Barn

About

Neil Young recorded his 41st album—and 12th with longtime backing band Crazy Horse—at a restored barn high in the Colorado Rockie. “Made it just like it was in the old drawings and photograph,” he tells Apple Music. “It used to be a stage stop, so you’d see these pictures with the carriages and the horses and the ladies with their big dresses with the metal ring and everything.” The songs here are succinct, the sound folksy and (relatively) subdued: <i>Harvest</i> without the string, or <i>Homegrown</i> without the drug. The band is as powerful and primal as they were in the ’70s (“Heading West”), but their politics are sharper (“Change Ain’t Never Gonna”), and their tenderness more tender (“Don’t Forget Love”). And if the hushed volatility of the eight-and-a-half-minute “Welcome Back” doesn’t convince you that they think of their music as being just as nuanced and transitory as jazz, nothing will. As drummer Ralph Molina put it when the take was done, “Neil just did some heavy shit.” So they kept it. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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