Music [3]

Neil Young on Tonight's the Night

“It was an LP recorded in audio vérité, if you will, while completely intoxicated on Jose Cuervo tequila. We would not start recording until midnight, when we were so fucked up we could hardly walk…When I played Tonight’s the Nightfor Mo Ostin and Lenny Waronker at Reprise, as was always my habit to do when I handed a record in, Mo asked, ‘Neil, are you sure you want to put that out? It’s really rough, and it may not be received well.’ I said yes. He understood why, which makes him one of the greatest record men of all time. Then we got in the Black Queen and rode home to the ranch, at least a full year after Tonight’s the Night had been originally recorded. The car was there for every event tied to that record. Every night after those sessions, we rode the Black Queen home to the Sunset Marquis on Alta Loma in Hollywood, weaving down Santa Monica Boulevard at three or four in the morning, completely wrecked on tequila, and we made it, so there is a God.”

With tracks from Nashville, the ranch and Los Angeles - plus a bittersweet song called "White Line" that Young had recorded as an acoustic duet with the Band's Robbie Robertson in England a few days before CSNY's Wembley show - Homegrown was shaping up to be a major work. After some mixing was completed, Elliot Mazer headed off for England, where he played a tape of the album for the head of Chrysalis Records, who then told Mo Ostin he was sure they had another five-million seller. But then a funny thing happened. Young changed his mind.

Blame it on that blurry evening at the Chateau Marmot, where Young had played Homegrown back to back with Tonight's the Night for a bunch of stoned musicians including Rick Danko. "At which point Rick the Prick said, 'Go with the raw one,'" said Mazer who was devastated when Young decided to jettison Homegrown in favor of Tonight's the Night.

So long woman I am gone,
so much pain to go through.
Come back maybe I was wrong.

For her first new song in five years, Joanna Newsom is giving us a lesson in Native American history. ‘Sapokanikan’ – the first track to be taken from her fourth album ‘Divers’ – is named after an area of land in the cove of New York’s Hudson River. It’s where the Native American people known as the Lenape once settled, and is now known as Gansevoort Street in the city’s bohemian Greenwich Village.

At some points, it seems as if Newsom is singing about the settlers’ legacy (“The map o’ Sapokanikan is centered and devilled/The landowning leveled by some unrecorded and powerful hand,” she sings at the track’s start, adding later “the records they left are cryptic at best”). But, at others, she seems to be putting herself into the story and imagining herself as part of the group, like when she trills about seeing someone “depart for the western front where I walk my cow.”

Musically, it’s a familiar sound of horns, piano and flute combining into something pretty, elegant and enchantingly old-fashioned. Here, they bounce just as the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed video (who Newsom worked with on Inherent Vice) shows her skipping through the Village streets, capturing the calm of a snowy day and the pretty scenery of the night as she goes. As she wanders around, her voice goes from soothing and soft to shrill, Kate Bush dramatics. Lyrically, ‘Sapokanikan’ might be bookish, but its melodies are more than infectious enough to leave it ringing in your head long after its five minute run time has passed.

Bluebottle wrote:

Ringdrotten wrote:

I'm putting tinfoil up on the windows..