Neil Young has arrived at a milestone that few recording artists ever reach. His new album is the 50th of his long career. And even at this late stage, he remains a maverick figure with distinctly unorthodox methods.
Young’s new album is titled Second Song, and is the second he has recorded with his band The Chrome Hearts.
The four members of The Chrome Hearts are guitarist Micah Nelson (the youngest son of county music legend Willie Nelson), bassist Corey McCormick, drummer Anthony LoGerfo and legendary keyboardist Spooner Oldham.
A veteran session musician, Oldham was part of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section in the ’60s, and played on classic soul hits including When A Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge and I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You) by Aretha Franklin.
Second Song was recorded at at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studios in Malibu, California and produced by Lou Adler, whose credits include Carole King’s multi-million selling masterpiece Tapestry.
In a new interview with MOJO magazine, Young discusses his unconventional approach to making new music.
He says of his writing process: “If I have an idea, just in order to preserve it, I’ll sit down and play whatever I can. Usually there’s a lot of mistakes, and I’m still finding it, but that’s what I record. I know where I’m trying to go. I can tell by listening.”
He also explains why he likes his backing band to be unrehearsed and unfamiliar with the new songs when they begin recording.
“You don’t want to think about it,” Young says. “You don’t want to have it practiced. The whole idea is to not know what you’re doing.”
Producer Lou Adler also tells MOJO that he heard very little of the material for this album before they set to work at Shangri-La studios.
“It’s a little unusual from my normal way of producing – not a little, a lot,” Adler says. “You have to look for the cracks and offer your assistance, input, opinion. Everything just sort of happened. We started, and then it went.”
It is reported that Young and his band cut four tracks for this album within the first day. Young has a basic rule of allowing just three takes of a particular song before it’s finished. However, he says that one song on this album required seven takes before it was completed to his satisfaction. That song is titled Earth Girl, and it is a dedication to his wife, the actor Daryl Hannah.
Young says of this song: “It has two melodies in it – one melody on top of another. One has a lot of words that come fast, and the other is more gentle. That’s one of my favourite songs. I know it describes my love for Daryl pretty well.”
He also tells MOJO that the final track on the album, I’ll Love You Forever, was also recorded with Hannah in mind, although he originally wrote it back in the ’60s for a girlfriend named Pam Smith.
I’ll Love You Forever dates back to the period when Young was in his first proper band, The Squires. But for Young, the sentiment in this song is timeless.
As he says now: “The feeling in the song was like it could have been yesterday. I was young when I wrote it, but that doesn’t matter, because that’s just the age of my body. I could have written it tomorrow.”
