Neil Young, Morning Albums, and J. Penn Wiggins

I want to introduce a new feature, or perhaps more accurately an upcoming one, at the $10+ level, which after all these months I still think of as the $2+ level. For a while now Penn and I have had a daily ritual. Every night we listen to Max Richter’s Sleep—an eight and a half hour piece of ambient/modern classical designed for the use case all of that suggests. I’m almost always up before the album is over, and as I head in to take my shower I queue up another album to play afterwards, which also serves to wake Penn up. It started as an opportunity to help Penn explore new music—I try to keep it eclectic—and has evolved into him playing with criticism by writing short reviews of the albums on Bluesky.

Last week I embarked on a long focused stretch of albums, and at the end of it Penn and I decided that the feature had outgrown Bluesky, so instead we’re going to bring it here as a weekly feature for $10+. (This is part of a general expansion of the Patreon that’ll roll out over February to serve as a joint Patreon for the two of us. This won’t involve me pulling back on anything—it’ll be strictly additive, with his solo work joining my solo work and our collaborations.) That’ll be along in a few days—he’s writing up Pet Sounds today. But today I wanted to talk about that focused stretch of albums and its construction, alongside Penn’s reviews of it, as an intro to the forthcoming feature.

So, the other day I was having lunch at my favorite local Chinese place while an edible kicked in, and I was listening to my algorithmically generated station on Apple Music when it threw up “When God Made Me,” which is a song of Neil Young’s 2005 album Prairie Wind. Neil Young had been a little bit on my mind anyway—I’d just reorganized our record collection, including incorporating some stuff from Anna’s late aunt’s collection, and had been eyeing the copy of Harvest we now owned. And so I pulled up his Wikipedia article, because I was curious about the shape of his career. And the thought I immediately had was that Penn wanted to be a Neil Young fan, he just didn’t know it. (That sentence reveals a lot about our relationship, really.)

So I set about creating a survey of Young’s career with the goal of hooking Penn. My goal wasn’t completism, nor a greatest hits tour. Rather, I wanted to pick albums that would captivate Penn and show him what I thought he’d be interested in. I want to stress that I was not a big Neil Young fan, nor even a small one. I did my end of the work off little more than Wikipedia articles and stray tracks listened to in order to get a vibe—I’d listened to exactly zero of these albums in full. Which is its own neat project, and gets at some of the thought processes by which I do similar planning in advance of doing the actual reading for Eruditorum and LWIA.

So here, as a sort of overture to Penn’s reviews becoming a feature here,  the albums I picked, what I was thinking in picking them, and Penn’s reviews.

Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 Buffalo Springfield Again

Young’s career started with him as a member of a band, and so I decided to as well, not least because it let me build up some of the story I was telling without tipping my hand to Penn—I presented this as a perfectly ordinary morning selection. I was torn between this and the band’s self-titled debut, but ultimately decided the “warring solo albums” vibe of this one would set up my later themes better. Also, Apple Music had this one flagged as essential, and I tend to put any stock in that editorial curation.

Penn:

You know that thing “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed?” I kinda feel like that about this record. It has flashes of brilliance, and such vast stretches of mediocrity between.  This is an album that has no idea what it’s trying to be.

C-

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 Déjà Vu

Young’s other, more notable band. By this point Penn could obviously discern that I was up to something, but as I pointed out, there were a lot of directions I could go from here. Again, my thought was to let Neil Young kind of emerge out of his context. This provided any constraint with Young himself—I rejected Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and After the Goldrush as starting points specifically to keep these two albums from being read as Neil Young albums.

Penn:

This is very tidy music, usually outright pretty with its soft harmonies and precise guitar. It suffers for this, imo, and when it reaches for rock it soars at it.

Hilariously, the best songwriter among them is Joni Mitchell.

C+

Neil Young’s 1972 Harvest

The other advantage of opening with two band-based albums was that it let me introduce Young’s solo work with an album that tangibly lives up to its reputation. As Anna remarked, “it’s the one with the songs you’ve heard of on it.” This is obviously positioned to make the sale, although I was prepared to have it go to the next album. But it’s a clear banger of an album—one of the only things there’s just no debate over whether to include in a Neil Young overview.

I was obviously by this point at all sweating Penn’s grades, which rarely strayed into the Cs, but I also was pretty confident I had this, and his initial reticence about the group efforts was going to turn out to be setup for a triumphant moment where he fell in love. I mean, seriously, he’d even mentioned to me that he just had an instinctive bias against Neil Young. I had this in the bag.

Penn:

It can only be so surprising that I like this.

In the last two of these albums, Young has been responsible for most of the experimental and weird songs. Of course on his own, his inner music goblin free, he makes something like this.

