neil young

Any chance that Ragged Glory/Smell the Horse is getting a separate release? Already have the rest and not sure I want to spend $60 just for the one extra disc...

If you buy it now, you will guarantee that those 4 tracks are included in the next Archives box.

For which I will thank you.

"Down the Ragged Glory hole" would have been a much better title for an expanded edition imho

xpost - haha they absolutely will be in that next Archives box for sure, when it hits in 2026

I don't own physical copies of any of that stuff anymore and Young's remasters have genuinely sounded great, so I'm on board for this one.

The original Ragged Glory disc came out near the end of the 'too quiet' era of CD mastering, so that is a welcome upgrade.

ha the LP is pretty quiet as well, it's a long one

I understand why vinyl mastered at a low volume is not ideal due to signal/noise ratio inherent in the medium but I don’t think I understand why it’s an issue for CDs

I think it's just that they didn't really know what they were doing back then w/r/t CD mastering

Freedom and Ragged Glory (and Lou Reed’s New York, and probably a bunch of others I’m forgetting) came out during the uncanny valley period where CDs hadn’t quite taken over, and labels still felt a kind of default need to release vinyl. But releasing a double LP was expensive, and also constituted A Statement: even in 1989, if New York was released on two LPs (despite being 56 minutes) it would’ve changed the conversation around and perception of that record. It would’ve seemed more ambitious than it was.

So far I'm really refreshed by World Record and most of Toast---meanwhile, the solo acoustic tour is upcoming:

Young has prepared a setlist of roughly 15 rarities comprised of songs that he says “apply to my life right now,” including the 1982 “Trans” outtake “If You Got Love,” “Prime of Life” from 1994’s “Sleeps With Angels,” and “Song X” from his 1995 Pearl Jam collaboration “Mirror Ball.”

Fans can still expect to hear Young play his most beloved, well-known hits though he estimates that 80% of the performance will be dedicated to his die-hard fans. “They’re not new songs,” he said. “They’re old songs. But I wake up with them in my head every morning. They are songs that apply to my life right now and apply to everyone’s lives in this era that we’re in. Some of them were written 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, but never really played live.”

The tour is said to kickstart with a four or five-night residency at a “tiny, little unknown theater that’s close to one of the most well-known theaters in the world” on the West Coast, with the official locations to be confirmed tomorrow.

Variety coverage I hadn't seen when first posted in April:

Neil Young and Stephen Stills Bring Buffalo Springfield Classics Back to Life in Greek Theatre Autism Benefit

The original Ragged Glory disc came out near the end of the 'too quiet' era of CD mastering, so that is a welcome upgrade.

I understand why vinyl mastered at a low volume is not ideal due to signal/noise ratio inherent in the medium but I don’t think I understand why it’s an issue for CDs

The late '80s and early '90s were arguably the best years for CD mastering because they happened right before the "loudness wars" where everyone had to have their CD's mastered with more and more compression, for the asinine reason that they didn't want their music to come off as "quiet" if it followed much louder (i.e. compressed) music in the CD changer or on the radio. You even saw this happen on TV where the stupid commercials would blare out at obnoxiously loud volumes because they were compressed to be far louder than the actual TV programs they were interrupting.

One of the selling points of digital was that mastering the music at low volumes had no issues with surface noise from vinyl, and the reason you needed to master at low volumes was dynamics. This was especially true for classical music, particularly orchestral works, which is partly why digital recording acquired a reputation for being this fancy, expensive process in the beginning - classical music embraced it early on because of digital's advantage in recording highly dynamic music.

Regardless of what you record in digital, there's a ceiling where if you try overload the signal, it results in horrid distortion, and not the pleasing kind you'd get in the analog world. The common thing with digital is that it doesn't fail "gracefully" the way analog does. You see this in film too - when things blow out or have too little exposure, film still captures some kind of detail and information, and every kind of film stock will have some inherent characteristic that makes it succeed or fail at that level in a unique way. With digital, a hard limit means it just clips everything off into complete and unnatural looking black or white. In the case of music, it's just a square wave that sounds like shit.

So if you had this dynamic signal that's already close to the limit but want it "louder," you'd have to compress the signal. If you were really inept, you'd just jack up the output level and clip off the signal, which sadly happens quite a bit too. All of this incredibly stupid because all anyone has to do as a listener is raise the volume on playback - in other words, there's no good reason to needlessly compromise the music just because a listener wants it to be louder, it's literally why you have a volume dial, but such is the world we're living in.

