neil young

Seeing kd lang -- "just a big boned gal from Canada" as she described herself to me an eon ago -- at the opening of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver singing a beautiful if slightly overlong Hallelujah reminded what an extraordinary talent she is. She effortlessly opened up her career from country music into big but soft-voiced...
> music/2905/kd-lang-recollection-nonesuch/

An album where an artist covers the material of others is hardly a new concept, but you can guess that Peter Gabriel -- the ever sensitive quality controller, with his first album in eight years -- brings something special to the table. Here he is on songs by those of his generation such as David Bowie (Heroes), Paul Simon (Boy in the...
> music/2896/peter-gabriel-scratch-my-back-emi/

Sometimes just getting to a gig can be a mission -- and I don't mean waiting for a cab to get you across town. My cab arrived exactly on time, it was the rest of it which was haywire. Just as the taxi pulled into the driveaway to take me to the airport so did the courier with my airline tickets and rock'n'roll itinerary for a sprint around...
> mybackpages/2775/the-gin-blossoms-memphis-in-the-meantime/

The quiet and often largely invisible power beside Gillian Welch, guitarist/singer-songwriter Rawlings here comes into the spotlight with a collection of folk-country and alt.folk-rock songs which would mostly not fit Welch's canon but here have an understated charm of their own. They still possess some of that old time quality which has...
> music/2785/dave-rawlings-machine-a-friend-of-a-friend-acony/

I have been to pretty, but pretty dull Cambria in California where the core of this group hail from and I can understand why they might want to take to the road. They did and seem to have spent a lot of time in Alaska where one of them is a fisherman and the other works as a baker in Larson Bay. Then they started touring and touring after...
> music/2711/port-obrien-threadbare-dew-process-isaac/

There seem an alarming number of women musicians written out of popular culture: Doris Troy, Minnie Ripperton, Laura Nyro, Judy Henske, Mireille Mathieu, folk-rocker Cindy Lee Berryhill . . . And who these days even cites Janis Joplin either as an influence, or simply as someone worthy of serious critical or popular attention? These...
> absoluteelsewhere/2603/judee-sill-1944-79-the-disappearing-crayon-angel/

J. Mascis is the Silent Bob of rock. Look at any of the few interviews on the internet and you can see large blocks of type (the question) followed by a paltry line or two (the closed answer which seldom allows for a follow-up). Mascis, once of Dinosaur Jr and now out on a solo career with the occasional band The Fog, is a man of...
> absoluteelsewhere/2585/j-mascis-interviewed-and-concert-review-2003-no-time-for-talking/

As a cruel ploy it was also kind of funny. When guitarist J. Mascis and bassist Lou Barlow in Dinosaur Jr got to the point that they couldn't even talk to each other, the end was inevitable. They'd had a good few years, but in 1989 Mascis told Barlow he was breaking up the band. The following day he reformed it -- without Barlow. Barlow...
> absoluteelsewhere/2586/lou-barlow-interviewed-2003-dinosaur-walking-again/

One of the mainmen in Elsewhere favourites Drive-By Truckers, Patterson Hood here weighs in with the second solo outing under his own name which stalks similar musical territory as the Truckers (alt.country, Stones-riffery, dark ballads) but takes an even more dense emotional turn in some places. Many of the songs here -- as he explains in...
> music/2502/patterson-hood-murdering-oscar-and-other-love-songs-shock/

For a while in the late Eighties/early Nineties alt.country was an exciting but difficult music to follow: no sooner had you tuned in to Uncle Tupelo than they split (Jay Farrar to found Son Volt, Jeff Tweedy and the rest to form Wilco); then Jay Bennett was out of Wilco and into a solo career (his death a few months ago was a bitter coda to...
> music/2485/son-volt-american-central-dust-rounder/

The remote community of Deer Lick Holler in the Appalachians isn't on the way to anywhere, so there aren't many outside influences. It's where musicologists go to study authentic hillbilly music -- and be fearful of the sound of Duelling Banjos. So it was a significant day when a stranger drove into the valley on crisp autumn afternoon a...
> absoluteelsewhere/2379/hayseed-dixie-the-hillbilly-humorists/