A

Neil Young & Crazy Horse's 1979 Rust Never Sleeps

So after that, I spilled the beans. What I specifically presented it as was a bid for Neil Young to be adopted as “his guy.” Which is a role he has for creators he particularly vibes with. (Russell T Davies is his guy lately too, and I should probably see if I can get him to do an essay on Queer as Folk and Cucumber, which we’ve been watching.) The core of this is that Young is a weird little guy—an archetype that Penn has long vocally identified with. He’d largely figured that out with “A Man Needs a Maid,” a song on Harvest that I had no idea existed but that features a genuinely unhinged use of strings.

The other thing I figured would appeal is the ethos of “rust never sleeps.” One of the things Penn is really interested in is his visceral aversion to stillness. And that’s the overt theme of this album. He also loves what we call formalist bullshit, and the structure of this—an acoustic first side, an electric second side, bookended by versions of the same song—was going to appeal to him. I also knew that one of the things he’d appreciate was Young’s influence on grunge, and so the majestically overdriven guitars of “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” (and if you’ve never heard it, do so, preferably right after listening to “My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”) were going to appeal. Indeed, if Harvest had failed to seal the deal, they were where I knew I’d have it.

Penn:

Apparently neither does Neil Young.

This is a formalist weirdo of an album, and it refuses to sit still; a slow frog boil from moody solo acoustic to giant fuzzed out grunge guitar.

Lyrically, too, it is all movement and dream logic.

A+

Neil Young’s 1982 Trans

There’s a point in the course of any really good scheme where you realize that it’s working because the bits you didn’t plan are coming off as well as the bits you did. For instance, I had forgotten that Neil Young, in the course of getting sued for not sounding enough like Neil Young, did an electronic album. I’d been thinking of Young as a guitar guy for Penn—he’s really gotten into the instrument in the last six months, and he was kind of on the market for a favorite guitarist. But Penn was a synths guy before he was a guitar guy, so an electronic album? Right up his alley. And then it turned out to be about communicating with Young’s disabled son, which is also a topic near to Penn’s heart.

Penn:

Of course my guy has a  synth pop cyberpunk album. Why am I even surprised?

A glorious turn to the synthetic, as he struggles to communicate with his disabled son. He’s painting an electric future with that decidedly 80s awe and anxiety, and it is feral. He is perfect.

A+

Neil Young’s 1989 Freedom

This one was an odd one to pick. I could have done Ragged Glory, which is his more overtly grunge-interacting album. But I kind of preferred to cap off the story of Young’s eighties, and then to treat the 90s separately, even if I did intend to do them… idiosyncratically. So I did his big 1989 comeback album, which is also widely treated as part of his Godfather of Grunge status. Still, largely the one I was least certain of, and I’m not sure Ragged Glory wouldn’t have been better.

Penn:

Aptly named, this album sprawls out across Young’s range of style freely. We have soft harmonies, vaguely incomprehensible stories and country twang. We have distorted rock guitar, driving rhythm and disillusionment.

And also my favorite Emmylou Harris song.

A

Neil Young & Crazy Horse’s 1991 Arc

I’d already largely made up my mind to do this when I found out Neil Young has a noise album. But he did—thirty-five minutes of spliced together amp noises. And once I knew that, there was never any serious question that it was going in the mix. In fact, I largely cleared the room for it, ignoring Ragged Glory and Sleeps With Angels from his grunge phase and, arguably more controversially, Harvest Moon, although I really didn’t want to go back to Young’s acoustic side at this exact point in the story. Much like skipping Tonight’s the Night and Zuma in the 70s, and for that matter like skipping Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and After the Gold Rush, I figured I’d leave Penn room to explore further on his own. Arc was the album he most needed to know existed.

Penn:

Guitar feedback, cacophonous drums, and the ghostly remnants of song meld into an experimental soundscape. The audience cheers.

Young is playing. He can’t stop changing and making new art, so why should his recordings stay the same? It’s bloody brilliant.

A+

Neil Young’s 2010 Le Noise

The biggest time jump forward, in part because Young’s hyper-prolific late career was much harder to figure out the highlights of. Young working with Daniel Lanois on a guitar-tone focused album was a pretty obvious choice of ones to do, though. This one was weird to discover was a video album—I got out of the shower and immediately found myself very puzzled.

Penn:

A collaboration among Young, some guitars, and producer/fellow sound nerd Lanois, this is an album of decadent timbres: buttery soul rumbling bass, rattling grunge tones, and vast echoing acoustic sections.

Just exquisitely recorded rock music.

A-

Neil Young’s 2023 Before and After

With a barely month-old album that’s a career retrospective to boot, there was never any real doubt how I’d end this, and there was a real fun to walking right up to the doorway of the present. It also let me have one final surprise—Young blends the song transitions together on this acoustic survey of his career, an acoustic version of the DJ mix, a genre and medium Penn is again, profoundly into.

Penn:

This is such a stripped back, simple record.  Stark solo acoustic arrangements of songs from across his career showcase the age in his voice.

It feels intimate—like a gift to himself. A new shape for some old works, so they too, need not sit still.

A+