- Source: A Letter Home
A Letter Home is the 35th studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young. It was released on April 19, 2014, on Record Store Day by Third Man Records. The album was produced by Young in collaboration with Jack White of The White Stripes.
Background
The album was recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth at Jack White's Third Man Records recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee. Young said in March 2014, "A Letter Home is going to be very confusing to people because it is retro-tech... Retro-tech means recorded in a 1940s recording booth. A phone booth. It's all acoustic with a harmonica inside a closed space, with one mic to vinyl. It's a funky old machine, it sounds like Jimmy Rogers or something." Of this method, White said, "we were obfuscating beauty on purpose to get to a different place, a different mood." In a May 2014 interview with David Fricke for Rolling Stone, Young described working with White: "Jack is an original. I've watched originals my whole life. I've absorbed from originals, taken that and turned it into me. That's the folk process. Jack does that to some degree. He also reminds me of Charlie Chaplin, because of his sympathetic nature, his curious choices. A lot of soul comes through everything he does. It's sparkling in a new way. And it comes by connecting new threads."
A message on Young's website described the album as "an unheard collection of rediscovered songs from the past recorded on ancient electro-mechanical technology captures and unleashes the essence of something that could have been gone forever".
Songs
The entire album consists of covers of classic songs by artists Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Gordon Lightfoot and others. Young explains to David Fricke: "They were songs I listened to as I formulated what to do with my life." Young explains that he had "been working in the back of my mind on a roots project--'roots' being, 'Where did I come from? What made me who I am? What music has effected me over the years? What feelings have I gotten from music that really made a difference? Where did the music that I love come from? What did it sound like?' They have to resonate with me personally in my life and what I believe and how I feel, on a personal level and on world levels. "On The Road Again" is kind of a world-level song for me. It's like, 'Yes, I love this, this is how I feel, I'm that kind of guy, I AM that guy.' Then there are other songs in there that are extremely personal and loving songs that are about relationships and my life at the time. I was living those songs, so they all work for me."
The opening spoken-word track, and other spoken lines throughout the album, were addressed to Edna "Rassy" Young, Neil's mother who died in 1990. Young explains that people would use the Voice-o-Graph machine to record spoken word messages, kind of like a primitive voicemail, and that his mother would have enjoyed him sending her a message: "She would've loved it, just the fact that I was communicating and it was for her. I didn't plan that thing. Jack told me, 'You know, they used to send messages on these records. It wasn't always just music, there'd be a message.' Rather than write a letter, because maybe some people couldn't write, they used these recordings to say what they thought and send a message. So that's how that worked."
The first song on the album is Phil Ochs' "Changes". In a 2020 post to his website, Young states "Phil Ochs was one of the very greatest writers of the folk era, along with Tim Hardin and Bob Dylan. Phil wrote this song, "Changes." It's a beautiful melody and lyric. The folk duo Jim and Jean introduced me to Phil Ochs back in the sixties and "Changes" is my favorite song of Phil's. Great lyrics." In a 2023 post, he continues, "Changes" is one of the first songs that showed me what a song could be. I think Phil Ochs was one of the greats."
Young chose to record Bob Dylan's "Girl from the North Country" for the album. He explains, "I know all kinds of songs that Bob sings, but I just had to do that one. I'd never done it before. When I started playing it, I realized I don't know this song at all. I don't know the changes, I don't know how to play it. With Bob's masterful songwriting, the chords are all sideways. It sounds like simple stuff — it's only got three chords, but I'm working my ass off trying to figure out when they arrive. I love my version. That one's got changes that are just irrational. Yet the song just bobbles along. It's a great sympathetic character Bob created, the way he treats his love. It's really beautiful - the respect that he shows."
Young sings Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death" for the record, after having unintentionally used the song as the basis of his own "Ambulance Blues" years earlier. According to Young, "Ambulance Blues" "is another song that I wrote is based on Bert Jansch's "Needle Of Death," it's almost the same chords, you can see how I copped all the changes, I was so influenced by him I basically rewrote his song with a different theme. That's the folk process, which is something that some people are still into. I am, so it means a lot to me."
The album features two selections by fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot. Young shares his admiration for the singer-songwriter: "He's a master. I love Gordy's songs. Both of the songs of his I did on the record are very touching and very emotional to me."
