Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Neil Young - Harvest



Harvest may have been the first album I was listening to that my mom recognized. It was before I could drive, so she drove me everywhere. As we were riding, I inserted it into the car stereo. She said, “Oh, Neil Young!” and I said, “You mean, you know this?” I couldn’t believe my mom had listened to such a cool album. Only later did I realize that literally every person has heard Harvest. It has the sort of instant accesability paired with an aching gravitas that artists spend long hours trying to pull off. Which is the thing. The album was recorded so spontaneously in Nashville that, at least as far as I’m concerned, it was either going to bomb or it was going to kill. And boy did it kill! Some of Neil Young’s most ubiquitous songs are presented on Harvest.


The thing that gets me with Harvest is this: it does not try hard to be beautiful. Beauty, as I understand it, comes at a premium when one begins to struggle for it in their work. There is the constant battle to hide edges, to remove traces of effort, to downplay details that seem unconcerned with the final product. But all you get in the end is something that has fingerprints all over it. But you listen to Neil Young, and he puts down to tape what is going on for him at the moment, and the beauty is immediate. It is both raw and refined. At any rate, though Harvest is actually quite a hodge-podge of recordings, including a live track from a solo performance, it conveys itself in a way that makes you want to hear every song over and over and over. Which is what I did for quite a long time.


There is one song, though, that took longer to hit than the others. The title track. I find its beauty in the melody and the way the lyrics never quite articulate anything other than a sort of complicated frustration. It is the kind of waltz I expect to hear resonating in the floorboards of some old dancehall in Texas. Yet, the song maintains a loneliness that never really allows this image to be fulfilled. He sings with a stoicism that, rather than conceals, exposes an ocean of feeling underneath the otherwise static arrangement. I lifted the rhythm section out of my interpretation to give it a little more buoyancy, and I added some omnichord to taste.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Dancing In The Dark





My first introduction to Bruce Springsteen occurred in 2009, while living with my best friend. He was and probably still is an avid fan. For him, the boss’ best material exists on Born To Run. I still remember him singing (and Springsteen’s singing is more like yelling) along to “tenth avenue freezeout” while we would get ready to go to a bar or a party. I didn’t get it.


One day, about a year later, the track “Born to Run” came on my itunes. It was a revelation. The boss understands urgency as I experience it in my darkest moments, but also in my most excited states. He communicates it as I feel it: that the moment of utter desperation is also the moment of greatest power, because it’s at that point that you have nothing left to lose. I think back to my friend singing along while we got ready to go to the bar, and it is not so hard to understand why Springsteen is the perfect soundtrack to a fresh night.


I immediately related to his hope that there exists a life beyond what is handed down to us by blood or circumstance or both. Bruce’s characters are more than a little paranoid, but they are also tragically acquiescent. At some point shortly after this, I heard “Dancing In The Dark” for the first time. Rather, I watched it – the music video for the song is actually a live performance from 1984, featuring a cameo by a young Courteney Cox at the end. Never has loneliness looked so exciting. I blame bruce’s dancing for this.


This song excites the part of me that envisions myself as a daring yet average, powerful yet sad guy – someone who would take his life into his own hands if there were only enough time after the shift ended. The video (and the original recording) interprets the song as a celebration of loneliness. I found a lot of territory left to explore once I got over the Boss’ bravado and the sheer 80’s-ness of it.