For Neil Young, a Journey Through Rock and Rust - NYTimes.com

Interesting interview on For Neil Young, a Journey Through Rock and Rust - NYTimes.com By PHIL PATTON:

Mr. Young says he believes that listening to music in the car is the best way to judge its quality.

“You can tell a great song if you listen in the car,” Mr. Young said. “Why? Because if you are listening in the car, you have a changing picture. You are also distracted by driving. You are doing two things at once, which is really good for music. The soundtrack to the landscape? There you go.”

Mr. Young said he did not, however, write music in a car, save one experiment, the rock opera “Greendale,” released over 2003 and 2004 with an accompanying film and graphic novel. “I wrote the songs while driving around on my ranch in a 1951 Plymouth. When I got an idea, I would just stop and write. When whatever I was thinking was gone, I would just drive on another three or four hundred yards. When I got another idea I would stop again.”

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As a musician who uses the phenomenon of rust as a leitmotif in his songwriting, Mr. Young explains his attraction to old cars, even ostensibly lifeless ones, in human terms.

“If you go for a walk in a junkyard, every car is talking to you,” he said. “There are voices. It’s like a cacophony of sound. Every car has got people in them. There are junkers, all piled up, but if you get close to them there’s history in every one of them: the families that grew up in those cars, the kids, the lovers. Everything that happened in those cars, it’s all right there. That’s why I love cars. They all have a soul and story to tell.”

Full interview at For Neil Young, a Journey Through Rock and Rust - NYTimes.com.

Also, see Neil Young Conversation with Jonathan Demme.

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