“One thing that many people have said about this record is that it sounds like it’s coming from another place or time,” Neil Young said, of his latest album. “It’s not really relevant to the last record or the record before.”
Since 1968, Neil Young—who was born in Toronto in 1945—has been making raucous, astringent guitar music, both as a solo artist and with his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse. On occasion, he has veered toward tenderhearted folk rock, as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and on records such as “Harvest,” his fourth LP and the best-selling album of 1972. Young has spent most of the past fifty years arguing for environmental causes, even when nobody was keen to listen.
I think it has to be an accident. One thing that many people have said about this record is that it sounds like it’s coming from another place or time. It’s not really relevant to the last record or the record before. I came up with the melodies for eight or nine of these songs while going on walks. You know how you do. You might be taking a walk with the dog or something, and you start whistling a tune.
When we were ready to go, I called Rick [Rubin]. Rick and I had worked together in the past—we really like working together, and we have a lot of fun anytime we’re doing anything. I called him and I said, “Listen, I booked the studio. Are you around?” He had been in a house fire, where he was caught on the second floor. He had suffered from smoke inhalation, so his voice was all crazy, but he said, “Yeah, I want to come to the studio—we’ll hang out.” He’s speaking in this low voice.
We make chronicles of things. Or I do—I make chronicles of an experience. I play the songs, and we’re doing it live, and everything happens, and then we capture it like that. Rick is a genius. It’s so easy, because he loves music. You’re not gonna find a person who loves music more than Rick. He’s dedicated to preserving it. If you talk about an environmentalist trying to save the Earth, then he’s a music-mentalist. That’s the way he looks at music. That’s a great thing. He’s just living it.
For some musicians, the idea of making art in the midst of a crisis—during the pandemic, say, or in the face of an ongoing climate catastrophe—can feel small, or silly, or inconsequential. It’s the artist’s imperative to make work that’s personal and important to them, but then there’s also this larger question of whether art can help solve problems. Can it?
Thank you. Well, I feel it, too. We need to come together. That’s all I know. When the virus hit, everybody was terrified. They didn’t know what to do. How could it shut everything down? And then the next thing that happened is “Wow, have you seen how many birds there are?” In cities, people were seeing things that they never saw before. The planet was talking to us. We didn’t even know it was happening; we were so focussed on the virus.
It’s a record of things that happened, and this is information about the participants. I stepped back and looked at it that way, and I just stayed with it. You see a picture of my mom and me looking at each other, my sister and my brother, all of ’em are in there, and they’re all an important part of my life. These are the thoughts of these people I was channelling; this is where all this came from.
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