‘A Letter Home’ finds Neil Young embracing his status as an artist who, at this stage in an almost untouchable career, can do pretty much as he pleases. So, just a couple of months on from the launch of Pono Player, a new adventure in high-fidelity, we have this collection of 11 covers close to his heart, presented in grainy lo-fi.
To record them, Young stepped into Jack White’s Voice-O-Graph booth, a curio from 1947 that ensures Young’s journey into the past is accompanied by a suitable amount of pop and hiss. Like early Mountain Goats, the basic recording process does provide a level of unvarnished intimacy, adding greater power to several of his selections.
The clash of old and new extends to Young’s spoken word intro, which finds him telling his late mother about the work of Al Gore, the “weatherman for the whole planet”, and asking her to “start talking to daddy again”.
The music, meanwhile, spans his youth in Winnipeg and reaches as far as the mid-’80s, with his rendition of Bert Jansch’s Needle Of Death, a precursor to The Needle And The Damage Done, particularly fascinating.
Elsewhere, White steps in to add the required harmonies on the Everly Brothers’ I Wonder If I Care As Much, while a beautiful take on Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind has a defeated air that sets it quite apart from the original.
Young’s weary version of My Hometown, the final song on Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born In The USA’, is the standout, though. Some 30 years later, its journey through the small-town wreckage of Reaganomics remains distressingly relevant: “Foreman says these jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back.”
He is less successful in the record’s early stages, with Bob Dylan’s Girl From The North Country rendered somewhat ineffective after a meek run through Phil Ochs’ Changes. Willie Nelson’s On The Road Again is recast in sombre tones that can’t overcome the familiarity of its melody.
Taken as a whole, though, ‘A Letter Home’ is a worthwhile experiment from a polarising figure, yielding a couple of covers that border on the definitive amid warm reminisces.
Neil Young Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Thu July 10 2014 - CORK Live At Marquee
Sat July 12 2014 - LONDON Hyde Park
Sun July 13 2014 - LIVERPOOL Echo Arena
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