Re: Great news: Neil's back (Bruce mentioned)
- From: "Gumboman" <noemail@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 03:11:52 -0500
Great article - thanks.
JH
"Dave" <abuse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4lGdnT29MPrDApbeUSdV9g@xxxxxxxxxx
> Aug. 22, 2005, 3:11PM
>
>
>
> Neil Young ponders mortality in Nashville
>
>
>
> By JON PARELES
>
> New York Times News Service
>
>
>
> NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A lanky man in an antique-style pewter-gray suit and a
> gaucho hat stood onstage Thursday night at Ryman Auditorium, the hallowed
> country-music landmark that was the longtime home of the Grand Ole Opry.
> An
> old-fashioned painted backdrop was behind him; an old guitar was in his
> hands.
>
>
>
> The guitar, he told the audience, had belonged to Hank Williams, who was
> fired from the Grand Ole Opry in 1952. Neil Young, the man holding the
> guitar, said he was happy that Williams' guitar was returning to the Ryman
> stage. And then he sang This Old Guitar, a quietly touching song from his
> coming album, Prairie Wind, that observes, "This old guitar ain't mine to
> keep/ It's mine to play for a while."
>
>
>
> Thursday night Young began a two-night stand at the Ryman Auditorium that
> was a tangle of new and old, of remembrance and reinvention. With him were
> more than two dozen musicians: a band, backup singers (including his wife,
> Pegi), a horn section, a string section, the Fisk University Jubilee
> Singers
> and Emmylou Harris. They were assembled for what would be the only
> performances of all the songs on Prairie Wind (Reprise), due for release
> on
> Sept. 20.
>
>
>
> The musicians were costumed like old-time country performers, in suits and
> modest coordinated dresses, but they weren't playing old-time country
> music.
> A film crew directed by Jonathan Demme, who made the Talking Heads concert
> film Stop Making Sense as well as The Silence of the Lambs, was shooting
> for
> a documentary scheduled for a February release.
>
>
>
> A day before the concerts, Young took a break for an interview between
> rehearsals that had been running 12 hours a day. "We're doing 10 songs
> with
> 20, sometimes 30, musicians on them," he said. "I pick musicians who are
> in
> the moment, and when you get guys who are in the moment to try and
> re-create
> some other moment, that's a hell of a lot of work to do. They can't even
> remember what they played."
>
>
>
> Memory is central to both Prairie Wind and Young's other project, the
> long-postponed release of music from his archives that is to begin next
> year. "It's a long road behind me," he sings in The Painter, which opens
> the
> album. "It's a long road ahead."
>
>
>
> Prairie Wind is a collection of plain-spoken songs about family, faith,
> home, music, the passage of time and the wide-open Canadian landscape
> where
> Young grew up. Like the other albums he has recorded in Nashville -
> including the best-selling album of his career, Harvest, from 1972 - it
> looks toward American roots, and its 10 songs amble from country twang to
> bluesy harmonica to Memphis soul horns. There's a fond, loose-limbed
> honky-tonk tribute to Elvis and ballads that straightforwardly offer love
> and loyalty; the title song, particularly onstage, turned into an
> incantation as expansive as its chorus: "Prairie wind blowin' through my
> head."
>
>
>
> The lyrics are infused with feelings of mortality, and are full of
> benedictions and farewells. While making the album, Young, 59, was being
> treated for a brain aneurysm, a swelling in a blood vessel. He alternated
> recording sessions in Nashville with surgery and hospitalization in New
> York
> City.
>
>
>
> In March, Young had experienced blurred vision at the Rock and Roll Hall
> of
> Fame induction ceremony, where he performed with the Pretenders. "I saw a
> lot of doctors real fast," he said. The aneurysm was diagnosed, but he had
> already made plans to begin recording in Nashville, and he did a week of
> sessions - finishing the first three songs on the album - before returning
> to New York for surgery.
>
>
>
> "The recording studio is one of the few places where I feel completely at
> home," he said. "I felt like staying in there. I wanted to get whatever I
> had on my mind into music." He wrote quickly - sometimes completing a song
> in just 15 or 20 minutes - and placed the songs on the album in the order
> they were written and recorded, as he had with Greendale, the rock opera
> he
> released in 2003. The songs on Prairie Wind don't have a narrative, as
> Greendale did, but they continue to explore Young's fascination with the
> changes and continuity of generations.
>
>
>
> "When you're in your 20s, then you and your world are the biggest thing,
> and
> everything revolves around what you're doing," Young said. "Now I realize
> I'm a leaf floating along on the water on top of some river. That's where
> I'm at."
