Tell me about your time in lockdown. Between working on archival releases and new music, did you ever have any downtime?
Just a little bit of downtime with Daryl. We could put aside time for each other and do things together, but she’s very creative and she has a lot to do, too. So we just do these things, and the Archives is gigantic. Volume III is the biggest volume of all three that I’ve made so far, almost twice as big as the other ones. It covers a longer period of time. I think it has 13 albums in it. I make new albums now. The other Archives, I used to do this album or that album. And there’s highlights from albums, but I go by the period and create a new album around the making of the album that came out.
What other highlights can you share?
There’s some really beautiful things. The 13th disc is an album called Summer Songs that I put together on tape and then put it on the shelf, because I was doing these new songs I’d just written. I was going really fast at the time and writing a lot of songs. So I just put the song down and then I’d do it again and sing the harmony part, sitting in the same place without moving, after I did the first one, so it almost sounds like the two were right on top of each other, and it has a very interesting sound to it.
I located this group of songs through some questions asked by people who would write me letters at the Archives, and they are very helpful. These are the soul of the Archives community — these people who write letters and talk about things that they remember, because I can go into the Archives and find things and make them come to life, these memories that people bring out. So I found Summer Songs, there’s four albums that it’s from. These songs are real early, and they weren’t heard again for years. That’s how that ends, and there’s 11 albums in between it. It’s crazy.
I can't exactly pinpoint why his recent music turns me off but it has something to do with the melodies. They are very - obvious. Along with the wordplay/rhyming. I can basically guess the next word having never heard a song.
Also, Nils being a finger picking guitar player in crazy horse.....
tragabigzanda wrote:Initial thoughts on Barn, anyone? I need to spend more time with it, but knee jerk reaction is that it feels like modern day Neil's closest thing to the ditch trilogy since that era. Everything is sloppy and off-the-cuff, but oddly charming. And with just two exceptions, the songs are surprisingly succinct.
This might be much better than I'd anticipated.
Listening now. I think Crazy Horse really loses something without Poncho -- Nils brings something entirely different to the table, and he's a great player, but it doesn't feel like Crazy Horse, no matter how much Neil himself gets into that mode. That said, I'm enjoying the album -- I think it's impossible for me to not at least passively enjoy any instance of Neil turning on the distortion. It's making me want to listen to Psychedelic Pill -- now that's a late-era tour de force.
Last edited by Kevin Davis on Fri December 10, 2021 4:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.
