Neil young tell me why year genre3/1/2024 Don’t embellish it with other people I don’t need or hide it in any way. “He told me to keep it simple and focused,” continues Young, “have as much of my playing and singing as possible, and not to hide it with other things. No one gives a shit about anything else.” “Just make sure to have as much of you in the recording as you can,” Briggs apparently instructed him. In Waging Heavy Peace, he recalls asking Briggs – possibly his one equal as a curmudgeon – for “any advice for me on my music going forward?” Shortly before Briggs died on November 26, 1995, Young went to visit him in San Francisco. Instead, Young subverted his success by being antagonistically predictable: by reassembling Crazy Horse, giving them license to be ramshackle to a degree that exceeded even their bedraggled reputation, and recording an album that would prove – with an irony which clearly delighted Young – too lo-fi and grungy for the grunge generation. His next move was not to hop genre with the kind of cantankerous zeal he displayed in the 1980s. Now, though, the idea of capitalising upon the success of Mirror Ball appeared unutterably vulgar. The first half of the decade had seen Young accept a sanctified status among a younger cohort of Nirvana and Pearl Jam fans. “It’s all,” he claims, “one song.”Ī year earlier, David Briggs had died, and Young spent much of 1996 attempting to honour his old producer in as uncompromising a way as possible. The first thing you hear on the album is a heckler complaining, “They all sound the same!” In what would eventually become a wry mantra for him, Neil Young has the perfect response ready. A couple of songs from the show made it onto a live CD, Year Of The Horse, the following year: “When You Dance”, in fact, opens that set. On November 8, 1996, a conceivably weary Crazy Horse fetched up at the Meadows Music Theater in Hartford, Connecticut. Every Neil album is reviewed in comparable detail – you can find details of where to buy the mag here… The Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide that I wrote about here (along with a review of the forthcoming “Live At The Cellar Door” set) is on sale now, so I thought it might be useful to post a sampler of what you might expect in this Uncut special: namely, this piece by me on 1996’s underrated “Broken Arrow”.
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