Day 26: Neil Young – Harvest

This album was ubiquitous to me before I even put it on for the first time this morning. As has happened a few times so far, I had the fun “Oh, this song and this song were from this album?” experience as I ran through Heart of Gold, Old Man, and The Needle And The Damage Done. I remember those songs as tepid radio noise, songs I’d heard filtered through FM decay too many times to take seriously.

So when I fired this up and “Out On The Weekend” came through my earphones, I discovered that the notes I had heard played in those aforementioned hits when they appeared on the radio were only peaks jutting from a murky surface. “Out On The Weekend” deftly uses space as an instrument, thrusting you into a cavernous sound stage where the bass and drums are the only concrete sounds. Instruments are placed very delicately: Neil’s voice, a soulful harmonica, a restless acoustic guitar, and dizzyingly dissonant peals of pedal-steel guitar cry, kept discrete enough to keep from muddling together. You are put into the room with him, especially when you hear what sounds like his harmonica scraping against the microphone (around the 2:00 mark). It’s a killer opener, as it establishes a trusting intimacy that is maintained through the album. Young’s voice has a way of sounding forced but better for it, as if he knows he can’t vibrato as well as he wants to but knows the song needs it, and the opener’s sleeve-hearted lyrics seem to get lost somewhere between the banalities on the page (“See the lonely boy, out on the weekend/Trying to make it pay./Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/Can’t begin to say”) and the sounds he emits. I could’ve actually just listened to this song all day.

The album keeps it up, running through styles in pairs of tracks. The most contentious numbers, “A Man Needs A Maid” and “There’s A World”, are constantly maligned for the inclusion of the London Symphony Orchestra. On the former, Young tries to scale a certain height with his voice, sounding low in the mix the whole time, fighting to be heard, but by the end of the song when the orchestral accompaniment is crashing down, he tries to sing against it and is drowned out. This is largely due to mastering limitations at the time: to make Young properly audible during the very loud section of the song, the volume of his voice would have to be cranked to uncomfortable levels. However, that this was not fixed on the remaster reflects on an important effect this imbalance contributed to the song. When Young cryptically confronts the difficulty of letting a woman into his life (the actress mentioned in the lyrics, his wife), the song bowls him over with its beauty, drowning out his plaintive reassurance to himself that “a man needs a maid”.

Hit or miss, every track lands somewhere and penetrates deeply. “Heart of Gold”, a true classic, teems with activity that radio over-play has made hard to notice. Young manages to fill every song with detail that manages never to sound busy. Even on his straightforward tunes, like “Are You Ready For The Country?”, the band sounds in perfect lockstep, playing off of and around each other, filling every second with shit that just plain sounds great. No matter the effect his band could have, no matter the recording techniques, it all goes out the window on “The Needle And The Damage Done”, where Young sings about losing his friends and fellow artists to drugs. He sounds like he’s in that delirium beyond despair, where one’s feelings couldn’t possibly surmount the bleakness they face. And this is where you see what lies behind all the recording techniques, the orchestra, the gleaming radio gold. Behind it all is a man exhuming an unfathomably deep store of pain, and using a pluckish guitar melody to burrow deep inside you and see whether you have it too.

Day 10: R.L. Burnside – Too Bad Jim

Oh man oh man oh man, I liked this a goddamn lot. From the opening notes of Shake ‘Em On Down I could surmise a number of things about R.L. Burnside:

1. He is probably blind.
2. He was probably in his 60s when this was recorded.
3. He was probably drinking continuously during the recording, including while singing; probably this involved a straw and a bottle of rye suspended from his neck by a frayed rope.
4. He probably has had difficulty maintaining healthy relationships.
5. The vicissitudes of his life have probably been the result of bad luck as much as bad decisions.

One look at his Wikipedia article revealed I was not too far off. This paragraph says more than enough about how beautifully, classically blues this album is:

Around 1959, he left Chicago and went back to Mississippi to work the farms and raise a family. Burnside was convicted of murder and sentenced to six months’ incarceration (in Parchman Prison) for the crime. Burnside’s boss at the time reputedly pulled strings to keep the murder sentence short, due to having need of Burnside’s skills as a tractor driver. Burnside later said “I didn’t mean to kill nobody … I just meant to shoot the sonofabitch in the head. Him dying was between him and the Lord.”

