News broke this week that Neil Young will be releasing a new album at the beginning of March titled “A Letter Home.”
A new Neil Young album is always good news, but like most of his albums, there’s a punch line, and here it is: he recorded it in a glorified phone booth.
Here is how rollingstone.com describes the glorified phone booth, otherwise know as the Voice-o-Graph:
Originally made in 1947, the Voice-o-Graph is the only public vinyl record recording booth of its kind left in the world.
Who else on earth but Neil Young would look at that booth, which the article says can only “record up to two minutes of audio that’s cut onto a six-inch phonograph disc,” and say, “That’s where I want to record my next album.”?
If any artist other than Neil Young said that, they’d get hauled off to a rubber room faster than a bald Brittney Spears.
But Neil Young has made a career out of doing the unexpected or zigging when everyone thought he was going to zag (which everyone thought only because that’s what Neil Young said he was going to do).
I could spend the rest of the day giving you examples, but here’s a couple for the sake of illustration:
After recording “Harvest,” an album that is still the most successful of his career and featured the hits “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man,” he didn’t go out on a solo acoustic tour to perform those hits and other songs in that vein, as everybody else would do.
No, he hit the road with a new band, The Stray Gators, and played sloppy renditions of largely new material. The audio-verité album that documents that tour, “Time Fades Away,” is a favorite of mine, but he certainly lost more fans than he could have gained.
A few years later, he was on tour with his old friend (and sometimes bandmate) Stephen Stills. After a few shows on that tour, he left his friend this message: “Dear Stephen, funny how things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil.” And then he left to work with Crazy Horse or play with trains or whatever else he decided to do when he woke up that morning.
In the eighties, Young signed to Geffen Records headed by his friend David Geffen, then decided to put out an electronic album, “Trans,” which featured lots of keyboards and computer processing, including a vocoder that obscured his voice as much as auto-tune vocals on today’s pop songs. After a couple more “unrepresentative” albums, Geffen proceeded to sue him for not making albums that sounded like Neil Young.
And here’s just one more story I can’t resist telling: Twenty years after jilting his audience with “Trans,” Young evidently woke up one morning and decided that what was missing from his life was participation in a community theatre.
So he put together a batch of songs that tell a story set in a town named Greendale, designed a stage show to go with the songs that resembled a community theatre, and then hit the road with Crazy Horse performing that stage show in its entirety before an audience clamoring for “Like a Hurricane” and “Heart of Gold.”
To top it off, he did this tour before the album containing those songs (“Greendale”) was released, which meant the audience spent the first hour and a half of the concert hearing songs they’d never heard before. Even though Young tossed out a few old songs after the “Greendale” sequence, some people were clearly not amused.
So Neil Young has a long and winding track history of being unpredictable, and that’s why many of us love what he does. He refuses to be a breathing jukebox or follow a script someone else wrote. While it can be frustrating, it’s never boring, and he has a better track record than anyone I know for striking gold.
So for the time being, he wants to put out an album recorded in a glorified phone booth. Fine. But tomorrow Young could decide to run off to Poland and record a polka album with indigenous musicians in a mountain cabin. (But please don’t tell Neil I said that; he just might do it.)
More than once before, he has had an album all ready to go, and then at the last minute decided to release something else. That happened with the still-unreleased “Homegrown” album, but all was forgiven since he gave us one of his masterpieces, “Tonight’s the Night,” instead.
So while recording a new album using sixty-seven-year-old technology might sound a little crazy, when you’re Neil Young, it’s simply just another day.