(THIRD MAN RECORDS/REPRISE RECORDS/WARNER BROTHERS RECORDS; 2014)
I’m into nostalgia. Everybody knows that about me. I hang onto stuff from my youth, still think of lost loves and memories from decades past, and made much of my music career from writing about the inescapable march of time. So, I am perfectly comfortable (if melancholy) looking back, although I can’t stay in that state. Neil Young seems to be the same way. Although he is known for always putting his attention into the project he’s doing NOW, and his recent patenting of the PONO high-tech audio system is about as modern as you can get, Neil has bouts of unpredictable, intense nostalgia. Albums like A PRAIRIE WIND and HARVEST MOON, as well as his ARCHIVES series and its many included live recordings, all reveal an artist keenly aware of his past and given to visiting it rather often. But A LETTER HOME is something else again: A headfirst dive into the very sound of the past, featuring songs recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph recording booth, something Jack White (whom Young struck up a friendship recently) had at his Third Man headquarters in Nashville. Apparently, this thing is barely big enough to accommodate one musician and his guitar, but Neil was fascinated by the concept, and decided without much chin scratching to make an album this way. He chose a selection of all covers, mostly songs he grew up with in Canada and a couple of others by fellow artists he met later, and proceeded to sing these numbers like they belonged to him alone. It’s a pretty revelatory piece of work by this rock legend, showing his true “heart of gold” at work.
The scratchy, primitive sound may put some off, but the key word here is nostalgia. Forget about everything you know regarding modern sound and equipment, and take this journey. It’s a deeply touching one. The record begins with Neil talking to his Mom in the great beyond, and this may conjure forth a tear or two if you are like me, in the category of people who recently lost their moms. “Be sure to talk to Daddy again,” Neil advises, a comment on the bitter divorce Neil’s parents went through when he was a child. He then launches into Phil Och’s poignant classic, “Changes.” Young has often spoken of Ochs as one of his musical heroes, and he wrings every bit of emotion and intimacy out of this; if you didn’t know it was an Ochs song, it would sound just like something Neil himself wrote, right down to the melody and repetitive nature. Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country” is also nice, but must bow meekly to the magnificence of the next track, Bert Jansch’s “Needle of Death.” This is possibly the highlight of the record, and the longest track at nearly 5 minutes. Beginning with Young whistling not such a merry tune, the track is literally spine-tingling, with its evocation of a “troubled young life” derailed by drugs. If you know anything at all about the losses Neil himself endured because of friends who died from drugs and his outspoken comments on the matter many times, this song is overwhelmingly personal, ghostly and gut-wrenching. It isn’t just the highlight of the record, it’s one of the most haunting performances Young has ever rendered, Voice-o-Graph or not. It took me awhile to recover from the experience of listening to this. Jansch, a guitar hero of Young’s, died not long ago himself; I was lucky enough to see him open for Neil on a tour a few years back.
Fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot penned a couple of the tunes Young chooses to cover here, “Early Morning Rain” and “If You Could Read My Mind.” Both of these are pretty revelatory, as Young not only gets the timeless feel and romantic angst of these compositions, he gives a fresh spin to both. The former is jaunty but in a way that preserves its underlying sadness; the latter is surprisingly pleasurable, because we’ve all heard Lightfoot’s version way too many times through the years on the radio, and it’s nice hearing Neil give it his spin. The short take of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” is also warmly engaging. Young is clearly focused 100% on these performances. Sometimes in the past, he has made recordings where you suspect he’s not fully into it, or is just doing something to be perverse or throw off his fans (or in a notorious case in the 80s, his own record label). But there is no doubting Neil’s conviction here, and that’s the key to this record: he MEANS it, man. And Young at the peak of his performing and emotive powers is a singular force, and is definitely enough to offset the primitive nature of the recording, which features only voice, guitar, piano and harmonica.
With the time-bending beauty of the previously mentioned tracks, more modern-sounding songs like Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” and Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown” suffer a bit by comparison, although Neil does make the latter sound like something very much applicable to his own youth. Tim Hardin’s “Reason To Believe,” begins with another spoken word message to Neil’s mom, about how he and Jack “rediscovered a lot of the old songs we used to listen to in Grovenor.” Lilting piano adorns this, with the lyric about finding “a way to leave the past behind” emerging as perhaps the key line on the album. And the lovely Ivory Joe Hunter ballad “Since I Met You Baby” oughta be in a film or something. It’s a bar room soundtrack here, with pensive rumination underlying what is, ostensibly, a simple love song. In this unique audio setting, something emerges from the recording that is captivating, and actually, profoundly sad in these days of crazy violence and technological dependence. Young is giving us an artifact, a shelf of memories, a reminder of a more innocent time in the evolution of art and entertainment when things cast a different kind of spell and had people marveling. Not even this record is likely to do that for most people, because the world is a different place now. And that’s kind of a shame. Because A LETTER HOME is a deeply stirring document, and just like the death of handwritten letters themselves, it deserves to be successfully delivered to the much-missed party on the other end.