Neil Young`s fans have long known he`s a stickler about sound. There`s nothing unpremeditated when he summons thick lava surges of electric-guitar distortion or when he plucks acoustic-guitar chords to call in pristine solitude. So maybe it was inevitable that he would end up collaborating with another careful shaper of replication and depth, Daniel Lanois, the manufacturer who has opened up somber spaces on albums by U2, Peter Gabriel, the Neville Brothers and Bob Dylan.
Their collaboration, "Le Noise" (Reprise),tiffany earrings, is due for free on Tuesday. The latest songs by Mr. Young, 64, ponder mortality, love,tiffany watches, history, memory and faith. "Somewhere in a ray of sun you see the dark/ Somehow when you see the spark, it burns your heart," he sings in "Someone`s Gonna Rescue You." Nearly all the tunes here reach for the kind of primal, indelible riffs Mr. Young brought to songs like "Cinnamon Girl" or "Cortez the Killer." The music roars and reflects, seethes and mourns.
The album`s parameters are strict. Mr. Young performs alone, on electric or acoustic guitar, in eight tracks that total 39 minutes. "I wanted to do the solo record because I didn`t want to teach anybody the songs," he said by phone from the Peck House restaurant in Woodside, Calif. where he and Mr. Lanois were spending the afternoon doing interviews. "These songs are pretty complex, actually. It`s simple, the number of chords they have, but the way they`re laid out, they`re more complex than they go like they are. I`ve found that a lot of musicians that play with me all thought that my songs are very simple, until they really tried to meet them with me."
"Le Noise" was made in Mr. Lanois`s home studio, a house in the Silver Lake section of Los Angeles that has arched windows, high ceilings and a prized collection of vintage tube amplifiers. While he sang and played, Mr. Young was videotaped,tiffany necklaces, mostly in dark and white, for a companion DVD; he has released clips on YouTube.
"It`s variety of care a horror movie," Mr. Young said. "Le Noise, this monster, lives in this house."
The real-time performances became raw material for Mr. Lanois. He tweaked and toyed with the guitar sounds, processing multiple signals from each instrument. He also looped, echoed and multiplied fragments of the performances, time-warping the stark reality of vocals and guitar.
"Everything that happened actually happened, but he`ll take pieces of the execution and put them in again and put them in different places," Mr. Young said. "He does a performance in the mix, and I do a functioning in the performance and it comes together to be what you see and hear."
When Mr. Young claws at one of his venerable electric guitars - the much-altered Gibson Les Paul he calls Old Black or his Gretsch White Falcon, which has separate pickups for speed and lower strings, awaiting manipulation by Mr. Lanois - the tracks blare like his band Crazy Horse. But Mr. Young`s guitar and sound are unmoored from a rhythm section,tiffany rings, and they ricochet in stereo through Mr. Lanois`s transformations, meeting their own shadows and ghosts. "Rumblin,` " a call about portents of change, merges a hymn and a burgeoning earthquake.
"I don`t need to be a record maker that just puts a lot of sweetening on a man`s work," Mr. Lanois said. "I`ve never gone this far on any other record, ever. As perfect a register as this might seem, on my share of it I remember I`ve really stepped way ahead of anything else I`ve always done with these sonic delights."
Mr. Young said: "He had all of the board in the universe to do it because there was aught else there in the way. There was no lot in the way, no backing singers, no system of instruments - nothing in the way of him doing it. The just thing there other than me was him, and he was using pieces of me on top of me. It worked out really good."
One song, "Hitchhiker," took 35 days to complete, Mr. Young said. "If it was a TV show, it would be called `The Drug Chronicles, T.M.I.` " Mr. Young said, abbreviating "too much information." It is a compressed autobiography, mostly written in 1975, of his early age of celebrity and excess, mentioning hashish, amphetamines and cocaine. This class he reworked the chords and added concluding verses, among them, "I tried to give my past behind, but it`s catching up with me."
The early songs are recent, and were written fast. "Peaceful Valley Boulevard," which "likely took an hour," Mr. Young said, is a sweeping environmental history of the American West, from bison hunting to electric cars. Mr. Young hadn`t planned the call with such a long view. "I walked into it hearing a gunshot across a valley, back in the day,tiffany cufflinks, and then everything else just unfolded," he said. "It did go from past to deliver to semifuture, but sometimes that happens. Not that often, but it does happen, and when it does I ever feel fortunate, because it seems to ever get somewhere that I don`t normally get."
Mr. Young introduced songs from "Le Noise" in a solo theater tour earlier this year, and he is passing on the road again, performing alone with electronic effects. The concerts are scheduled along the Gulf Coast, as benefits for people touched by the BP oil disaster. It`s an unusual quality of route for a cradle with a brand-new album to promote. "It`s hurricane season," Mr. Young said. "It`s release to be interesting."
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