The album is not just a triumph of style, though. It’s genuinely great music. Any track from the album could stand up as a high point. The guitars on .44 Pistol positively saunter, sounding bitterly indignant. While RL’s voice is just perfect — ravaged by menthols and grain alcohol — the guitars really make it bleed. His leads are beautifully expressive, earning the phrase ‘licks’; he reaches into the deep footprints the rhythm section stomps out and plucks out the bluest chords you could imagine. He and his band are content to repeat a chord or two for a long while, letting a suggestion of a pattern linger, teasing it with flourishes, before R.L. seems to get annoyed and dig into his guitar for a second before regaining his composure. The whole sound is the blues, as far as I’m concerned: It’s a musical bad mood, and like real bad moods it juggles frustration, bitterness, disappointment, and elation, all in flashes that leave you haggard and bitter.

The complex soul of the music is especially evident in a song like Short-Haired Woman, which manages to be lazy and restless, sad and ambivalent, dismissive and insistent, blending all of these states in a true way. It’s not the garish sound of someone setting out to paint with tones, thinking “I would like this to be a sad song so it is going to be sad, and I would like it to resolve cathartically so it will eventually get upset and loud.” It is the sound of someone accustomed to strife shrugging at their misfortunes, knowing that real life, even at its worst, consists of too many concurrent feelings to be flattened out.

This album, in all its humanity, was especially invigorating today. See, I’ve now gone a week and a half without listening to music. Maybe that’s not technically accurate, but believe me it feels like it. The challenge of not being able to listen to the music I want to is the true soul of this project. The daily album is a way of assaulting my system, of expanding my horizons, of filling in some of the woefully cavernous gaps in my musical knowledge, of learning how to write about music in any kind of an effective way. But that’s all beside the point. The project is a way of instilling discipline in my life. I’ve always had a hard time sticking with things for very long. I have a hard time envisioning a year down the road, let alone constructing the things I want in my life when I get there.

Two things in my life have been relatively constant: music and writing. Music has always been my passion. Nothing mattered more when I was a kid, and not much matters more now. I wish this passion could have translated into a musical career of some sort, but I could never muster any talent on an instrument and the sad fact is I’m really not that creative. I’ve been playing piano for a while now and the best I can do is pluck out parts to songs I really like, and like enough to want to know how they operate.

“After a heart attack in 2001, Burnside’s doctor advised him to stop drinking; Burnside did, but he reported that change left him unable to play.” – Wikipedia

A friend was a bit puzzled at how abruptly I started this project. This is usually the kind of thing someone starts on January 1st. But I had been coasting for a while now, writing short stories here and there, trying to get into the right mental space to conjure a 2nd novel, and despairing at how vague an idea of the future I had. Moving to a new city has derailed my sense of continuity, and without any big career goal outside of eventually having spent enough time writing to hone my talent enough to convince someone to give me enough money for writing to pay my rent with, I needed something.

Inspired by my friend Kelsey’s blog project, Dear Mr President 365, where she has been writing a letter to the president every day for a year, I was thinking how nice it would be to have something like that: A daily task. A purpose. A small thing I have to do every day that actually draws on things I like. An opportunity to write, to converse with myself and a reader, about something that really means something to me. To learn something.

The idea for this blog hit me, and I jumped.

And so, for the next year, my life has meaning. It’s insignificant in the grand scheme of things; but it’s a concept I can stand for, trying to throw myself hard against something that has always been my greatest failing — sticking to a goal for more than a week — and in the process delineating a year in music, finding three hundred and sixty-five surprising new things to like, hate, and/or respect, gorging on a buffet of art greater than any I’ve ever tackled before.

Last night I overheard the first minute of Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place, the opening track from one of my favorite albums, and couldn’t stop hearing it all night and all morning. It was tormenting me, and calling to me. It was an itch I couldn’t not scratch. And then I got this, my random album for the day, and put it on, and immediately realized that the remainder of the year will not be a challenge; it will be an adventure.