Neil Young is as unpredictable as he is prolific. Since the ambitious, if ill-conceived, Greendale appeared in 2003, Young has released albums as musically diverse and creatively uneven as Living With War, Fork In The Road and Psychedelic Pill.
For every classic like On The Beach, Tonight’s The Night and Harvest Moon, there’s been an intermittent stinker. Young sails blithely and bravely on, confounding expectation at every turn.
This time he has recorded an entire album, A Letter Home, in a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. The result sounds like someone has dusted off an old scratched 78 and played it on an equally archaic gramophone. It should be a disaster, but it isn’t.
Why? Basically A Letter Home, with the title referring to an intimate message from Young to his late mother, is a raw and personal record, even though it is comprised solely of covers.
Bert Jansch’s chilling Needle Of Death, which inspired Young’s Needle And The Damage Done and Ambulance Blues is a masterpiece, whilst there has never been a better version of Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind. Extraordinary – and brilliant.
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