INTERVIEW: Neil Young’s Adventures on the Hi-Res Frontier - The Pagan Mechanic Rides Again | WIRED

Neil Young
Photograph: Kelia Anne MacCluskey

In a recent interview with Neil Young he discusses recording the album Colorado with Crazy Horse and on bringing real quality to streaming audio -- whether we want it or not.

From The Pagan Mechanic Rides Again: Neil Young’s Adventures on the Hi-Res Frontier | WIRED by Jesse Jarnow:

Neil Young: “We started off doing something that we’d never done before, just to see what would happen,” Young says. He’d played some solo shows in the months leading up to the session and rediscovered a concept even more satisfying than first takes: no first takes at all.

“Every time you do a song, it’s an opportunity to define it and what it means and how it feels,” he says. “So if you feel it while you’re doing the song [live], you’re fucked, you’ve already done the song. It’s only going to happen once like that, when you get that feeling. And so I had that feeling on a couple of the songs, that I’d done the song. I didn’t want to do it again.”

“It’s really hard to chase something once the singer’s done,” Lofgren says. “Why do it? So it was quite challenging. When Neil plays live, he’s got great time, but he wasn’t playing to a click track. Ralphie and Billy were great at learning the track and weaving in with the groove.”

There are jams and there are half-baked ideas. There are indelible melodies and eco-anthems and echoes of the Memories. There is a rhythm track made from Lofgren’s tap dancing shoes run through an octave divider (“Eternity”). There is Ralph Molina's and Billy Talbot’s otherworldly sense of space on perhaps the most exquisitely fragile Crazy Horse jam of all time (“Milky Way”), the type of creation Young wants listeners to experience in the same fidelity as the band did.

Full interview @ The Pagan Mechanic Rides Again: Neil Young’s Adventures on the Hi-Res Frontier | WIRED by Jesse Jarnow.

Neil Young at Lost Planet Editorial, Santa Monica, CA - Sept. 9, 2019
Photo by Rebecca Cabage/Invision/AP

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