>
>
>
> The lyrics are filled with reminiscences. "It's about where I'm from and
> where our family's from and where the world is going," Young said, "and
> what
> it used to be like when my grandfather was a kid, and what they remember
> and
> what I remember them telling me about, the things that they saw that no
> one
> will ever see again."
>
>
>
> Like Bruce Springsteen's current album, Devils & Dust, Young's new album
> also ponders religion. The album's most striking song, No Wonder, is a
> series of elusive, overlapping narratives and contrasting musical
> sections,
> united by the recurring image of a church. And its final song, When God
> Made
> Me, sets a series of questions to a hymn-like melody: "Did He think there
> was only one way to be close to Him?" Perhaps by coincidence, the studio
> where Prairie Wind was made, Masterlink, was once a church and, during the
> Civil War, a Confederate morgue. (More recently it was Monument Studios,
> where Roy Orbison recorded throughout his career.) Ryman Auditorium itself
> was built in 1892 as a gospel tabernacle.
>
>
>
> "I feel like our religion and our faith have been hijacked," Young said.
> "What is bothering me the most is the misappropriation of religion and
> faith, the misuse of God and the house of worship. It's one faith with
> different people trying to express it in different ways. It's all about
> being the little guy in the big world."
>
>
>
> The core band on Prairie Wind is the same one Young used on Harvest Moon
> in
> 1992, and it includes his longtime collaborator, the slide and pedal steel
> guitarist Ben Keith (who was on Harvest) and the soul songwriter Spooner
> Oldham on keyboards. Young has returned to Nashville every so often to
> make
> his more reflective, down-home albums.
>
>
>
> Most of the concert's second half was drawn from those albums, with songs
> including Heart of Gold and Old Man from Harvest, a gorgeously poised
> version of Harvest Moon that included the sound of a man rhythmically
> pushing a broom, and the title song from the 1978 album Comes a Time.
>
>
>
> Young recorded Prairie Wind in an old-fashioned way: playing and singing
> live with the band in the studio, though strings and backing vocals were
> added later. "We really made a Nashville Renaissance recording," he said.
>
>
>
> But the songs rarely sound like other people's Nashville projects, past or
> present; their homespun tone conceals eccentricities small and large.
> Onstage at Ryman, musicians came and went in constantly shifting
> combinations. Even when the songs are slight, they're atmospheric.
>
>
>
> Young said he had decided to film the concerts for a simple reason: Demme
> asked him. "He called me up and said, 'I've got a year off, I'd like to do
> something, and are you doing anything?' I said, 'Well yeah, I just made
> this
> record called Prairie Wind. I'll send it to you, see what you think.'"
>
>
>
> "And then we just came around to the idea, Why don't we just use this
> music,
> which was recorded in Nashville in the old way, with real musicians coming
> in from everywhere, and putting them together live?"
>
>
>
> Meanwhile, Young had been working steadily on releasing digital versions
> of
> the music in archives that date back more than 40 years. The last time he
> was on the verge of releasing archival material, he changed his mind when
> improvements in technology promised higher fidelity and he started a new
> round of remastering. Young recently renewed his longtime contract with
> Reprise Records, which will release the first volume of his archives -
> covering 1963 to 1973 - as a set of eight DVDs or CDs.
>
>
>
> The DVDs, with high-resolution audio, also include visuals and
> annotations;
> for instance, with material recorded in the 1960s at the Riverboat
> Coffeehouse, Young reconstructed images of the club. "You can see
> everything
> but me," he said. "I'm like a ghost."
>
>
>
> The archive project has been as time-consuming as Prairie Wind was
> spontaneous. "When I do finally get it out there, it's going to be a great
> relief," Young said. "It's like a huge overcoat that I wear. It's got a
> lot
> of pockets in it. Some of them are full of diamonds. Some of them are just
> full of lead. It's a burden, but it's getting lighter."
>
>
>
> Going through the archive has let Young second-guess his memories. "There
> are some things in it that are just unbelievable, records that I don't
> know
> why I never released," he said. "I look at what I released during that
> period, and I go, 'Wow, what was I thinking?' But life is like that."
>
>
>
> For the concert's finale Thursday night, Young returned to the Harvest
> Moon
> album for One of These Days, a song about watching friends drift away. But
> with more than two dozen Nashville musicians surrounding him onstage, he
> didn't look lonely at all.
>
>
.
- References:
- Great news: Neil's back (Bruce mentioned)
- From: Donnieb78
- Re: Great news: Neil's back (Bruce mentioned)
- From: Dave
- Great news: Neil's back (Bruce mentioned)
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