
NEIL YOUNG’s been busy. Making a new life with Daryl Hannah, a new album with CRAZY HORSE, and building an actual barn to record it in. Meanwhile, the pandemic has enabled a slew of projects – a sci-fi novel, Archives II, III and IV, the legendary Toast LP – and bought time to mourn Elliot Roberts, fight for the planet and ponder CSNY. “There’s been a lot of new beginnings,” he tells SYLVIE SIMMONS.
NEIL YOUNG IS AT THE OTHER end of a Zoom call. Neil can see MOJO, MOJO can’t see him, which is just the way he likes it. At MOJO’s request he hits the camera button and for a moment or two there he is, smiling and waving from a dark, unlit room that might well be a kitchen, before disappearing. If this is the rustic house in Colorado Young shares with his actress wife, Daryl Hannah, or their latest home, a wooden house by the lake near Omemee, Canada, where he spent his childhood, he’s not saying.It’s early in the morning, the sun’s not up yet, nor is anyone in the house besides Neil, though soon we’re joined by what sounds like a team of workmen, hammering away. Neil Young likes building things. Always has. There were those hybrid cars of his – classic American clunkers half the length of a street, that he’d convert into eco-friendly bio-fuel, then electric, cars. And there were all those adventures in finding the best new audio systems for playing old music. And there’s barns. Neil has always loved barns.
This isn’t your first barn. Why do you like barns so much?
What’s so beautiful about this barn is that it’s made out of logs, so all the surfaces are curved. Which means the sound is much more mellow and not so overbearing, with different frequencies slapping back against each other. The roundness gives everything a chance to reflect.
Some of these songs are reflective in another sense. They’re acoustic, nuanced, where we’ve come to associate Horse albums as monolithic sound and epic burnouts.
What happened with Barn is we had a lot of different kinds of songs. I started to write them about a year ago and I finished them right as we were doing the record, and some are like After The Goldrush songs. Acoustic songs as well as electric songs. But there’s really nothing that that band can’t do. So we were just exploring, you know? Moving through life, playing our music. We’re lucky to be still doing this after 50 years.
His latest barn is pictured on the front sleeve of his new album, Barn. A wooden structure the size of a large church, set in a vast, empty, Rocky Mountain landscape at sunset. It dwarfs the four men posing outside the front door: Young, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina and Nils Lofgren. Yep, Crazy Horse – the version of the band that played on Young’s last album, Colorado (2019), ie. minus longtime rhythm guitarist Poncho Sampedro, plus longtime multi-instrumentalist Lofgren – is back again. Highly unusual. Since 1969 and his first album with them, Everybody
Knows This Is Nowhere, it has been rare to have two Crazy Horse LPs in a row. Why the change?
“Well there’s really no reason”, says Young, other than that “the circumstance in the world was just so different.” The pandemic, he means. The lockdown and then the move from Colorado to Canada.
“I didn’t make any records for a year and a half,” he adds. “During a long period of time we didn’t do anything, except for those fireside sessions that Daryl and I did [films of Young playing guitar and piano in and around the house] and put on the internet.”
Young wrote most of Barn’s songs in Canada. And when he felt ready to record them, the songs suggested to him that he should record them live in a barn. “That idea of recording live in a barn,” he says, “is just a pure Crazy Horse idea.”
Relationships half a century long don’t come along very often.
No they don’t and we’re very fortunate. Even though Poncho is not with us, he was with us for 45, 46 years. He basically retired. He’s got a really nice place over in Hawaii and he spends a lot of time in the water. He’s very happy and healthy. But the rest of us just wanted to keep on going.
And then we got Nils back and it’s just great. We’re very happy.
Does Nils make for a new chemistry?
Nils is a great musician and he’s always been a member of the band from the very beginning, and even though he wasn’t right with us all the time he’s always been part of the band. So it’s just like having him home again and it feels great. He’s very, very versatile, and he plays a lot of other instruments, so it’s a different sound. His accordion playing was amazing – I’ve always loved his accordion – and his singing is great, so is his spirit, and the way he whistles. All of our jams are really good; Nils is really listening. He has a different sensibility. It’s all about the people and their playing and how they feel. We feel the atmosphere where we are and the songs reflect that.
This barn is in Colorado and off the grid?
Yes. We used generators.