neil young

haha definitely some bongo action in the mix!

like this is fine but Peace Trail is his best thing in recent memory specifically because of the vibe of Keltner's odd/cool approach to drums on that record and the weird use of autotune

next up....Pocahontas! starting out with some pipe organ noodling...there was just some live applause but sounded fake (maybe?)....this is basically him doing Pocahontas just like he did the doomy pipe organ version of Like a Hurricane on Unplugged

now some solo neil electric just going "bum bum" on one note over and over and then some feedback

gonna be honest, this is like the platonic ideal of electric neil to me

okay applause at the end this is def actually a live cut

now....Cowgirl Jam....running time 10:35!

yeah i think some of this is live stuff drawn from either the desert trip fest or the telluride show?

cowgirl jam is, as you'd expect, them jamming on the cowgirl in the sand changes....

like this is good, but again fucking #bongoalert, someone toss this hippie

this is obviously neil jamming electric so it's got a certain quality but i swear promise of the real is basically like "damn dogg u ever wish crazy horse had edie brickell and the new bohemian's rhythm section??"

damn ok they got into it around 7 minutes...

neil jamming electric is one of the pure sounds of music

agreed, i could listen to him play electric guitar probably from now until the end of time tbh

i love the way his tone has, like, corroded over time

"what was good"

"yeah that was good"

"lets go over here and smoke a beer"

"sip a joint"

low-key nice little cover of "angel flying to close to the ground" with (assuming) PoTR dude singing, actually very sweet little cover, standup bass, mandolin and acoustic guitars

i swear promise of the real is basically like "damn dogg u ever wish crazy horse had edie brickell and the new bohemian's rhythm section??"

this brutally otm own has forever ruined neil and the real, thx ums

haha yes, so good

we interrupt this paradox live blog

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3cDLsAlH6YU/WrQuE55WYII/AAAAAAAAN1A/2UTc5QxaX4IzkiSXsnj7vvJTqNHCZP0WgCLcBGAs/s1600/roxy-marquee.jpg

paradox passage 4 - literally 14 seconds long and maybe not even that many notes on acoustic guitar

now...the "digging in the dirt" song is back and longer, i see now the previous version that was 1:30 was "digging in the dirt (chorus)", so basically neil did a reprise of this song before the actual song appeared?

paradox passage 5, acoustic noodling...."i was just out there takin a leak...think i heard the call of the silver eagle"....

running to the silver eagle super big japanese taiko type drum circle tom toms...big electric riff almost bo diddley....harmonica wailing...huge sounding tribal drums this is pretty cool

neil did a reprise of this song before the actual song appeared?

classic neil

it's a paradox

next up..."baby what do you want me to do"

half-assey bluesy acoustic shuffle jam on what google tells me is a jimmy reed song that elvis and albert collins also did

paradox passage 6: foghorn of feedback for 17 seconds

"Offerings" 50 second song with fingerstyle and harmonica, sounds like the intro to a song off Prairie Wind, stops at 50 seconds

"How Long?" --- 2:26 of rawly recorded delta blues fingerstyle with the PoTR dude singing...almost sounds like an instrumental outtake off A Letter Home, it's actually the blues song "Further On Up the Road" that Clapton did (i'm sure it's a cover of someone)

"Happy Together" sounds like a field recording of them walking (there's footstep sounds and they are kinda out of breath")...cover of the Turtles song

Tumbleweed...the last song...some more acoustic strumming BUT WAIT...suddenly we are transported to the land of oz! all of a sudden it's super lush strings and harp and flute like we went to heaven...or the album storytone at least...

then it goes back down to ukelele, version of the song from storytone...
actually i looked it up on youtube outside of the weird transition this actually IS "tumbleweed (solo)" from storytone as far as i can tell

and um...

that's it?

