A Record of Home
TRUE (Tuesday Round-up of Everything), week of 7/1, Post #1:
Neil Young-- "A Letter Home"
This isn't likely to be anyone's favorite Neil Young album. It's a little too much what Neil apparently intended it to be; a photo album full of family snapshots, Neil noodling around in his bedroom, figuring out (or remembering) songs he loved way back whenever, and also a sweet little letter to his mom. These aren't cover versions, not even remakes. They're just him playing them. Neil clearly loves these songs. I love a lot of them, too. But I won't be putting on Neil's versions of them much.
There's one element of this package that transcends it, though. A little gesture of glorious genius. Appropriately, in the circumstances, it seems almost a throwaway. An extra.
It's the credits. Or, not the credits themselves, but the slip of paper they're printed on, foxed and tanned and stained to replicate--so precisely that it literally stole breath from me--the paper sleeves that once housed the slabs of scratched vinyl on which I, like Neil, first heard most of these tracks.
The effect of that sleeve, at least on me, is more than just nostalgic. I took one look at it, and suddenly remembered not just those near-useless objects in general--stained and crumpled before I even pulled them out of their record jackets for the first time--but SPECIFIC sleeves. The speckles on my copy of Gordon Lightfoot's IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND. The rip down the center of my PHIL OCHS best-of.
There I was, suddenly, in my own childhood room. Humming the songs that have become MY letters-home songs. Understanding all over again how profoundly my relationship to art I love has intermixed with, transformed, become indistinguishable from my relationship to people.
It may indeed be better to burn out than to fade away, as NY once claimed on RUST NEVER SLEEPS (my copy of which had a paper sleeve with a giant coffee stain, like a birthmark, in the upper left back corner, even though I didn't drink coffee then).
But I think Neil's found another way entirely, which is to somehow keep taking in and giving out so much that you just keep burning.
Neil Young-- "A Letter Home"
This isn't likely to be anyone's favorite Neil Young album. It's a little too much what Neil apparently intended it to be; a photo album full of family snapshots, Neil noodling around in his bedroom, figuring out (or remembering) songs he loved way back whenever, and also a sweet little letter to his mom. These aren't cover versions, not even remakes. They're just him playing them. Neil clearly loves these songs. I love a lot of them, too. But I won't be putting on Neil's versions of them much.
There's one element of this package that transcends it, though. A little gesture of glorious genius. Appropriately, in the circumstances, it seems almost a throwaway. An extra.
It's the credits. Or, not the credits themselves, but the slip of paper they're printed on, foxed and tanned and stained to replicate--so precisely that it literally stole breath from me--the paper sleeves that once housed the slabs of scratched vinyl on which I, like Neil, first heard most of these tracks.
The effect of that sleeve, at least on me, is more than just nostalgic. I took one look at it, and suddenly remembered not just those near-useless objects in general--stained and crumpled before I even pulled them out of their record jackets for the first time--but SPECIFIC sleeves. The speckles on my copy of Gordon Lightfoot's IF YOU COULD READ MY MIND. The rip down the center of my PHIL OCHS best-of.
There I was, suddenly, in my own childhood room. Humming the songs that have become MY letters-home songs. Understanding all over again how profoundly my relationship to art I love has intermixed with, transformed, become indistinguishable from my relationship to people.
It may indeed be better to burn out than to fade away, as NY once claimed on RUST NEVER SLEEPS (my copy of which had a paper sleeve with a giant coffee stain, like a birthmark, in the upper left back corner, even though I didn't drink coffee then).
But I think Neil's found another way entirely, which is to somehow keep taking in and giving out so much that you just keep burning.
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