MUSIC > Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It
NYTIMES.COM: Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web site, http://www.neilyoung.com/, and on satellite radio networks.
Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and "Ragged Glory."
Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.
In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of right-wing blogs, he urges, "Let's Impeach the President." It ends with Mr. Young shouting, "Flip, flop," amid contradictory sound bites of President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.
"If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans," he argued, speaking by telephone from California. "They can run again with some pride."
Mr. Young is a Canadian citizen. But having lived in the United States since the 1960's, he sings as if he were an American. The title song of "Living With War" quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the album ends with the choir singing "America the Beautiful."
The album's release is a high-tech, globe-spanning update of a topical song tradition that's much older than recordings: the broadside, a songwriter's rapid response to events of the day. "They had these songs that everybody knew the melodies to," Mr. Young said. "They'd just write new words, and the minstrels would be traveling around spreading the word. Music spreads like wildfire when you do it that way."
On Tuesday a higher-quality version will be for sale as a download from online music stores, and a CD will be in stores next week as soon as it can be manufactured and shipped. Eventually a DVD will be released with video of the recording sessions, which took place March 29 to April 6. Many of the songs on the album were first takes, recorded immediately after Mr. Young taught them to the band. On March 31 he wrote three songs: "Let's Impeach the President" before breakfast, "Looking for a Leader" after he recorded "Let's Impeach the President" and "Roger and Out" the same evening.
Mr. Young's Web site will have a more elaborate presentation, available free. It will include a page designed like a cable-news broadcast, complete with visuals (including recording-session scenes), ticker and logo: LWW (for "Living With War") rather than CNN. "Even if it turns out that we can't sell it with the news in it, we won't sell it, we'll just stream it," he said. "We don't have to sell it. We can still get it out there. This has nothing to do with money as far as I'm concerned."
Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. "That first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it."
Mr. Young has always been impatient with the time lag between writing a song and getting it to the world. When four student protesters were shot dead at Kent State University in 1970, he wrote "Ohio," recorded it with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and released it two and a half weeks later by sending acetates — preliminary pressings — to radio stations. (He will be on tour this summer as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young in what's billed as the Freedom of Speech Tour.)
After 9/11 Mr. Young wrote "Let's Roll," a song about the passengers who brought down a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, and released it free online. "Now we have the Internet," he said. "It doesn't sound as good, but it's much faster, and it gets around the world. That's huge, that's as big as we get."
The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."
The protest song, rocked-up slightly from its folky 1960's form, has been making a comeback during the Iraq war, from arena bands like Pearl Jam, the Rolling Stones and Green Day to indie-rockers like Bright Eyes and blues-rockers like Keb' Mo' and Robert Cray. Bruce Springsteen's latest album is a tribute to the protest-song mentor Pete Seeger, although it features old folk songs rather than Mr. Seeger's topical material.
"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal wave. This is just the tip of it."
Mr. Young said that he made "Living With War" not with a plan, but on an impulse. "I don't know what actually did it," he said. "It happened really fast, faster than I think I've ever experienced. There was just a kind of a wave."
As in the 60's, protest songs risk self-righteousness and preaching only to the converted. Only the most generalized ones outlast the interest in whatever headlines inspired them. There's not a lot of mystery to the songs on "Living With War"; they make their points as forthrightly as possible. Yet in the Internet era information — not just songs but blogs, videos, photos, drawings, e-mail jottings — is in the paradoxical position of being published worldwide and perhaps archived forever, but also being impulsive and ephemeral. A song for the Internet doesn't have to be one for the ages. Like an old broadside, it just has to get around for its moment, for right now. "Living With War" — irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and obstinate — is definitely worth a click.
posted by Ronnie Rocket @ 2:28 AM
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Neil Young: The conscience of America
Never afraid to say - or sing - exactly what's on his mind, this forever active and prodigious rock'n'roller has now decided to attack the most powerful man in the world - the President of the United States
Campbell Stevenson
Sunday April 30, 2006
The Observer
It has been a long time since Neil Young was last considered to be the king of protest music. But over the past week, as American TV hosts and bloggers, music fans and newspaper columnists have debated his new album, Living With War, the Canadian musician who has made his home in the USA for 40 years has become an emblem of the swell of opinion against the Iraq war and the Bush administration.
He has rarely been comfortable in such a role but this time he has prepared himself for it. Interviewed by CNN, and wearing a big cowboy hat that has the advantage of covering his bald spot, the 61-year-old said: 'I'm exercising my right of free speech. That's what is great about this country. This is a record about unification. No one owns the 9/11 mentality. It belongs to everyone, to George Bush and his family, John Kerry and his family, to me and my family.' Bush might think that the song 'Let's Impeach the President' is not quite as unifying as Young believes. Young's gargantuan 1991 tour which took place in the wake of George Bush Snr's war against Iraq. As the ear-splitting music, designed to mimic the sound of battle, drew to its climax, they turned around to find the members of New York's leading avant-garde rock group, Sonic Youth, sitting behind them, similarly open-mouthed.
