Gary Burden, the famous album cover artist – In an exclusive interview with Human Highway, the artist, art director, and designer talks about his journey along the Human Highway and his work for Neil Young.
Gary was winning a 2010 Grammy for the design of Neil Young’s Archives Volume 1 and is currently working on Archives Vol. 2
Neil Young moving forward with plans for “high-res” music service
December 21, 2012 – 16:04 AMT
PanARMENIAN.Net – Neil Young is moving forward with his plans for a “high-resolution” music service, filing two new trademarks for marketing slogans. In addition to his previous trademark applications, Young has now asked for the rights to two more phrases, 21st Century Digital and Pono Promise, both linked to the singer’s forthcoming Pono audio system, The Guardian reported.
According to the United States patent and trademark office (via Rolling Stone), Young has taken out eight different trademarks for Pono: Pono Promise, 21st Century Listening, Earth Storage, Thanks for Listening, Storage Shed, 21st Century Record Player, Ivanhoe and SQS. SQS stands for Studio Quality Sound, while Ivanhoe is the name of the singer’s holding company.
The two latest filings are already displayed as slogans on Young’s Pono website. The site explains that “pono” is “the Hawaiian word for righteous” and that the technology “lets you ‘feel the soul of the music'”. Young’s trademark applications specify that the terms can be used on audio paraphernalia, for everything from microphones to CDs to MP3 players.
Despite bold talk about Pono’s audio fidelity, details of Young’s project remain closely guarded. Though Young had been in discussions with Steve Jobs before the Apple CEO’s death, the singer has said he now plans to “force iTunes to be better”.
Whatever it turns out to be, Young hopes to launch Pono next summer, according to a recent tweet.
Neil Young’s Moonlit Sessions
Oct 1, 2012 9:00 AM, Mix, By Barbara Schultz
REUNION WITH CRAZY HORSE YIELDS TWO POWERFUL ALBUMS
Working with Neil Young can be a wild card, for sure, but it’s probably one of the most exciting gigs a studio engineer can have. John Hanlon has been producing, recording and mixing Young for about 17 years, and to say it never gets boring would be a gross understatement. It’s a thrill. It’s musical genius live on the floor. It’s awesome power on the fly, by the light of the full moon…
Hanlon’s relationship with Young started in 1983, when he and David Briggs, Young’s longtime producer, were working on Trans remixes. Hanlon joined Briggs again in 1990, engineering and mixing Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s magnificent Ragged Glory, and Young has been calling upon Hanlon’s talents ever since.
“When Neil calls me, it’s always out of the blue,” Hanlon says. “His manager, Elliot Roberts, and Neil will call together and say, ‘We need you yesterday.’ Then I just drop everything to go, because I’m working with a real artistic visionary.”
In August 2011, Hanlon got the call to head up from his home in Malibu to Young’s ranch in Northern California. “They told me we’d be working with Crazy Horse and Mark Humphreys,” Hanlon explains. “Mark is Neil’s monitor engineer onstage; he runs the P.A. in the studio. We record everything live, with no headphones. There’s some overdubbing later, but he always goes for the live performance feel. It’s always about the performance with him.”
Hanlon didn’t know in August that the sessions would result in two albums: a heavy, hard-rocking batch of folk songs called Americana, and Psychedelic Pill, a collection of new originals. Hanlon was simply told that the first order of business would be to install a studio that could serve as a working clubhouse for the musicians and a small crew.
“I was to build a studio in one of the houses on the ranch where David Briggs and Tim Mulligan had done American Stars ’n Bars with Neil back in the ’80s,” Hanlon says. “And he wanted to do it 8-track analog, which meant we’d also snapshot to Pro Tools, but he wanted an 8-track setup, in the building they call the ‘white house.’
“First I went up for some preliminary meetings with my assistant engineer, John Hausmann, to lay out the space and check out the acoustics. I purposely didn’t ask how they had set up the room for American Stars ’n Bars. I wanted to feel the vibe in the room without any preconceived notions of copying what they did. That was the 1980s; sounds and amplifiers, and where people’s heads were, would have affected the sound coming off of the instruments and from their souls at that time, anyway. Everything changes.
“\"Live Music is Better\" bumper stickers should be issued.” by -- Neil Young
Neil Young on Tour
Sugar Mountain setlists
Tom Hambleton provides BNB with setlists, thankfully. His website is the most comprehensive searchable archives on the Internets about anything Neil Young related setlists. Goto Sugar Mountain.
Check out an exclusive Interview with Gary Burden of R.Twerk & Co.
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