Neil Young — A Letter Home [2014]

            Neil Young — A Letter Home
•   Neil Young's 'A Letter Home' Coming Back as Deluxe Package
New set will include alternate takes, vinyl discs and making-of DVD.
Birth name: Neil Percival Young
Born: November 12, 1945, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Album release: May 27, 2014
Record Label: Third Man Records
Duration:     38:58
Tracks:
01. A Letter Home Intro       2:17
02. Changes (Phil Ochs)       3:52
03. Girl From The North Country (Bob Dylan)       3:27
04. Needle Of Death (Bert Jansch)      4:53
05. Early Morning Rain  (Gordon Lightfoot)      4:25
06. Crazy (Willie Nelson)       2:17
07. Reason To Believe (Tim Hardin)       2:47
08. On The Road Again (Willie Nelson)        2:18
09. If You Could Only Read My Mind (Gordon Lightfoot)       4:01
10. Since I Met You Baby (Ivory Joe Hunter)       2:11
11. My Hometown (Bruce Springsteen)       4:05
12. I Wonder If I Care as Much (Don Everly)       2:26
•   "A Letter Home is the thirty-fifth studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young. It was released on April 19, 2014 on Record Store Day by Third Man Records. The entire album, which consists of covers of classic songs by Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and others, was recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth at Jack White's Third Man store in Nashville, Tennessee."
In french:
•   Un clin d'oeil de Neil Young qui propose un album de reprises (Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Bert Jansch, Gordon Lightfoot, Willie Nelson, Tim Hardin, Bruce Springsteen, Ivory Joe Hunter & Don Everly) enregistrées dans une cabine d'enregistrement datant de 1947 et destinée aux pressages vinyles... Opération effectuée, à l'occasion du RSD, dans le studio de Jack White à Nashville. A écouter pour le plaisir des grésillements et autres crachotements...
Website: www.neilyoung.com
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By Andy Greene
April 24, 2014 10:35 AM ET
•   Neil Young's lo-fi covers record A Letter Home was quietly released on vinyl through Jack White's label Third Man Records just in time for Record Store Day last week, but on May 27th it's coming back in a deluxe package that will include a CD, a download card, a making-of DVD and two vinyl records. The limited edition set will retail for $109.98, but a basic CD version will also be offered for $13.99.
•   A Letter Home — which features acoustic renditions of Bob Dylan's "Girl From The North Country," Willie Nelson's "On The Road Again" and many other classics — was recorded at Third Man Records on a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. •   "Imagine a very simple recording studio not much larger than a phone booth and you'll get the idea," reads a press release. "Recorded live to track to one-track, mono, the album has an inherent warm, primitive feel of a vintage Folkways recording."
•   The deluxe edition of the album will also have a 32-page booklet and seven 6" clear vinyl discs, one of which features an alternate take on Willie Nelson's "Crazy."
•   Young also released a video for his cover of Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death" for those who wish to see the Voice-O-Graph recording booth in action.
•   Young recently wrapped up a solo acoustic North American tour at at the Chicago Theater. The shows centered mostly around Young's early work, and featured the first live performance of the Rust Never Sleeps deep cut "Thrasher" since 1978. He heads to Europe in July for a tour with Crazy Horse. (http://www.rollingstone.com/)
Also:
BY NICK DERISO | APRIL 25, 2014
•   “My friend Jack has this box,” Young says as A Letter Home begins, in an opening message to his mother — but, by then, it’s already clear that A Letter Home is an album like no other, recorded in a situation so old fashioned as to seem otherworldly.
•   Clearly, the visit to Jack White’s refurbished late-1940s recording contraption put Young into a nostalgic mood, as he begins reeling off a series of cover songs that punctuated his life and career. And at first, as Young takes a gently ruminative spin through Phil Ochs’ “Changes,” it appears that this is as far as A Letter Home will dare go.
•   But Bob Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” takes on a ghostly sense of rumination, not so much sad as a resigned. And “Needle of Death,” the Bert Jansch song that served as a foundation for his own harrowing meditation on drug use in “Needle and the Damage Done,” is somehow sadder still.
•   Not all of it works. Young adds new shadings to two cuts from Gordon Lightfoot (a propulsive “Early Morning Rain,” a knife-sharp “If You Could Read My Mind“), but then has less success with two head-scratching, lesser items from the Willie Nelson songbook (“Crazy,” which comes off sing-songy; and “On the Road Again,” a honky-tonk misfire). Young may, in fact, have a true passion for Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby,” but this rudimentary take doesn’t bear that out.
•   An equally unlikely selection of Bruce Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” on the other hand, gives Young a chance to well up some 1960s-era brio — giving this song a new edge. And he closes with a truly inspired choice in the Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If I Care as Much,” turning a narrative that had always been so sweetly conveyed into something approaching a protest song. (http://somethingelsereviews.com/)
Amplification:
•   Young uses various vintage Fender Tweed Deluxe amplifiers. His preferred amplifier for electric guitar is the Fender Deluxe, specifically a Tweed-era model from 1959. He purchased his first vintage Deluxe in 1967 for US$50 from Saul Bettman's Music in Los Angeles and has since acquired nearly 450 different examples, all from the same era, but he maintains that it is the original model that sounds superior and is crucial to his trademark sound.
•   The Tweed Deluxe is almost always used in conjunction with a late-1950s Magnatone 280 (similar to the amplifier used by Lonnie Mack and Buddy Holly). The Magnatone and the Deluxe are paired together in a most unusual manner: the external speaker jack from the Deluxe sends the amped signal through a volume potentiometer and directly into the input of the Magnatone. The Magnatone is notable for its true pitch-bending vibrato capabilities, which can be heard as an electric piano amplifier on "See the Sky About to Rain". A notable and unique accessory to Young's Deluxe is the Whizzer, a device created specifically for Young by Rick Davis, which physically changes the amplifier's settings to pre-set combinations. This device is connected to footswitches operable by Young onstage in the manner of an effects pedal.Tom Wheeler's book Soul of Tone highlights the device on page 182/183.
Discography:
•   Neil Young (1968)
•   Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)
•   After the Gold Rush (1970)
•   Harvest (1972)
•   Time Fades Away (1973)
•   On the Beach (1974)
•   Tonight's the Night (1975)
•   Zuma (1975)
•   Long May You Run (1976)
•   American Stars 'n Bars (1977)
•   Comes a Time (1978)
•   Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
•   Hawks & Doves (1980)
•   Re-ac-tor (1981)
•   Trans (1982)
•   Everybody's Rockin' (1983)
•   Old Ways (1985)
•   Landing on Water (1986)
•   Life (1987)
•   This Note's for You (1988)
•   Eldorado (1989)
•   Freedom (1989)
•   Ragged Glory (1990)
•   Harvest Moon (1992)
•   Sleeps with Angels (1994)
•   Mirror Ball (1995)
•   Broken Arrow (1996)
•   Silver & Gold (2000)
•   Are You Passionate? (2002)
•   Greendale (2003)
•   Prairie Wind (2005)
•   Living with War (2006)
•   Living with War: "In the Beginning" (2006)
•   Chrome Dreams II (2007)
•   Fork in the Road (2009)
•   Le Noise (2010)
•   Americana (2012)
•   Psychedelic Pill (2012)
•   A Letter Home (2014)
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Neil Young — A Letter Home [2014]

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