Monday, May 19, 2008

Neil Young 1: Neil Young

Having developed a taste for the studio while working with Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young threw himself into his first real solo album (as opposed to simply writing and producing his own songs for Springfield albums). Neil Young has a lot of elements that would reappear down the road, but mostly shows he hadn’t figured out his own sound yet. His voice, in particular, is hesitant, almost trying to croon.

The album opens with “The Emperor Of Wyoming”, a country instrumental with lush strings. “The Loner” has scarier strings, and introduces the distorto-compressed guitar sound that permeates the rest of the album. “If I Could Have Her Tonight” starts nicely, and is almost immediately blown out the door by the urgency of “I’ve Been Waiting For You”. To this day “The Old Laughing Lady” is hard to hear and slow as molasses, features female vocals and strings that make one want to sleep with the lights or the TV on.

Side two kicks off with another instrumental (“String Quartet From Whiskey Boot Hill”) that Neil didn’t even write, for a song he hadn’t finished. It somehow flows nicely into “Here We Are In The Years”, an early meditation on ecology undermined by his unsure vocal. “What Did You Do To My Life?” sounds a lot like the other songs on this album, and is followed by the superior “I’ve Loved Her So Long”. After all these short tunes, “The Last Trip To Tulsa” still gets points for being what it is: a solo acoustic performance with lyrics too weird to be considered surreal. At nine minutes it takes up a good chunk of time and the imagery doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s still kinda funny, and the extreme strumming keeps you from tuning out. And then it just ends.

Neil Young is not his worst album, but it would be far from his best. Even he knew it, and matters weren’t helped when the first pressings were subjected to an experimental mastering process that was intended to make it more easily compatible with both stereo and mono outputs, that still being a thing in those days. That gave him an excuse to remix it, but ultimately it’s not the sound that let him down. Yet for all its tentativity, the songs have endured, and he would continue to play them over the decades, honing them into arrangements more true to himself.

Neil Young Neil Young (1968)—3

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