There is a difference between something being “much anticipated” and it being “long awaited”. Neil Young’s box set Archives Vol 1 (1962-73) is certainly much anticipated . . . But long awaited? I think most people gave up waiting many years ago: Young announced the series back in the mid Eighties. In...
> absoluteelsewhere/2466/neil-young-archives-vol-1-1963-1972-reviewed-here-we-are-in-the-years/

There is a difference between something being “much anticipated” and it being “long awaited”. Neil Young’s box set Archives Vol 1 (1962-73) is certainly much anticipated . . . But long awaited? I think most people gave up waiting many years ago: Young announced the series back in the mid Eighties. In...
> music/2467/neil-young-archives-volume-1-1963-1972-warners/

You don't have to get too far into this album -- maybe just a few chords in fact -- to click that this isn't the Conor Oberst (aka Bright Eyes) of previous releases, the guy who started by juggling electronica dabbles with folksiness, then moved into alt.folk and bent pop. This time out with a bunch of friends who share an affection for...
> music/2375/conor-oberst-and-the-mystic-valley-band-outer-south-un-spk/

This was either going to be brilliant, or . . .  First the background: here is the great soul-funk Hammond B3 organ player Booker T (he of Green Onions fame with the MGs, and that band behind dozens of Stax artists) teamed up with Southern rockers Drive-By Truckers who know this sound and style inside out. Oh, and Neil Young (who...
> music/2380/booker-t-potato-hole-anti/

The sometimes tetchy Neil Young has long lead his followers and record company on a merry dance: he has delivered some of the most exceptional albums in rock (Tonight's The Night, On the Beach which is an Essential Elswhere album, Arc-Weld, and Live Rust among them) -- but equally he has offered self-indulgent nonsense (the over-rated and...
> music/2312/neil-young-fork-in-the-road-cd-dvd-reprise/

By consensus the idealism of the 60s was dealt two fatal blows in late '69: the first in August when the victims of Charles Manson's murderous family started turning up in flash Hollywood homes; then at the Rolling Stones' free concert at Altamont in December when Hells Angels took control of the crowd by means of billiard cues and blades....
> essentialelsewhere/1887/neil-young-on-the-beach-1974/

Press conferences are a waste of time and no sensible journalist entertains them. Ask your best question and everyone else gets the great answer. And if you are a print journalist those lazy slime from television go to air that night with it and you can wait a day to see it in the paper. And then your mates think you copied it from...
> mybackpages/767/gladys-knight-talent-with-talons/

It's a little known fact, but Mick Jagger and I are real tight. And that's not just me saying that. The last time I saw Jagger -- whom I call Mick, of course -- he shook my hand and said, "Graham, we're real tight." Of course there's a back-story here. Let me put this in the greater context. It was November 88 and Mick was in town with...
> mybackpages/768/mick-jagger-and-me-passing-ships/

Nothing showy here, but I've spoken to Neil Young three times. And the man was boring and awkward every time. But that's just my opinion. I've never understood why musicians -- especially those with as many track miles as Neil Young -- bother with interviews if they don't want to talk. Why do they subject themselves, let alone anyone else...
> mybackpages/770/neil-young-out-to-lunch/

This album title partially reflects the thoughtful Browne's frame of mind in many tracks here: he's 60 and a greybeard so it isn't surprising he might be in reflective mode - as he is on the title track, where he looks back to when “there was change in the air, it was love everywhere” and sings of an innocent love of his youth on...
> music/1940/jackson-browne-time-the-conqueror-inside/

We can make this easy, a kind of tick-the-boxes thing: this LA band of indie.rock-cum-alt.folk people are signed to Neil Young's label (yes, they have a slice of his brittle and stuttering guitar solo-style), have performed alongside or been in bands with John Vanderslice and the Watson Twins (Elsewhere favourites), Sebadoh and Folk Implosion,...
> music/1769/everest-ghost-notes-vapor-elite/

With guitar playing that slips from Blue Cheer's fuzzy density to Television's ethereal astral flights, lyrics that typically defy interpretation, and some of Neil Young's intensity this is quite some statement by the former Pavement frontman who here takes his tight band through everything from driving and economic prog-rock to almost...
> music/1551/stephen-malkmus-and-jicks-real-emotional-trash-unspin/

This beautifully packaged 3-CD set (with explanatory booklet) is doubtless very useful as a teaching aid in American schools: it is a chronological collection from a Lakota dream song through colonial period and Civil War songs, to Depression Era laments for the parched land and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? then into the civil rights period...
> music/1520/various-song-of-america-split-rock-southbound/

