Written by bnbrainer on 09 June 2012
Neil Young: Depth, darkness and despair in new album
For over four decades Neil Young has been one of the great stalwarts of modern music.
He’s an artist who is as likely to confound as delight his fans, switching regularly between delicate acoustic ballads and noisy electric rock.
For his latest album Americana – on which he reunites with his old band Crazy Horse – he has tackled old American folk songs.
In a rare interview with Front Row presenter John Wilson, Neil Young discussed the dark and violent themes behind his latest work.
The full interview can be heard in a special edition of Front Row on BBC Radio 4 at 7.15pm on Friday 8 June.
Go to for a 4:31 minute audio of the interview on BBC.
Tags: Americana
Posted in Interviews, News / Article | Comments Off on Front Row on BBC Radio – Neil takes the dark side of Americana
Written by bnbrainer on 09 June 2012
Tahoe date confirmed.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse confirm Tahoe date
Neil Young and Crazy Horse will perform Aug. 9 as part of the 2012 Lake Tahoe Summer Concert Series, it was announced today.
Young, formerly a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and a solo performer in his own right for the better part of five decades, will perform at 8 p.m. at Harveys Outdoor Arena on the south shore of Lake Tahoe.
This will mark the first time since 2004 Young has toured with Crazy Horse, which also consists of Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot.
The band is known for hits such as “Down By The River,” “Powderfinger,” “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cortez the Killer” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” The band’s latest album is titled “Americana.”
Tickets, which will cost $59.50, $89.50, $125.50 and $150.50, will go on sale Friday, June 22 at 10 a.m.
Tags: Americana, crazy horse, tour dates
Posted in Crazy Horse, News / Article, Tour dates & Info | Comments Off on new tour date: Tahoe
Written by bnbrainer on 06 June 2012
Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse in nine years – Protesters dissect Neil Young’s new album of protest songs
Ben Kaplan Jun 4, 2012 – 4:16 PM ET
Illustration by Mike Faille, from Kiim Kong photo
Americana, Neil Young’s first album with Crazy Horse in nine years, is a collection of classic folk covers that describes an outsider’s America populated with travellers searching for the idea of a country they can’t find.
The activists listening to Neil Young’s new protest album think, by and large, the protests don’t go far enough. The album’s called Americana, it’s Young’s first with Crazy Horse in nine years and the songs — 11 classic folk covers such as This Land is Your Land and Travel On — describe an outsider’s America populated with death-row inmates, share croppers and out-of-sorts travellers searching for the idea of a country they can’t find.
“Living with War, which had Let’s Impeach the President, now that was a protest record,” says Ryan Peck, executive director of HIV & AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario, and host of our listening session this past Friday. “Here’s this Canadian reminding Americans what they’re really about — the good America, which of course is the idea of freedom.”
Young’s new record is above all else a Crazy Horse album, which means almost every tune contains a crunchy wall of harmony, wallop, feedback and guitar. Opening with Oh Susanna, a minstrel tune from the 1840s, and then bleeding into a threatening-sounding Clementine (a reworking of Oh My Darling, Clementine), the record doesn’t barnstorm so much as strike a note of curiosity.
“This is a song people thought was dead and buried. Something so stupid it was generally assumed no one would ever sing it again,” Kenneth Hale, director of Advocacy and Legal Services for Tenants Ontario, says of Clementine. The song, written during the California Gold Rush of 1848, is about the drowned daughter of a miner who takes up with his lover’s kid sister.
“Neil had an album called Freedom,” continues Hale, “but I still see him as a song-and-dance man.”
Covering folk tunes has been a fruitful pastime for aging lefties. In 1992, Bob Dylan released Good As I Been to You, an album of rearranged call-to-arms songs, and the record was widely seen as fuel for the re-emergence still driving him forward today. Likewise, Bruce Springsteen made The Seeger Sessions in 2006, which was sandwiched between the lesser albums Magic (2007) and Devils & Dust (2005).
This record’s a bunch of angry hippies in their garage playing songs that they loved when they were four
For Young, Americana follows Le Noise, which scored the 66-year-old a Grammy Award for best rock song in 2011. Clearly, this record is a chance for Young to flaunt his influences and make a statement, something achieved on the album’s wild version of the Silhouettes’ Get a Job, a ’50s-era ditty about joblessness.
“In an era of massive unemployment, Get a Job speaks to a reality that so many people are facing and it’s what every activist hears when we’re out on the streets with a picket sign,” says Yutaka Dirks, who contributes to the new book Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. “Many of us do have work, and we’re often out on the streets protesting the loss of good, stable, union jobs. You have to let the insult slide off your back.”
Crazy Horse, whose members backed Young on his first solo album, is a band best known for their thunder, but when the group formed in 1963, they were an a capella doo wop group in Los Angeles. It’s not lost on our activists that the band’s named for a Native American hero who went to war against the United States.
“Neil’s the kind of hippie who mixes his marijuana with tequila,” says Peck, “and this record’s a bunch of angry hippies in their garage playing songs that they loved when they were four.”
On Americana, the Crazy Horse harmonies stand out almost as much as their guitar sludge, and Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land, perhaps the ultimate folk song, steers the album back into political territory. Young’s version also contains the oft-deleted lyrics that address the country’s property laws.
“Given the Occupy movement, I think he’s explicitly addressing inequality,” Dirks says. “This record’s about using music to keep hope. It’s saying, collectively, ‘We all have a voice.’ ”
In the end, the new Young album is modestly activist-approved, catchy and a tip-of-the-hat to the bygone days of America’s ragged early years, which seem to be resurfacing now. Young’s 35th solo album concludes with God Save the Queen, the British national anthem, which fades into America the Beautiful and a children’s choir for its final note.
“If this is a political record, it’s a subtle political record, but I like what Neil does to these songs,” Peck says. “In a way, he does sort of what lawyers do — we slightly change the law and adapt them slowly to the times.”
Americana by Neil Young is available June 5 from Warner Music.
____________________
thanks go to sharry w.
Tags: Americana, Living With War
Posted in Crazy Horse, News / Article | Comments Off on Protesters dissect Neil Young’s new album of protest songs
memphish on 
Albert Stromann on 
liza on 
Baz on 