Apologies if the last paragraph came off as an insult, it wasn't intended that way. I used to complain about CD's being quieter than others until I wised up and really started to notice how bad "louder" remasters sounded compared to older CD's. If you rip them on a computer, match the volume levels (by dropping the louder one), you can hear on a good pair of headphones how bad the compression is and how the "quiter" mastering is actually fuller and more dynamic when played back with the volume cranked up.

by dropping the louder one

By this, I mean opening the file in a sound editing program and decreasing the overall volume or output signal there. If you open the quieter mastering and try raising the volume or output level there, you end up clipping the signal as mentioned above. Only raise the volume using the speaker or playback application or equipment's volume output, don't do it by manipulating the digital file.

Hell yeah---see also: Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression

Music Into Noise: The Destructive Use Of Dynamic Range Compression part 2

And several others, if you search Dynamic Compression, or even just Compression.

I mainly wanted a slightly louder Ragged Glory because I still remember this one time had been listening to it and then later putting on some later & more loudly mastered album on while forgetting to adjust the volume and nearly blowing my head off through the headphones.

Maybe this is in the other thread, but when did the 'loudness wars' really get rolling? There seem to be plenty of nice sounding major label new releases and reissues in the mid-90s.

It was a steady and gradual build. You can find some examples as early as 1992 but they were likely to use a modest bit of limiting or compression just to make it louder - the majority of releases weren't like that. More releases did in 1993, and I'd say by 1994 it was probably a majority of them. Once that happened, people started adding even more compression, and it kept creeping up and up. I remember going through the Smashing Pumpkins catalog, which IIRC had something close to an annual release from 1991 to 2000 (maybe more like one every 18 months), and you could hear and see how the problem got worse and worse with each release. IIRC 1995's Mellon Collie was the first time where it became kind of egregious, and by the time they got to Machina II it was pretty horrid. Just as well - I think their records grew substantially worse and worse after Mellon Collie.

Can Weld be improved upon with a remastering? As in, was it not mixed to death by Neil and is unsalvageable? I'm clueless when it comes to this stuff.

Jimmy McDonough wrote about this in Shakey, but David Briggs made a better mix that was released on the now out-of-print LaserDisc edition. Neil himself admits the album mix (used for all audio formats) wasn't good and that Briggs was right, but Neil has never bothered to correct things. Now would be a good time though!

ty for new DN

I don't reckon Neil would want to delay a reissue project to tinker pointlessly with the audio though

lol

i've got the "briggs mix" of weld (on mp3 lol) ... can't remember it being some kind of insane revelation, but I'll check it out again. Weld rules in any mix!

Weld rules in any mix!

This. My first Neil.

My current World Record fave, along with "Love Earth," is the here-atypically thudsome "Chevrolet"---figures a car song would be the one to ignite all these natural resources he's been saving, and deservedly so! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcpdFfJqmYc

Someone was nice enough to make me a CD-R copy of their LaserDisc audio years ago after I told him everything Jimmy McDonough wrote about that particular mix - from what I can recall, it was just a better, clearer mix, like a better "life-like" representation of a presumably well-engineered live show. I don't have the CD-R's where I am now because I put a copy on my iPod, and unfortunately I forgot it and left it behind in the same family home where I have those CD-R's in storage.

you sound like the man himself, if you swapped out "iPod" for "Pono"

can't decide if i want to see him on this west coast tour in July or not.

solo, and supposedly he's rehearsing songs he rarely plays?

by "want" i mean "can i make this happen among all my other commitments, money-wise, etc." of course.

got a ticket for one of the LA shows ... it's been way too long and my brothers and I have been promising we'd go see him together at least one more time ... tickets were actually a little less pricey than I expected.

how much, TW? if you don't mind me asking.

my local Live Nation shed has just stopped publishing ticket prices altogether.

$95 + fees — those were the "cheap" seats, but the Ford is pretty small, I don't think there's a bad seat in the house.

yeah, it is ridiculous that you don't really know what tickets are going to cost until the last minute and you're sort of "committed"

yup. sucks.

and yet i get it ... they put "$59 general, $99 reserved" or whatever on the website and, esp for popular shows, pretty soon they're on TicketMaster for $200, $300 via Verified Resale so they look legit, and the venue gets 100 calls. i wouldn't want those 100 calls either!

just a crappy deal all around, except for Live Nation's Board of Directors, I guess.

can't decide if i want to see him on this west coast tour in July or not.

solo, and supposedly he's rehearsing songs he rarely plays?

