It’s not really relevant to the last record or the record before. One thing that many people have said about this record is that it sounds like it’s coming from another place or time. How do you purposefully cultivate that feeling in the studio? records-most early recording artists had just one three-minute shot in front of the microphone, and sometimes things got a little wild, a little free. It reminds me a little of listening to old 78-r.p.m. “World Record” has a looseness and a spontaneity that’s rare in new recordings. In a post on NYA Times-Contrarian, Young’s Web site, he wrote, of the sessions, “Real magic lasts and we think we have it.” This conversation has been condensed and edited. “World Record,” which was co-produced by Rick Rubin, was recorded live and mixed to analog tape. Perhaps “imperfection” is too judgmental a word the performances are real. There’s a visceral spontaneity to all of Young’s music, which has now become the hallmark of his work-a very deliberate, very human embrace of imperfection. He was simply in the right place to receive the songs. “A different melody with a different feeling must be coming from a different person,” Young said. He was wearing a black T-shirt with a drawing of a human heart on the front. “It seemed to me like each one came from a different spirit, as day after day I walked through the trees and the snow with my two dogs running around,” he told me recently, on a Zoom call from an office in Santa Monica. Young described the experience of writing it as almost supernatural: he was taking daily walks through the Rocky Mountains, where he spends time with his wife, the actress Darryl Hannah, and found himself whistling unknown melodies, which turned later into stories. Last week, Young released “World Record,” his forty-second studio LP, and an album focussed almost exclusively on how to combat climate change. It sounds like both a lament and a warning. My favorite version of the song was recorded live at Carnegie Hall, and features just Young’s voice and piano. On the title track of 1970’s “After the Gold Rush,” he dreams of a climate apocalypse, spaceships zooming across the Earth to gather and repurpose its bounty: “Look at Mother Nature on the run / In the nineteen-seventies,” he sings, his voice high and splintering. Young has spent most of the past fifty years arguing for environmental causes, even (or especially) when nobody was keen to listen. On occasion, he has veered toward tenderhearted folk rock, as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and on records such as “Harvest,” his fourth LP and the best-selling album of 1972. The Cellar Door recordings find the audience so reverent and rapt that staffers at the club obviously had no problems enforcing its famous "No talking!" rule during his stay.Since 1968, Neil Young-who was born in Toronto in 1945-has been making raucous, astringent guitar music, both as a solo artist and with his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse. Alone on stage and switching between acoustic guitar and grand piano, the young Young's folk-rock brilliance shines throughout a 45-minute set of faithful-to-the-original-recording renditions of many of his classics, including "Tell Me Why," "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," "After the Gold Rush," and "Old Man." The then-25-year-old also played unplugged versions of "Cinnamon Girl" and "Down By the River," as he makes the latter easily the most beautiful song about a psycho's gun-murder of a girlfriend ever put to wax. ![]() ![]() ¶ On Tuesday the rock legend releases the latest in his archival concert series, " Live at the Cellar Door." The recordings are drawn from a six-show solo stand at the Georgetown nightclub in late November and early December of 1970. Devotees of the Everything Used to Be Better school will love Neil Young's sorta-new record.
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