Music: {allcanada} Album of the week: Neil Young's 'A Letter Home'

Monday, May 26, 2014

{allcanada} Album of the week: Neil Young's 'A Letter Home'

Breaking Bad / The Walking Dead / Get Paid To Work From Home

It's great to have the old weird Neil back, the restless experimenter of Trans, Re-ac-tor, Greendale and other albums that puzzled, freaked out and often intrigued his longtime followers.

A Letter Home (* * * out of four) is a concept album, recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth at Jack White's Third Man Records in Nashville. The result is deliberately low-fi, crackly and relic-sounding, befitting an idea that finds Young rediscovering folk/country gems from the past half-century that still inspire.

Both "sides" of the album start with him recording a chatty letter to his late mother. That leads into casual, quirky covers of 10 songs from artists who influenced him, including Dylan (Girl From the North Country), Willie (Crazy,On the Road Again) and Springsteen (My Hometown). Along with standout readings of Tim Hardin's Reason to Believe and Bert Jansch's Needle of Death, the most effective material is his nods to fellow Canadian Gordon Lightfoot via Early Morning Rain and If You Could Read My Mind.