Young's earlier incarnation as a folkie, hanging out in California's Laurel Canyon with Joni Mitchell, the Byrds and the rest of what became the Seventies rock aristocracy, inspired many singer-songwriters to let it all hang out. Meanwhile, from his 140-acre Broken Arrow ranch, the property near San Francisco that he bought for $340,000 in 1970, Young will continue to go his resolutely individual way.
Neil Percival Young was born on 12 November 1945 in Toronto. His father, Scott, was a sports journalist and author and for many years after Neil's success, he was still better known in Canada than his son. His mother, Rassy, had been going to marry another man in 1940, but fell for Scott. She kept the wedding date, but changed the groom. Neil and his brother, Bob, grew up in rural Canada, fishing, hunting and playing with the Lionel model trains which Neil loved so much that he later bought the company.
His life, and his family's, has been marked by serious illness and tensions. At six, Neil nearly died from polio and spent months in bed. His parents often fought, but there had been nothing to suggest that Scott would walk out on the family, as he did in 1959. Theirs was a rift that took a long time to heal. Young maintained for years that his classic 1972 song, 'Old Man', was about his gardener, not his father.
He began to take music seriously as a teenager in Winnipeg, listening to country, doo-wop and then rock'n'roll, which he described to Jimmy McDonough as being 'where God and the devil shake hands'. In Winnipeg, he befriended Joni Mitchell and began his lifelong friendship and tussle with Stephen Stills, an equally talented, equally ruthless guitarist with whom he would form his first successful band, Buffalo Springfield, in Los Angeles. The Springfield's classic protest song 'For What It's Worth' was written by Stills; Young's songs tended to concentrate on misfits, exemplified by his enduring 'The Loner'.
As the band's fame grew, Young became prone to epileptic seizures. Two of his children, Zeke, born when he was living with actress Carrie Snodgress, and Ben, from his 28-year marriage to Pegi Morton, have cerebral palsy, with Ben's being particularly severe. (Zeke now works on his father's tours.) In the early Seventies, a spinal injury also laid Young low for months. Perhaps this continuing pattern of infirmity has contributed to his relentless work schedule and the speed with which he often operates: get the job done while you still can.
Since the death of his father last year and an operation for a brain aneurysm, Young has completed two albums and is back on the road for a 30-date American tour this summer. This year, as every year, he will host the Bridge School concerts, to raise money for students at the San Francisco school for children with cerebral palsy (both his sons went there).
Young's compassion also sits alongside a ruthless streak. When he was about to leave Springfield, he very publicly told the band to fire their manager, Elliot Roberts. His real reason was that he wanted Roberts to manage him. The two have been together ever since and while Young may take many hard-nosed decisions, it's Roberts who implements them, and he perhaps knows Young best. 'Neil likes having quirky people around him,' Roberts told McDonough. 'It lessens - in his mind - his own quirkiness. "Yes, I'm standing on my head, but look at these two other guys nude standing on their heads."'
And it's Roberts who also offers an insight into Young's political stances. 'Neil doesn't really read newspapers; if he watches TV and sees a CNN special on Bosnia, he wants to do a record within two days.' It's Roberts who then has to dissuade him - but not this time.
Young earned the derision of music business liberals in 1984 when he backed Ronald Reagan, saying: 'I'm tired of people constantly apologising for being Americans.' Here was Young the patriot and Young the libertarian in full flow. Four years later, he made appreciative noises about black civil rights leader Jesse Jackson's presidential ambitions. His only previous comment on George Bush Jr was 'Let's Roll', a song about flight 93 and the passengers' successful attempt to stop the 9/11 hijackers from hitting another target.
It was a lumbering record, written in the heat of the moment, but as quintessentially Neil Young as any other: meant from the heart, without regard to what political lines he might be crossing. 'Let's roll for justice/let's roll for truth,' he sang, hitching his wagon to the war on terror.
And so Living With War, whose underlying theme is patriotism and whose main charge is that the President has stolen America from Americans. It is a direct and urgent record, made in haste. But don't expect Young to repent at leisure. He doesn't really do repentance - or leisure.
Tell us what you think of Neil Young's album Living With War at the Observer blog
The Young Lowdown
Born: Neil Percival Young in Toronto on 12 November 1945. Married twice - to Susan Acevedo and, since 1978, to Pegi Morton Young, with whom he has had two children, Ben and Amber Jean. One son, Zeke, from an earlier relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress.
Best of times: For his music, the early Nineties. Albums such as Ragged Glory (1990) found favour with a younger audience and his live shows with Crazy Horse were incendiary and intense. Kurt Cobain's suicide note infamously quoted from a Young song: 'It's better to burn out than to fade away.' Young responded with Sleeps With Angels (1994), his finest record in nearly 20 years. He also had a huge hit with 1992's Harvest Moon.
Worst of times: For his music, the Eighties, when a parade of dull albums baffled and alienated his record label and many of his fans. Most of his energy during this decade was concentrated on bringing up son, Ben, who has cerebral palsy.
What he says: 'I don't see change as a curse. It's just part of my make-up. Without change, the whole thing would fall apart. I'm not talking about rock and roll, I'm talking about my life. I've got to keep moving somewhere.'
What they say: 'What makes Neil a hero to the grungers and valid to people like Dylan is that he's unpredictable. He's the only old guy who can still rock. All the rest should just retire.' David Briggs, Young's producer.
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