The first phone call to Patti Smith at home in New York catches her weary and breathless. She's apologetic but disarmingly courteous. It's been quite a few years since I've been called "sir" and never, that I recall, by someone from rock'n'roll culture.   But it is also an inconvenient time to talk she says. She's been...
> absoluteelsewhere/462/patti-smith-interviewed-and-reviewed-on-the-road-again-1998-and-album-reviews-2004-2007/

By the time he came to releasing albums under his own name in the early 90s, Paul Weller had already had two separate careers: first in the Jam and then the Style Council. If the Jam had been quintessentially English and took its references from the Who, the Small Faces and Ray Davies as much as Mod culture and the rage of the punk years,...
> essentialelsewhere/798/paul-weller-wild-wood-1994/

Despite critical acclaim and mega-sales for two decades or so after the early 70s, Joni Mitchell was never a happy traveller in the music industry, and frequently denounced it. The most recent crunch for her came when she was told by a music exec that her 2002 album Travelogue (new arrangements of old songs which she did partly as a...
> music/1374/joni-mitchell-shine-universal/

In his 2006 book The Seventies -- excellent digressive but interlocked essays about the cultural and social movements of that volatile decade -- the London-based writer Howard Sounes namechecks singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell any number of times.As he should. Mitchell's albums helped define the Californian singer-songwriter movement which...
> essentialelsewhere/797/joni-mitchell-blue-1971/

Widely credited as the figurehead of the neo-folk movement (which owes more to early jazzy folk-rocking Donovan than Dylan in its encompassing vision and musical ambition), Texas-born Banhart has delivered a series of fascinating albums notable for their diversity. Drawing on traditional folk, world music and trippy psychedelic styles (and...
> music/1368/devendra-banhart-smokey-rolls-down-thunder-canyon-xl/

On a first hearing I thought this would have been the album that Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood might have made if Nancy had been more like Elizabeth Montgomery in Bewitched and Lee more like Karl Wallinger from World Party. Sort of pop but not, as it were. There is a dreamy and disconcerting quality to much of this pairing of Seattle's...
> music/1367/arthur-and-yu-in-camera-stomp/

In the days after Hurricane Katrina it was believed that this great New Orleans r'n'b singer had been washed away. Fortunately he had been rescued although his home, like much of that wonderful city, had suffered extreme damage. The interesting thing about the rumours of his death was the sudden recognition of his talent in the wider...
> music/1353/various-a-tribute-to-fats-domino-tipitinas-shock/

The life of 65-year old David Crosby is an open book. In fact, it is two open books.   In the late 80s Crosby wrote his autobiography Long Time Gone which, in compelling detail, outlined his career from a Greenwich Village folk singer to being a founding member of the Byrds, his friendships with the Beatles and Bob Dylan, being fired...
> absoluteelsewhere/383/david-crosby-and-stephen-stills-interviewed-2007-survivors-stories/

At the time, flying from London to Tokyo to interview the Cranberries seemed like a good idea. It was May '96 and they would be coming to New Zealand for a show shortly afterwards. My job -- at least in the mind of the record company and promoter who were footing the bill -- would be for me to interview the band, see the show, get excited, and...
> mybackpages/781/the-cranberries-even-the-faithful-departed/

With an embarrassing breathlessness, American rock writers greeted Living With War by 61-year-old Neil Young as if it was to be a turning point in the anti-Bush/anti-war campaign. All noted Young had knocked it off quickly in a fit of anger, but you have to wonder what took him so long to get round to considering the state of his (adopted)...
> music/2129/neil-young-living-with-war-warners/

It was bluesman Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown who taught me a valuable lesson very early on: it was possible to like a man's music and not like the man who made it. Billy Joel confirmed the opposite: I liked him very much but have never felt an ounce of emotion for his music. But first, let me tell you about a big bag of dope. When...
> mybackpages/764/clarence-gatemouth-brown-and-billy-joel-bad-cop-good-guy/

Neil Young's Greendale confirms "quirky" and "eccentric" aren't always endearing qualities, especially on a song-cycle about three generations of a family which ... blah-blah. With Crazy Horse he wades through the dreary narrative in the voices of the various characters (all sounding exactly like Neil Young) and piles on...
> music/2311/neil-young-greendale-reprise/