Y is for Neil Young and the troubled eighties

Thursday 10th April

Generally Music was crap in the Eighties; compared to the Sixties and the Seventies where innovations leap-frogged each other, and singers, songwriters and bands developed constantly.  I have long suspected that this relative decline coincided with the rise of the synthesizer and more sophisticated recording techniques.  Artists now spent months recording ten songs that sounded flat and boring.  No wonder; the life had been driven out of them.  Neil Young had a superb seventies, with albums such as ‘On the Beach’, ‘Zuma’ and ‘American Stars and Bars’ continuing his strong run of early albums.  But in the Eighties like Dylan and so many others he stumbled.  He seemed to doubt his muse, to look around for new styles, new sounds and produced ‘Trans’ where the songs were all sung through a vocoder (actually I really like it even though it was universally slated) ‘Everybody’s Rockin’ a sort of buesy rocker but lacking real warmth, ‘Landing on Water’ should have been called ‘Treading on Water’ and yet even among this there was the brilliant ‘Old Ways’ – a country album with beautiful songs on it and ‘This Notes For You’ a real bluesy album that feels heartfelt.  It felt like he was looking for himself and couldn’t quite find him.

Neil ended the Eighties with ‘recorded live’ albums ‘Freedom’ and ‘Ragged Glory’ with Crazy Horse, full of long jamming guitars and repeated but plaintive vocals.  They felt as if the songs had been made up on the spot, and maybe they were.  Neil seemed at last to have put his troubles and addictions behind him and found his most comfortable style.

The nineties and beyond have been even better….

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