INTERVIEW: Micah Nelson on Joining Neil Young and Crazy Horse: ‘I’ve Been Rehearsing for This My Whole Life’ | Rolling Stone

Particle Kid (aka Micah Nelson)

Farm Aid 2019 Highlights - Alpine Valley, Wisconsin 

photo by thrasher 

  (Click photo to enlarge)

A major interview with Micah Nelson on Neil Young's upcoming  “Love Earth Tour”: w/ Crazy Horse where the guitarist, "who cut his teeth on the road with dad Willie, breaks down his journey from loving the band as a kid to actually joining the band.

From Micah Nelson on Joining Neil Young and Crazy Horse: ‘I’ve Been Rehearsing for This My Whole Life’  | Rolling Stone by Andy Greene:

 

Rolling Stone: Tell me what Neil Young’s music meant to you as a kid.

Micah Nelson: Neil was always just kind of this being, this overarching energy in my life, and that music is always there. 

But it would kind of come and go in cycles. I would sort of venture off into these other worlds, and then he would come back into my life in these moments that always were so prescient, so synchronized, and exactly what I needed at that moment to remind me about rock & roll, and rawness and just honesty and songwriting and how that transcends everything else in production or sonics…All that shit.

There’s just something so primal and primitive about Neil, especially when he is with Crazy Horse. I saw them at Golden Gate Park at the Outside Lands Festival in 2012, it was a full circle moment and just sort of a slap in the face. It reminded me what I felt like I’d gotten too far from. 

Neil Young & Micah Nelson
Song of the Day - 5/29/18: MONSANTO YEARS

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Rolling Stone: When did you learn you were playing Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Tonight’s the Night straight through? [see Neil Young w/ Crazy Horse @ Roxy Night Club, Los Angeles, CA - September 2023]

Micah Nelson: About a week before. 

He said, “Oh, hey, we got Nils back.” So I had already kind of started learning all Nils parts on guitar and I was like, “Okay, this is what I’m going to be doing.” And then, “Oh, great, we got Nils. Okay, cool. He can play all his original stuff.” And Neil says, “Listen to the Ben Keith stuff.”

I don’t know how to play the pedal steel. I had never played the lap steel. So I’m like, “Okay, shit, I can probably fake this on my Telecaster with some delay and a volume pedal.”

So I started learning how to kind of fake the parts and get the spirit of the parts down. And then once we got there, Bill Asher was tech’ing at the time and he said, “Hey, I’ve got this lap steel that I made. It’s got palm benders on it, so it sounds more like a pedal steel. You can make it bend to the fifth or the fourth or whatever.” I was like, “Yeah, I’ll try it out.” And that was two days before the show.

I basically spent the next 48 hours learning Ben Keith’s parts on the lap steel with the palm benders and doing the best I can. And thankfully this is Tonight’s the Night where the guys making this record were fucked up out of their head. This is drunk Ben Keith. And so I was like, “Okay, I can fake this.”

But I also ended up falling in love with that instrument, and it was so much fun. And this is the story of me and Neil. He pushes me all the time to be better. 

And those types of experiences where you’re under pressure of making the music as good as it can be, I think have made me a better musician and a better person.

Full interview @ Micah Nelson on Joining Neil Young and Crazy Horse: ‘I’ve Been Rehearsing for This My Whole Life’  | Rolling Stone by Andy Greene.

Also, more on Micah Nelson and  Neil Young.

Micah Nelson  

Austin Lifestyle - Feb 2023

(see Micah Nelson "Teases" as New Crazy Horse Band Member w/ Neil Young)

 Also, see INTERVIEW: Micah Nelson -- Channeling Neil Young's band Crazy Horse | Guitar World.

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