Neil Young and Daniel Lanois click on 'Le Noise' - latimes.com

Neil Young and Daniel Lanois
Photo by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times

An extensive interview of Neil Young and Daniel Lanois on the new album 'Le Noise' in Los Angeles Times by Randy Lewis. Some quotes:

"Very early on," Lanois said, "I realized that my favorite songs of this project all had a message. And I invented this idea that he had just come down from the mountaintop and he had the tablets with him. So I said, 'Neil, what's the message?'"

"Something's going on right now," said Young, seated next to Lanois at one of the restaurant's white-clothed tables. "We're in the middle of a huge change or turnaround, but I don't know really what it is. But you can feel that something's going on.

We've had enough of whatever it was. People have had enough of it. They've seen it over and over again. It defies real description of what's really going on. We won't know for a little while."

"It's one guy singing and playing," Young said, "except it's decomposing and falling apart and all the pieces are coming back upside-down and huge and small and blown up and coming back and being mixed back in with where they came from. It's like you throw all the pieces up in the air and run through and they all stick to you. But the pieces he chose to do this with, that's the magic."

"Everybody associates 'acoustic' with 'solo,'" Young said. "But once we heard solo electric, we started associating electric with solo.... The reason why it seems so original is because it has a perimeter. It's enclosed. It's like a wild animal in a corral. No other animals can get to it, and it can't get out to the other animals. So you're dealing with this one thing: the electric guitar. Not 10 electric guitars and a bunch of overdubs; just one performance with one guitar."

"All this technology Dan brings is really old," Young said. "And he's capturing all these things that are old: The instrument itself is old. I'm old," he said with a laugh, then added, "Dan is young."

"My accident, the lost friends — I think all of that's gone into the record," Lanois said. "Record making is not absent of life. I don't want to get all mystical about it, but whatever's been happening to Neil, it might be a more passionate record consequently."

"He's grabbing the spiritual part of things, the soulful part of things — not just the … strong and the weak parts," Young said. "He's grabbing the spirit of it and accelerating it.... Now you're zooming in on things, but you're still in the song because it's a piece of the song. Now it can be seen, and felt, and that's what keeps hitting you as you're going through this."

"At one point, I said to him, 'Think back: Why did we get into all this to begin with?'" Lanois said. "We did it because we thought that our heroes knew something that we didn't. And the music held a message; it held the promise of another kind of life. So given that we came into this because we thought that our heroes were speaking to us, and they were giving out information that we couldn't get from our neighborhoods or from our friends or our parents, we have a certain responsibility — even at this point in our lives — to provide that to somebody else who might not have the gift to receive information on their own.

"We're not saying we're better than anybody," Lanois stressed, "just that some people have the gift to receive information, and it's their job as troubadours to pass it on and let the word be heard."

Also, see full interview and article on Los Angeles Times by Randy Lewis.


Le Noise by Neil Young
(Click to Zoom Cover)
Release Date: September 28, 2010

More on Neil Young's New Album 'Le Noise'. Also, see:

-Stream Neil Young's Entire Album Le Noise on NPR
-NEW LE NOISE VIDEO: "Hitchhiker"
-Comment of the Moment: Le Noise's "Sonics"
-Neil Young Interview on Le Noise: "It sounded like God"
- Producer Daniel Lanois Discusses Making of "Walk With Me" + UNCUT Review (UPDATED)
- Video of Neil Young's "Angry World" from Le Noise
- Neil Young's Le Noise: "Just a man on a stool"
- "Imagination never sleeps": Neil Young's Le Noise
- NPR Previews Neil Young's Le Noise's "Walk With Me"
- Dead Man Soundtrack: Preview of Le Noise?
- Anticipating Neil Young's album Le Noise

Also, see all of Neil Young's Solo Electric Concert Tour Dates and Reviews.

And, FWIW, pre-orders for Le Noise by Neil Young are already ranked at #8 #5 on Amazon.com Bestseller listing.