― alpine static, Wednesday, June 14, 2023 11:09 AM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

i went to the 2018 show at the orpheum in minneapolis and i joked to the two people i was with "watch him open with last trip to tulsa" (just referencing an obscure one) and he actually opened with it haha

I listened to Life for the first time since 1989, or I guess when I lost my cassette copy, and I really liked "around the world" : it seemed like with this recording, he was trying to incorporate fairlight/synclavier shit into the Crazy horse format, instead of trying to turn into Y.M.O./Kraftwerk re: trans, and this song kinda succeeds as such! I think at this point he hadn't turned into Mr. "digital is the dark ages of sound"? I had never heard Landing on Water until a few weeks ago, which it seems is him saying to Geffen that he'll do it their way and make it with Danny "Building the Perfect Beast" Kootch, and I rather like it because it is a not-so-obvious obvious mismatch.

Played the new Ducks OBS release again this morning on a long drive for work, surprised by how much I love this whole thing.

just need to post a lament that i'll probably never see him live.

I think at this point he hadn't turned into Mr. "digital is the dark ages of sound

but he's not talking about synths, he's talking about recording. kraftwerk, pretty much all of the original synth pop stuff would have been recorded analog.

you sound like the man himself, if you swapped out "iPod" for "Pono"

Hah, I'll never get rid of my iPod, more for practical reasons than anything else. It's got too much music on it, i.e. there's no way I'm going to load all of that into my phone, plus I recharge my phone a lot less when I don't use it for music. And I hate AirPods - headphone/ear monitor cables never bothered me.

I wish I splurged and flown to one of the Crazy Horse shows in 2019 with Nils Lofgren. Ah well...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIrlAwZaHK0

Part 2 of 2 of that 2019 show:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnU0wXYUcDU

but he's not talking about synths, he's talking about recording.

Everything from Freedom through Harvest Moon was recorded digitally. Took him four albums (or five if you count Arc separately) to realize he didn’t like digital recording.

consistency is not the man's strong suit

yeah the middle 8 of “around the world” is spectacular, life is underrated

it was a bit startling to hear the solo “long walk home demo” that opens disc 1 of archives 2

that one goes even further back — to the buffalo springfield days!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAN9WjegRcU

More dates than I'd seen:
http://view.e.warnerrecords.com/?qs=d1572806c6d918abf895d4c03a09dff4127b32999b3bfb57cecbc7e6b28ba78ead002973ee97d97efb6952d4f3397701ce90e2f597e0efe21629f3f705d522133dce7f02d2448e72

I said I liked most of Toast, but spoke too soon, although remain sold, as I was immediately, on the opener, which he opens with a chirp, "Don't say you love me (don't say you love me)," then he throws up a fence of attractive sounds, going this way and that: one of those things only he is likely to do, although I guess it's kinda like something more enigmatic on Oar---Neil's oblique strokes can make their own sense, though, and this is a promising start to an album about or alluding to marital problems, mixed emotions and all.
But "Standing in The Light of Love," though ok, tends toward/points to several that are either personally or generically (FM Important Rock) predictable, rhetorical (although I do kinda like the well-intended or good-intentions gesture of "How Ya Doin'?")
---then there's "I don't wanna let/The good times roll," with a riff that seems to leave a note out, nudging, or just plain bending, slacking, like, "Uh-uh," yet letting the bad times roll into a recognizable boogie, "Boom Boom Boom," not John Lee Hooker's boogie of that title, or anybody else's, not too much: it's his, customized and blended, singing like himself, while also suggesting Canned Heat's Al "Blind Owl" Wilson, who based his vocal sound on Skip James, one of those bluesmen long disappeared, who was retrieved in the 60s, played some more, prob outlived young outidery Blind Owl, eerie historical associations adding to the overlapping eerie canals ov keening---also Neil's playing like himself, while sometimes taking turns that suggest young Carlos Santana and Peter "Black Magic Woman" Green, making his own way through all that---anyway I have to give it up for

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1RHI9XfOec

So this has quickly turned out to be a song that, when it plays itself in my head, I feel more like doing what I'm doing. Good thing it's so long.

Perhaps "boogie" is not quite the right term, category-wise, but in effect it boogies, it surely grooves, anyway, in thee Neilian.