The iconic songwriter offers a selection of tunes from across his catalog, performed live in his house and recorded with an iPad. It sounds as starkly homemade as you’d expect.
Neil Young’s live audiences this year have included a cat, several dogs, a barnyard of disinterested poultry, and Daryl Hannah. The actor, Young’s wife and quarantine partner, is also the in-house cinematographer for the Fireside Sessions, an endearingly homemade series of performance videos shot on an iPad in and around their Colorado home. These brief sets, uploaded to Neil Young Archives, Young’s personal website and idiosyncratic high-resolution streaming platform, effectively constitute his touring for the year. That makes The Times, which documents a July Fireside Sessions performance of topical and socially conscious songs from across Young’s vast catalog, something like his newest live release.
The iPad’s rudimentary digital recording capabilities give The Times a lo-fi but distinctly modern starkness that stands in contrast to Young’s longstanding fixation on sound quality and love of vintage (and expensive) analog gear. The raw sound, mixed and mastered to the fullest extent possible, carries a certain populist immediacy, capturing Young’s voice through the same consumer-level technology available to everybody else. After Young’s 50-plus years making records, The Times is a new kind of homegrown.
Listening to The Times feels a bit like checking in on a cool older relative’s social media feed to affirm they haven’t gone QAnon-level bananas during quarantine. Young mercifully has not. The collection’s two songs that he hasn’t previously released are “Lookin’ for a Leader 2020,” which updates 2006’s “Lookin’ for a Leader” with lyrics about Black Lives Matter, and a cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” Though both affirm Young’s commitment to righteousness, neither hit particularly hard as music. “The Times” feels too vague, and “Lookin’ For A Leader 2020” too specific. Both are easier to appreciate as emotional windows into Young than statements unto themselves.
“Ohio,” Young’s 1970 protest song about the National Guard’s murder of four Kent State students that year, hits harder. A half-century later, as it becomes increasingly clear that “four dead in Ohio” is a tiny sliver of unceasing state-enacted violence on American citizenry, the song is as painful and real as ever. “Alabama,” originally released on 1972’s Harvest, is nearly as powerful. Young’s solo acoustic version plays like a black-and-white photograph next to the full-color harmonies by Stephen Stills and David Crosby on the original. Unlike the more aggressive “Southern Man,” also included here, “Alabama” is more imagistic than prescriptive, with “banjos playing through the broken/glass windows down in Alabama” before the white robes of the Klan flash by—a haunting open-ended quality that lends itself to the stripped-down treatment. The Times’ version of “Southern Man,” merely a smaller-sounding take on an otherwise powerful classic rock song, doesn’t transform itself in quite the same way.
Young is releasing The Times through his longtime label Reprise, and via an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music. Still, the EP's ramshackle documentary spirit is in line with the Neil Young Archives project, where the performance was first broadcast, and it feels most genuinely political when considered in that context. What began as a quest for high-resolution audio via the much-punchlined Pono player eventually resulted in Young’s own independent, self-updated platform, a full-service site for his music, writing, and videos. And if he loosened his anti-corporate stance by partnering with Amazon on The Times, he holds it strongly at the Archives. He recently announced he would be removing the option for users to log in via Facebook and Google (“Facebook is screwing with our election,” he wrote), further cutting off his corner of the internet from its dominant navigation platforms.
Young has said he chose to release The Times via Amazon “because no one delivers better sound to the masses,” and it’s possible to read some willful perversity into his decision to give them an EP he recorded on an iPad in less than an hour. Whether a sellout move, an ironic statement, or just another example of Young’s decades-long zig-zag through pop music, The Times feels genuine and unforced—an organic expression of whatever he was feeling at the time, in all its weirdness and contradiction. In other words, it’s prime Neil Young.
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