Neil Young’s TRANS Album Being Restored + More | NYA
Neil Young has announced that his 1982 album -- the wildly misunderstood and vastly under appreciated TRANS -- is being restored to his original vision.
From T-C | Neil Young Archives:
Left with all that music, in the end, I decided to go to the Islands and record there. New songs. ‘Island in the Sun, ‘A little thing called love,’ ‘Hold on to your love’ and ‘Like and Inca’ were all recorded right there and then.
We took a whole new track….and combined the two records to make Trans -Trans, an album that told the tale of going from one life to another, as my own life had changed in many ways with the birth of my wonderful second son, quadriplegic, non-speaking, the subject of the film-story and one of my great teachers.
Now the story has ultimately been told as it was meant to be. Animated by my friend Micah, the great Micah Nelson, our story of Trans is finally living!
In the meantime, Trans - the record, has been restored. All the original mixes are there. Just the way the album was first made. The record is in the filing cabinet available now. A missing song ‘If you got love,’ is still missing but now will be found in the archives Volume Three, along with the animated musical film - Trans.
Full details on T-C | Neil Young Archives.
Micah Nelson's Curated Playlist: "WE R NEIL-LIST"
image via Neil Young - TRANS (1982)
Cropped Album Back Cover
Also, see:
- TRANS: A Little Bit of Essential Neil Young
- ‘Trans’: An Album So Controversial, The Label Sued Neil Young Over It: Revisiting The Legend’s Robot Rock Opus | Vinyl Me Please
- Neil Young: "Super amazing long-form [TRANS] video by The Particle Kid!"
- Neil Young's LincVolt: Out of the Sunset
- Neil Young's TRANS Mixes: "I Need A Unit to Sample & Hold"
- The Story of Neil Young’s Heavily Computerized, Utterly Bewildering ‘Trans’ | Ultimate Classic Rock
- Neil Young's Techno-Synth-Pop Phase
- Margo Price Spins Neil Young's 'Trans' Album
- Micah Nelson's Curated Playlist: "WE R NEIL-LIST"
His Techno-Synth-Pop Phase
Labels: album, neil young, neil young archives, nya, trans
by thrasher@PermaLink: 2/15/2022 12:01:00 PM
14 comments
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14 Comments:
As of right now, what we have is only the original vinyl release of Trans, but in full 192/24 resolution, with the longer/alternate CD mixes of three songs moved over to bonus tracks in CD quality of 44/16. We had one Micah Nelson-designed video last year to tease the ORIGINAL original vision for Trans, the short film with all the concepts Neil had intended for production. When that’s ready, it’ll be pretty cool.
I have been checking back. My US 1st pressing of "Trans" does have "If You Got Love" listed on the back cover and also on the inner sleeve, but the labels show the regular sequence "Little Thing Called Love" followed by "Computer Age" and that's what you get to hear. Was this song pulled in the last minute when covers already had been printed?
I remember going to the record store and buying Trans. I still have the album and on the back "If You Got Love," etc.. just as Dionys said. I also remember reading that the song was pulled and that is all I remember. Does the song exist? I have never heard it (although that means next to nothing).
I keep going back to Trans. There are great songs on this album and there are some fine ideas holding it together. Who else could do this? What a risk. History vindicates Neil entirely. I guess I could have done without that vocoder but part of the program. This is the last album before he went bonkers with the country boy stuff (Misfits, a great song, like on every Neil album there is some great song).
It seems the song was pulled for reasons of space on the side of the LP (as it stands, just under 40 minutes gets close to compromising sound quality). I’ve heard If You Got Love on YouTube. It sounds like the other Island tracks in tone and instrumentation. The percussion is akin to what’s featured on Like An Inca. Having it reintegrated into the track listing would create more of a sense of building a “normal” world that the vocoder Trans effects would effectively shatter.
Even though I initially felt let down by the more conventional songs that began each half of the album, so appreciate them these days and feel including IYGL would create a more balanced vision between the two worlds depicted. And it would be nice to have the actual song list match the titles printed on the jacket.
I got the song on various ROIOs, soundwise it's something like an extension of "Little Thing Called Love", the opening song of the LP. During the 1982 tour it was played numerous times. It appeared as fifth song of these shows, as part of the "conventional" set before the original Trans material. (Info thanks to Sugar Mountain)
Listening this morning to Henry's Dream, one of my favorite Nick Cave albums, also produced by Briggs (1992).
I wonder how many more albums he and Neil would have worked on had he lived...
