As the flood of unreleased Neil Young material from NYA continues to inundate us like a "water-washed diamond in a river of sin", many fans are trying to figure out the best method to listen, watch and absorb the bounty of files.
At last count, over 50 new music video/visualizations have been uploaded recently on Neil Young Archives.
Here is the Comment of the Moment on A Good Day @ Thrasher's Wheat! by tomatron, who suggested...
Massive video dump this week! Well, they’re really visualizations...
What’s new: over 50 videos on NYA2 song cards.
How to listen: REVERSE CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. Since the videos cannot be played in either album playlist form or continuously through the cabinet, it is just as easy to play them from latest to earliest recorded. Start with CSNY Human Highway 4/15/76 and work backward through the Stills-Young stuff, a handful of Odeon tracks, and some choice ‘75 Horse, ending with Like A Hurricane.
Keep going, one backwards album at a time. You’ll hear Dume in reverse, introduced by solo piano No One Seems To Know and Crazy Horse’s Pocahontas. Little Wing kicks off a long sequence of Homegrown/Old Homestead tunes. The result of this scheme is an abridged version of NYA2 that winds its way back over the span of four years, with frequently trippy video accompaniment.
Any drawbacks? The missing videos are mostly missed. It amounts to a small percentage of the overall haul, but these are the tunes sans vids: odeon budokan - all 10 tracks; dume - pardon my heart; walk on - walk on; roxy - roll out the barrel; tuscaloosa - here we are in the years, after the gold rush, out on the weekend, heart of gold, time fades away, lookout joe, new mama, alabama.
Having to select them one at a time is a bummer, but this is the best way, using the arrows to go back through the file cards. You can go fullscreen or keep the video embedded in a large viewer, where the song’s date recorded is conveniently still visible. File cards with no video are easily clicked past. There is a minor snag when you hit outtakes and have to click on the cabinet to escape.
Why it works: since vinyl necessarily plays start to finish and CDs and digital can’t have the track order reversed without some programming (and Cabinet View plays chronologically), the videos are a practical way to enjoy the collection from latest to earliest performed. And there are some real visual gems in here. Ideally the NYA2 viewing session would culminate in a screening of Journey Through The Past!
Thanks for the suggestions here Tomatron! Really helpful. There's so much material being uploaded on NYA that it has become a real challenge for the more casual fans to keep track. We suppose the good news is that there isn't some big rush need to take it all in.
Here at TW, we have decided to take a leisurely approach to enjoying the vast pristine of NYA's goldrush. To each, their own.
How about yee, drunkards of the villages?
Also, see more on Expecting to Calculate Neil Young 2021: Numbers Add Up To Nothin'.
Thanks Tomatron, and thanks Thrasher! The water washed diamonds are within our reach, thanks to your Tech Support and Thrasher’s Wheat publishing your tips. It’s a symbiotic relationship we have between the fans, Thrasher’s Wheat, and NYA on line. We are all being fed by each other. Obviously, none of this would be possible without the Art from our Hero, Neil Young! What a prolific and wonderful body of work he has created, and is still creating! I am working my way backwards chronologically, as Tomatron advised. I guess this is the equalizer to not seeking us NYA2 Blu rays. We still get to watch and listen whether we bought the CD version or not. I had made the ludicrous claim that I was perhaps done buying the physical releases. That thought was short-lived. I bought the economy class version of Rust Bucket, NYA2, and pre-ordered Young Shakespeare. The temporary pain of not being able to buy the deluxe NYA2 set is forgotten. I am watching the video for Let it Shine. As reported, the vids are trippy; there are some fun photos, singles, scenes, and audio equipment displayed so far in my backwards journey. The vids are another vehicle in which to enjoy the Archives with. The cute photo of young Zeke in the Separate Ways vid enriches the experience. Very tastefully done. Thanks Neil! And thanks to the entire Archives team for helping bring it to the fans on NYA. We appreciate your efforts and the Art.
ReplyDelete-Alan in Seattle
(Spell check) this is the equalizer to not selling us Blu rays....
DeleteThanks Alan! Neil Young is giving us all kinds of ways to geek out on his catalog lately! I think I’d still buy blu-rays of Archives II if they ended up releasing them. These videos would also be great for us to hit play and vibe out to too!
ReplyDeleteI promise I only hit Publish once here, but y’all are free to enjoy the above comment all three times...
ReplyDeleteAll my playlists have miraculously returned!!! Post it a thousand times!
ReplyDeleteYes! Tomatron! All of my past Playlists have populated. Thats useful! Neil reads and listens to our concerns. Pretty cool. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteAlan in Seattle
And, it looks like Neil has upgraded the viewability of his Times Contrarian with a moveable right hand side bar to scroll up or down. I found the prior version quite unwieldly. Thanks for the upgrade, Neil.
ReplyDelete