Neil Young goes mad, and other news...

I like Neil Young; have done for decades. But, after a life of eccentricity, he would appear to have gone completely mad.

Which is okay of course. Some of my best friends are completely mad. It can make for interesting conversations. What's most impressive about Neil is that he's persuaded a lot of other people to join him on his path to madness.

And, I have to confess, I think I'm one.

This is why...

The reason I say this is because of Mr Young's new album ‘A Letter Home' is simply one of the strangest collections of music ever released. But more on that in a minute.
Because, before we go any further, let's back up a bit. Let's place this peculiarity into some sort of perspective if you will.

Neil Young has done weird things before. I'm talking about the eighties here, the time of Neil's 'computer experiments”. Neil had changed record companies. He had been 'poached” from his regular home at Reprise by rising label Geffen, owned by millionaire newcomer David Geffen.

Geffen's excitement over his new signing was short-lived.

In quick succession Neil made the repetitive ‘Re-ac-tor', discovered a vocoder and created the weirdly computerised ‘Trans', and then released an album of throwaway rockabilly songs, ‘Everybody's Rockin'. Each was so perversely unsuccessful that Geffen subsequently sued him for producing 'deliberately uncommercial and unrepresentative work”. Pretty much a first for the music world!

Geffen, in fact, didn't realise how lucky he was. If he sued Neil for those albums he'd have probably had to hire a crack team of ninja assassins to express his reaction to ‘A Letter Home'. But more on that in a minute.

There were reasons for Neil's seemingly erratic behaviour in the eighties, not the least that from late-1980 to mid-1982, Young spent much of his waking hours carrying out a therapy programme for his young son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. (Good news is Ben is still doing well and was the impetus for the annual Bridge Street School charity concert Neil organises every year to help his son's school).

The other thing Neil was unhappy with in the eighties, and has been ever since, was the quality of digital music. He railed against early CDs and has constantly complained about the substandard quality of pretty much every digital platform.

So much so that for years now he's been working on his own sound system, PonoMusic.

This week it's been announced Neil Young will be the CEO of PonoMusic, after a crowd-funded Kickstarter campaign raised $6.2 million earlier in the year.
PonoMusic's PonoPlayer claims to present digital music in higher-quality than either mp3 or CD.

That would be amazing. And the reports are Neil's quest for better sound quality is about to succeed. Everyone who has heard music via Pono says it's fantastic.
That's where ‘A Letter Home' comes in. Neil Young has gone mad.

‘A Letter Home' is a collection of 10 songs, all covers, plus two spoken word pieces. All are recorded solo by Neil with either acoustic guitar or piano accompaniment. There are songs by Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot (2), Bruce Springsteen, and Willie Nelson. So what's unusual?

Well, they were recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth at Jack White's Third Man store in Nashville. That's right, one of those instant record-making booths in which Elvis sung his first recorded tunes to his mother. And it sounds like it. You can just about make out the music behind a wall of scratches, pops, hisses and general distortion.

Seriously, this is undoubtedly the lowest-fi recording ever released by an established artist. It makes Robert Johnson's 1930s recordings sound pristine.

And it comes from the man creating the world's highest-quality listening system, who has complained for decades about sound quality. The world is getting weirder by the day.

One more thing:

I love ‘A Letter Home'. It sounds like a mysterious lost remnant of the musical past, transporting you to a different age; an antique land of scratchy old vinyl, of dirt and dustbowls and innocence.

It's good to go mad sometimes.