My Trans/LOW sequence has evolved:
1. Computer Age
2. Sample +Hold [Lucky 13 vers]
3. Computer Age
4. Violent Side
5. Hippie Dream
6. Hold on to Your Love
7. I Got a Problem
8. Pressure
9. Transformer Man
10. Touch the Night
Experimented with including Sysrusher but feel tigher is better here. Trans tracks are the CD versions, being what I have access to.
Also, want to state my unequivocal support for peaceful protesters and condemnation of all violent behavior. Unfortunately, no one side has a monopoly on anger or destruction. However, those in power have a higher level of trust and responsibility to act ethically and compassionately. I don’t think anything else
matters enough to justify further derailing here.
“Don’t forget love.”
Also: my comment should not be construed to suggest that “both sides” are equally responsible in all situations.
I think Trans was released in 1982? We might want to note here that PC's and email and everything else we now "rely on" and count as fundamental features of human communication, were not part of everyday life. The album is oddly "futuristic" in its moment but then amazingly "accurate." Nothing/ no one could have predicted the manner in which most of this went catastrophically wrong. All the way up to the present where the form of communication allows for the substance- which is decontextualized and broken. Of course, David Geffen was one of the "winners" as he was able to tether himself to technology. One of the most interesting stories in recent cultural history, Neil and Geffen. What was Neil really doing? Telling the truth.
@ Tomatron - thanks for sparking some of our recent posts on TRANS mixes.
It seems that 40 years later TRANS is finally maybe getting its due.
@ Dionys - we forgot about these mis-prints. need to go and check our old vinyl. pretty sure we have original pressing.
@ Abner - the bonkers phase indeed going from techno to rockabilly to country.
is it any wonder that Geffen was pissed.
with the country boy stuff (Misfits, a great song, like on every Neil album there is some great song).
@ Steve - good question. what do you think? If Briggs were alive today, he'd probably still be at the mix console w/ Neil & the Horse at the BARN..
@ M.R. Ian - interesting on tighter is better b/c that keeps closer to vinyl format or CD format.
with digital you get these 2,4, 6 hour playlists that are really just total randomness.
the shorter lists require more thought & planning.
#DFL
@ Abner - Neil and Geffen. yes, quite a partnership.
neil's recent comments about TRANS and Geffen refusing to finance his videos is really not that surprising.
altho, if only those TRANS vids had been made in 1982?! would the vid message have better conveyed the dangers of Computer Age?
frankly, it would seem that the vids would've made the technology attractive and not call out the dangers. Neil seemed to be a fan of the positive aspects of technology in the 80's to help out his son Ben.
so did Geffen refuse to finance TRANS vids b/c of the music or the message?
@thrasher, Right, the point with my shorter play lists is to find an album like structure. Seems to me the main thing that distinguishes an album is not the unit of vinyl, plastic, or digital files, but this element of structure that comes from how the songs play next to each other. Sequencing is the most obvious way to build that quasi-narrative shape. It’s essentially tension and release.
About Geffen, it strikes me that a particularly fractious period of NY’s personal life produced a series of LPs that feel fragmented and sometimes underdeveloped. Time again, it seems like the ideas were never quite realizes. How often have we read about Geffen squashing a project and/the artist intentionally withholding things?
I never thought that Trans seemed fragmented or half realized, but I agree with you Ian. On the whole, for sure ( The Geffen period). Also, Thrasher, good point about Neil's constructive and hopeful relationship to technology. Given the problems he faced, this seems like the best attitude, although he also clearly sees the problems. I am doing a lot of thinking right now about technology and the more close work I do, the more I see Heidegger coming to the surface. A dystopic view to say the least. Or, as Stephen Jay Gould said many times, we do not understand ourselves well enough to understand our inventions.
Trans is one of my favorite albums. I love it and I play it often. The history behind it is very beautiful and that adds to it's beauty for me. I wish it had even more vocoder songs although I love the ones that don't have it on there as well. I am looking forward to hearing Island in the Sun and will likely subscribe to Neil's archives specifically for that reason.
But, I wanted to ask you experts if you thought it would get a physical release outside of the Archives Vol 3 box set?
I'd really love a big set of Island in the Sun, the regular Trans album spruced up, and any outtakes or associated recordings, plus a Blu Ray of Neil Young in Berlin and the animated Trans film all in one package! I'd be first in line to buy it, but I know the chances for this are pretty slim!
Trans sounds great on vinyl if you have one of the original "quiex" promo copies Geffin used to use back then.
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