You know an artist is good when Harvest Moon receives 0 votes

well.

this is, at least on my one listen, by far the least essential most half-assed thing Neil has ever done by a wide margin. (and yes i realize that's not a small statement)

but yeah as shitty as anything he's ever done has been, there doesn't seem to be any reason for this to exist

perhaps it will make more sense in context of the film, though i suspect it will make even less sense

we're about two years from Neil putting out albums of music that is nothing but reprise versions of songs he'll never release.

i think that poll i ran a couple years back on 21st century neil young records is already in need of a major update, i was at Amoeba the other night digging into the Neil section and it was 50% Promise of the Real stuff and the covers after awhile all started to look the same.

reprise versions of songs he'll never release.

for a second i got excited about this, thinking Reprise was going to issue one of his unreleased albums

it's actually the blues song "Further On Up the Road" that Clapton did (i'm sure it's a cover of someone)

Bobby Blue Bland

That's a deliberate tongue twister name, right? Blobby?

hilarious that there's another version of "baby what do you want me to do" here, as though the version on Broken Arrow wasn't more than enough.

He nearly went into it back in 73 during a TTN show, after he made a Jimmy Reed joke and Nils didn't know who he was:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8mfpnvqi3u5xg8/NY%2011-20-73%20clip.wav?dl=0

WTF Nils?

yeah it's sorta strange that after hanging around Neil and co. since the Topanga era he never heard Jimmy Reed, haha.

haha ums thanks for liveblogging this, great read

Listening to the soundtrack now — god help me, I would love a whole album of “paradox passages”

sorry, this is pretty basic neil young but i’ve been listening to a lot of zuma and rust never sleeps, random thoughts:

zuma is a relationship album that doesn’t want to be by the end. ‘pardon my heart’ is about falling out of a love faith and then maybe falling back in (based on moments not shared?)

rust never sleeps is more adult, about passing torches on and so forth. powderfinger is so heartbreaking and moving about innocent youth. lately struck by the ‘out of the blue and into the black’ lyric - coming from nowhere and making money - “they give you this but you pay for that, and once you’re gone you can never come back” - he sounds like he’s physically cold at the end of that.

I don't think Neil regards himself as having ever possessed a "torch" to "pass"; the Rotten references are commentary if not fandom. Rust Never Sleeps is about artistic creation and growth.

And it's his best album.

no it's not

xp FP

Neil Young + Promise Of The Real
Paradox Official Motion Picture Soundtrack

http://image.e.wbr.com/lib/fe98127074640d7b74/m/1/400+NY+Promise+of+the+real.jpg

Is this cover image from the movie, I hope?

Available Now on Vinyl, High Resolution Audio, Download and Streaming
Available on CD April 20th

yes

Don't think this was posted yet, pretty interesting new interview:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-retirement-tours-are-bullshit-w517920

tl;dr: the archives website is going subscription-based; there will probably be another physical box set at some point, although the sound quality of the CDs will apparently be worse than Neil's streaming service; he's writing a SF novel.

classic neil

Rumblings and rumors about the return of Crazy Horse

if only poncho can tear himself away from gardening for a bit

Young is excited the film is finally coming out, though he seems well aware of its niche appeal. "We don’t expect everyone to like it," he says. "We're a little nervous because we're on a platform and everybody's gonna see it on the platform. It's like Facebook – people are gonna scream at you, and throw tomatoes and talk about your sex life and everything.

Neil has never actually been on Facebook has he...

omg neil's novel synopsis haha

XP A few years ago he posted to his page that he was taking it over and would handling all dispatches from there on out out, but I think he got bored with that pretty quick, because it seemed like it soon went back to more generic posts, but still any political stuff posted I'm pretty sure comes direct from him.

It's a novel called Canary. I have an agent in New York working with me on it right now. We're just finishing it. It's kind of a sci-fi thing about a guy who gets busted for a crime. He works for a power company and there's corruption in the power company and he wants to expose it, so he figures out a way to expose it and shuts down the grid a couple of times. He gets busted for doing that, and the cops come and take him out of his office, put him in a van, drug him, and he goes to a hospital somewhere. Then he wakes up and he's on a mission to pay his debt to society. That's all he cares about. Then he puts on these glasses, and they broadcast everything that he sees and he goes into different places and interacts with the people there and he's just a regular guy, but these people in this room downtown are watching everything he's doing and listening to everything. He discovers the solar company he works for is a hoax. And they're not really using solar. They're using this shit – the guy who's doing this has come up with a way to make bad fuel, the bad energy, this really ugly terrible stuff, and he's figured out a way to genetically create these animals that shit that gives the energy to make the (fuel). So he's created this new species. But the species escapes. So it's a fuckin' mess. It's a long story. So it's a novel.

idk sounds like an old guy on fb to me

It's a novel called Canary.

So it's a novel.