Dez Reviews Neil Young's 'A Letter Home,' 2014

God bless Neil Young. Over the last several years, he has been at the vanguard of a movement to improve sonic purity, a knight in shining armor fighting for our right to hear music the way it should be heard. To vanquish the ear bud drones and bring back hi-fi. He has been pushing the new Pono System, a hi-fi digital service that promises to return sound to the fuller days before the MP3 era. You might think that Neil would release a record that would exemplify the great new sound of the future (past). Or at least sound great on the Pono. But he lives in Neilworld, so he decided to step inside a 1947 Voice-O-Graph booth with an acoustic guitar and harmonica and dash off a record of covers. It is the most lo-fi record you will ever hear, whether you have it on a crappy MP3 or 80 gram vinyl. The Voice-O-Graph was a mainstay at carnivals and boardwalks in the ’40s, where any average Joe Schmo could put a few pennies into what looks like a phone booth and make his own scratchy 78rpm record. Often people would simply record a spoken message, a sort of audio letter to a loved one who lived far away (hence the title of the record).

Neil came across this restored Voice-O-Graph when visiting Jack White’s Third Man studio. He practiced a batch of folk/country covers for about three months, and then went in and cut this record on the Voice-O-Graph in single takes (there is really no other option than to do single takes). White co-produces with Neil and plays and sings back-up on a couple of tracks.

It sounds like a poorly recorded bootleg, with the crackle and hiss of an old 78rpm record. Not only that, but sometimes the speed gets off and sounds kinda warbly, like an old cassette tape where the tape got eaten up and twisted in your boombox. Or like your old LP is warped from accidently leaving it in the backseat of your car on a summer day in Texas. There is really not much “mixing” to speak of. One volume. Look at the cover and you get the idea. It looks and sounds like Neil recorded his new record inside a phone booth. (It is funny to picture the two songs where White sings with Young, as they would both have to try and squeeze into the booth and sing into the single microphone).

And that is all part of the greatness of the record. He wants to evoke a bygone era that befits these songs, a time capsule of sorts.

It is a concept record. The opening track is, in fact, a spoken message to his deceased mother. It is not as depressing as it sounds, though. Neil is characteristically, wonderfully weird, spending over half of the track telling his mother how nowadays people get pissed off at weather men for getting the forecast wrong, making several references, if I have it right, to Al Roker. Oh, and he scolds her (twice) that she “really should talk to Daddy,” since afterall they are in the same place now. (His parents divorced when he was young). He also asks her to “say hi to Ben for me,” referencing longtime sideman Ben Keith.

The song choices are...curious. Some really work. Bert Jansch’s “Needle of Death” goes hand in hand with Neil's own “Needle and the Damage Done” or all of Tonight’s the Night. In this lo-fi, crackling setting, it is absolutely haunting. And he reveals with his version of the song that he stole the melody for his own “Ambulance Blues” (1974) from Jansch. Bob Dylan’s much covered “Girl From the North Country” sounds good done by anyone because it is such a brilliant song (my personal favorite is a live Pete Townshend track), but Neil does it special justice, I think, with his roughshod reading. He drains all tenderness from it and make it wonderfully bitter. Phil Ochs’ “Changes” and Neil’s duet with White on The Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If I Care As Much” also work very well. I think the best track is Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” a fantastic song that was hampered somewhat by a certain cheesiness in the hands of Lightfoot. Neil brings the raw emotions of the song to the forefront and kills it.

His two Willie Nelson choices are a split. “Crazy” is nice and sounds fantastic in this vintage setting. The ramshackle “On the Road Again” (again, a duet with Jack White) is so ramshackle that the train sounds like it falls off the rails. The oddest and most critically polarizing choice is Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” With a catalogue as rich as Springsteen’s, there are many intriguing options for Neil to tackle. But this? Probably the worst tune from Born in the USA. Imagine Neil grabbing one of the darker Nebraska or Ghost of Tom Joad tunes and transporting it back in time through the Voice-O-Graph, that would have been fantastic. But his rendition of “My Hometown” is terrible. Almost unlistenable.

Taken as a whole, we have another strange detour and transmission from Weird Uncle Neil. The funny thing, though, is that in the last several decades, these odd, seemingly whimsical throwaways have been Neil’s best work. His ode to his electric car Fork in the Road, the jarring Le Noise project with Daniel Lanois, the garage Crazy Horse journey through the far past Americana…and now A Letter Home can join that wonderfully weird company. If other grizzled veterans of the rock and roll wars were as strange, as whimsical, as vital as Neil Young still is, the world would be a more interesting place.

***1/2 out of *****