Recording
Young was inspired to record the album after visiting White's Third Man Records complex and seeing the Voice-o-Graph machine that White had painstakingly restored. White states "We spent a year and half restoring it and getting it in tiptop shape. It sounds really incredible now. People used it to send audio letters to each other. People in the army, in wars, sending messages home, it was pretty amazing." Visitors to the shop are able to record their own records on site. "Well, I was visiting with my friend Jack in Nashville and we were using his studio for a Willie Nelson tribute that we did for Willie's birthday. Jack and I share a love of gizmos. We like mechanical things. So Jack was showing me some of his old gizmos and at the same time he was recording. People were coming and recording on the booth because it's like from the state fair or something so people used to make records and send them to their friends, you'd put in a quarter or whatever and be able to record a record and send it. It was kind of like the email and voice mail of the day. So he was showing me this and people were coming in and making records, and the limit of the duration is two minutes and twenty seconds." Young continues: "They'd come in and sing a song. I thought, 'This is cool. Look at these people — everybody's making records.' I said to Jack, 'I could probably make an album in this thing.' It's all about sitting down and playing a song and doing the whole thing. There's no production, it's just a performance. It's about the essence of the songs. We planned it out, and after three days we'd done them all."
The Voice-o-Graph recording machine limited Young and White to only recording a couple minutes of music at a time. For each song, several takes were recorded and then later transferred to tape and spliced together. Young explains the process to a concert audience: "A while ago I did a record that sounded like a record I did really a long time ago. A record I made in a recording booth that they used to have in State fairs, I really enjoyed making it. It was a record, you know this thing could only record for, I think, one minute forty seconds or something, then your record was over. It was for making records to send home to mum or your girlfriend or something. A way of communicating, like a 1941 email or something. And, yeah so, we, I, recently read, speaking of emails, someone said, 'It's a fake record - they couldn't really do that because the records could only play for 1:40 seconds.' and some of the songs are 5 minutes long. 'It's a fake, how did they do it?' Ok, well we did it. We played and I played for 1:40 then I played past that and I'd stop. We put in another disk and I played the rest. Kept going and we cut it all together with the magic of digital magic. Copied it and we cut it together and it still sounded like a record 'cause it was recorded on a record. So it was pretty cool. But the best thing about that was the fact that it was all these old songs by all these old guys, people I really loved when i was just starting out; people made a big difference in my life, 'cause they were great songwriters. So I was trying to pay respect to these people.
White explains the recording and editing process in more detail: "After the discs were cut, we transferred them to one–inch two–track with a 1953 Scully lathe at Third Man that was previously used by Cincinnati’s legendary King Records. We later found that the lathe had induced some noise into the transfer, but by the time we realised this, there was no time to do something about it. Because each disc could only hold 2:27 of audio, I had to do some splices on tape. The tricky part was having to varispeed the two takes before editing them so they were roughly in the same pitch. I did this with discs on which the pitch jumped dramatically in the middle of the take. I ended up having two varispeed boxes, and Richard Ealey at Blackbird Studios made me a switching unit to go between the two boxes. For something that was done with one mic in a phone booth, this project ended up being pretty complicated!"
Recording was captured using two different techniques simultaneously. Young later made a 'clean tape feed' of the album available for streaming on his website with improved sound quality over the official release.
Reception
The A.V. Club considers A Letter Home one of the best albums of the first half of 2014, calling it the "most surprising record by a guy who's built his career on surprising you".
Rolling Stone gives the album 3.5/4 stars, stating that "in its perverse way, A Letter Home is one of the most enjoyable records Young has made this century" and that it "plays like a crackly field recording from a lost world."
Awards
Album cover artist Gary Burden was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package.
Track listing
Bonus tracks from box set singles:
Personnel
Neil Young – vocals, guitar, harmonica, piano, production
Jack White – vocals, piano on "On the Road Again"; vocals, guitar on "I Wonder If I Care as Much", production
Additional roles
Gary Burden, Jenice Heo – art direction & design
Jo McCaughey, Will Mitchell – photography
Kevin Carrico, Joshua V. Smith – engineering
Mindy Watts – assistant engineering
George Ingram – recording
Bob Ludwig – mastering
Elliot Roberts – direction
DVD production
Bernard Shakey (Neil Young) – direction
Will Mitchell – production, menu sound design, sound (documentary)
Elliot Rabinowitz – executive production
Benjamin Johnson – editing, photography direction (documentary)
Hannah Choe – editing
Kris Kunz, Atticus Culver-Rease – graphics
Toshi Onuki – menu art direction
Julian Baker – hand lettering
Marcy Gensic – clearances
Box set
The box set includes:
1 standard 12" LP pressed on 180-gram black vinyl
1 "direct feed from the booth" audiophile 12" LP pressed on 180-gram black vinyl
Seven 6" vinyl 33 RPM discs pressed on clear vinyl
1 standard CD
1 standard DVD with footage from the recording
1 32-page, 12" x 12" book
Download card to redeem the digital album of the "direct feed from the booth" audiophile version
The 7th 6" disc of this set features a version of Dylan's "Blowin' In The Wind" backed with an alternate take/arrangement of "Crazy"
Charts
References
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