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NY Times: Neil Young comes clean

September 19, 2012
Neil Young Comes Clean
By DAVID CARR

Driving down the hill above his ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of San Francisco, Neil Young took a deep whiff of the redwood forest momentarily serving as the canopy for his 1951 Willys Jeepster convertible.

“I can still remember how it smelled when I first pulled in here — I was driving this car,” he said, recalling the trip in 1970 when he bought the place and named it Broken Arrow, after the Buffalo Springfield song.

The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said.
Young, 66, spotted this land out the window of a plane banking out of San Francisco four decades ago and now owns nearly 1,000 acres of it. His song “Old Man” is a tribute to the caretaker who first showed him the place.

“I ran out of money, so I had to sell some of it,” he said. “That’s O.K., because it was too big. Everything happens for a reason.” He kept his eyes on the narrow road through the giant redwoods.

It was hard to reconcile the affable guy motoring along on a sunny day with his past incarnations: the portentous folkie of “Ohio,” the rabid anti-commercialist who gave MTV the musical middle finger with “This Note’s For You,” the angry rocker who threatened to hit the cameramen at Woodstock with his guitar. He was happy partly because he was here.

“For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.”

We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.”

read all on NY TIMES, Neil Young Comes Clean (has also a nice photo of Neil)

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Psychedelic Pill – review by Uncut

Uncut writes:

“OK I’m going to try and be relatively brief with this – or at least as brief as one can hope to be when dealing with the longest studio album that Neil Young’s ever made. I’ve written what I hope is an exhaustive review of “Psychedelic Pill” for the next issue of Uncut, and don’t really want to repeat myself too much.

First up; it’s great, though I’m conscious of being someone with an enormously high tolerance of Neil Young’s self-indulgences, especially when he has the bedraggled might of Crazy Horse in tow. Trying to place “Psychedelic Pill”’s excellence into some canonical ranking doesn’t make a whole deal of sense to me, in much the same way as it feels a bit pointless trying to measure up “Tempest” against “Blonde On Blonde”.

Young’s 35th studio set is best understood as the next chapter in what has been an eccentric and compelling last decade of music-making, with this time (unlike on “Americana”, blogged about here) a lot of extended jams to satisfy my favourite NY cravings.

If you’ve seen the revealed data about “Psychedelic Pill”, you’ll know about how extended those jams are: two over 15 minutes, and one – the extraordinary opener “Driftin’ Back” – stretching out to nearly half an hour by itself. You’ll have seen the sleeve, too and, in conjunction with the title, wondered exactly how psychedelic this record might be.”

read more: uncut.co.uk/blog/wild-mercury-sound/neil-young-crazy-horse-psychedelic-pill

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Psychedelic Pill – review by Rolling Stone

Neil Young and Crazy Horse Reveal Album Release Date, Tracklist
‘Psychedelic Pill’ to hit shelves on October 30
By Rolling Stone
September 11, 2012 11:25 AM ET

Neil Young and Crazy Horse have given Psychedelic Pill, their second album of 2012, an official release date of October 30th.

With a handful of tracks passing the 15-minute barrier, and opener “Driftin’ Back” clocking in at a whopping 27 minutes and 36 seconds, the followup to their folk covers record Americana will be available in double-CD and triple-LP formats. Check out the full tracklist below.

“It’s us jamming and having lots of fun,” Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro told Rolling Stone earlier this summer. “I think that [former Crazy Horse producer] David Briggs would be proud of it . . . Once he was gone, I felt like we lost our compass a bit. We had the sound and we had the big machine, and we could play anything and play pretty good, but we weren’t putting any great records together. I mean, Broken Arrow was OK. It wasn’t like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere or Rust Never Sleeps or Ragged Glory.”

Produced by Neil Young with John Hanlon and Mark Humphreys, Psychedelic Pill is the first album of original material by the full line-up of Neil Young and Crazy Horse since Broken Arrow in 1996 – though the band (minus Poncho) did back Young on his 2003 rock opera Greendale.
The band resumes their 2012 tour on October 3rd in Windsor, Ontario. It wraps up December 4th in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Track list:
Disc One:
1) Driftin’ Back (27:36)
2) Psychedelic Pill (3:26)
3) Ramada Inn (16:49)
4) Born in Ontario (3:49)
Disc Two:
1) Twisted Road (3:28)
2) She’s Always Dancing (8:33)
3) For the Love of Man (4:13)
4) Walk Like a Giant (16:27)
Bonus Track:
5) Psychedelic Pill (Alternate Mix)

Read more: rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-and-crazy-horse-reveal-album-release-date-tracklist-20120911

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Psychedelic Pill – album cover

album cover:

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Psychedelic Pill – album tracks

The tracklisting for the upcoming Neil Young & Crazy Horse album “Psychedelic Pill“:

Disc: 1

1.   Driftin Back [26 min long]
2.   Psychedelic Pill
3.   Ramada Inn
4.   Born In Ontario

Disc: 2

1.   Twisted Road
2.   She’s Always Dancing
3.   For The Love Of Man
4.   Walk Like A Giant
5.   Psychedelic Pill (Bonus Track Alternate Mix)

Tentative release date: 30th October.

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