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With the barkers and the colored balloons
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 08:02 pm.
On a rainy evening, I'm listening to the upcoming Neil Young live album, Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968. This is an underground legend, an album whose existence was for fourty years inferred from the release of a single track from that night, Sugar Mountain, which showed up on a couple of albums over the years, including Decade.
Yes. THAT Sugar Mountain.
The album's finally being released Dec. 2, and NPR has it up to listen to over here. Let me tell you, it's as beautiful as that lone song we've had to go on all these years. I don't know what it is about Neil's voice that I've always found so moving. It's not beautiful at all, it's very limited, and yet it's deeply touching. I think it's the combination of the shy hesitancy of his voice coupled with the haunting poetry of his songs. It's the sound of a soul singing, a lonely wistful soul gazing out across miles of clear twilight. His voice has slowly aged and mellowed and roughened over the years, so one of the delights of this album is to hear him way back when he was a young'un, and that voice still had all that living to do.
The other delight is the patter. The gig was a small coffeehouse, and the atmosphere is intimate, bringing out Neil to talk to the people as well as sing. He'd just left Buffalo Springfield, and apparently he was still so shy solo that his manager had to coax him from the hotel room to do the gig. That shyness is in evidence here; you can actually hear him ducking his head when he talks about anything odd or embarrassing.
And oh, the songs. Lover, there will be another one who'll hover over you beneath the sun... The world in his songs has an essential tenderness and sadness, even then when he was still so young. He's one of the ones I think of primarily as storytellers rather than singers, because he builds a world with his songs.
It's going on my Amazon list; definitely one to get.
On a rainy evening, I'm listening to the upcoming Neil Young live album, Sugar Mountain: Live at Canterbury House 1968. This is an underground legend, an album whose existence was for fourty years inferred from the release of a single track from that night, Sugar Mountain, which showed up on a couple of albums over the years, including Decade.
Yes. THAT Sugar Mountain.
The album's finally being released Dec. 2, and NPR has it up to listen to over here. Let me tell you, it's as beautiful as that lone song we've had to go on all these years. I don't know what it is about Neil's voice that I've always found so moving. It's not beautiful at all, it's very limited, and yet it's deeply touching. I think it's the combination of the shy hesitancy of his voice coupled with the haunting poetry of his songs. It's the sound of a soul singing, a lonely wistful soul gazing out across miles of clear twilight. His voice has slowly aged and mellowed and roughened over the years, so one of the delights of this album is to hear him way back when he was a young'un, and that voice still had all that living to do.
The other delight is the patter. The gig was a small coffeehouse, and the atmosphere is intimate, bringing out Neil to talk to the people as well as sing. He'd just left Buffalo Springfield, and apparently he was still so shy solo that his manager had to coax him from the hotel room to do the gig. That shyness is in evidence here; you can actually hear him ducking his head when he talks about anything odd or embarrassing.
And oh, the songs. Lover, there will be another one who'll hover over you beneath the sun... The world in his songs has an essential tenderness and sadness, even then when he was still so young. He's one of the ones I think of primarily as storytellers rather than singers, because he builds a world with his songs.
It's going on my Amazon list; definitely one to get.
