Neil Young has spent the past few months making moves on something he's been passionately preaching about for a while now: studio-quality audio made accessible to the masses. From the looks of things, Pono seems to be the most practical application of Young's audio purism to date. He's been a loud critic of the mp3 and digital audio degradation for years, and he's embraced expensive and clunky listening formats to ensure that listeners are getting the best possible sound quality. His public persona in recent months has been that of "expert audio purist"—decrying "underwater listening" behind a desk, driving record executive Mo Ostin around to show off the capabilities of his new format, and so forth.
So what's the first album Young puts out after raising $6.2 million for Pono on Kickstarter? A sepia-toned long-player with a sound that would sit comfortably next to late 1920s Jimmie Rodgers or Carter Family records. In fact, the sonic quality of Young's latest, A Letter Home, might be a little worse than its spiritual forebears: Young joined Jack White at his Third Man HQ in Nashville, where he posted up in a 1940s phone-booth-size studio with limited resources—his acoustic guitar, a harmonica, a piano, and White—to record a handful of covers direct to vinyl. It's pretty much the sonic opposite of, say, his early collaborations with Jack Nitzsche. You can hear the continuous scrape of the grooves, pops, and momentary warps—tiny flaw after tiny flaw. Vintage-sounding and created using White's toys, it has all the appearance of a record featuring the guy who encased Paramount's archives in an oak cabinet and gussied up old Charley Patton records.
Young introduces the album with a letter to his dead mother, telling her that she should talk to his dad (his parents divorced in 1961), asking her to relay a message to his late bandmate Ben Keith, and telling her about how the public turns on Al, the weatherman. It's a sweet, absurd bit of business that vaguely recalls his sense of humor from Human Highway, and it frames the album as a care package to the afterworld, with songs and messages sounding like they're being transmitted via string-connected aluminum cans. This context renders his subsequent performance of Phil Ochs' "Changes" heart-wrenching. His voice is quiet, his guitar is strummed tenderly, the song he sings is about aging and loss. "Your tears will be trembling, now we're somewhere else, one last cup of wine we'll pour/ And I'll kiss you one more time, and leave you on the rolling river shores of changes." At one point in the song, he misses a chord change, which makes the performance feel incredibly human. After all, this is Neil Young, who's got an entire discography of impeccably recorded material. Those small flubs are like scratched out words on a page, and they make the record feel much more intimate.
For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home. The strongest moments on the album are the most delicate ones, which shouldn't come as a surprise for anyone who's spent any time with "Ambulance Blues" or Live at Canterbury House. The restrained material is also better suited for this recording format. His stripped down readings of Gordon Lightfoot's "If You Could Read My Mind" and "Early Morning Rain" pares both songs back to their essentials—beautifully delivered acoustic rambles about being a long way from home and a pained look back at a relationship. On one of his two duets with White, a version of the Everly Brothers' "I Wonder if I Care as Much" that closes the album, their voices sound completely gorgeous together and neither White nor Young showboats. It's a loving, simple, well-done tribute.
Occasionally, though, the recording quality distracts from the album's content. Young's cover of Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe" is partially blown by warped sound to the point where the original version sounds more assertive and fully realized than Neil's cover. Occasionally, Young will blow the harmonica too hard and temporarily mar every other sound; elsewhere, he covers songs that flat-out sound bad in the audio format they're presented in. "Since I Met You Baby" is an unessential, bleary version of Ivory Joe Hunter's velvet R&B original, while "My Hometown", removed from the production of Born in the U.S.A., is repetitive and a bad fit for Young's voice. The cover of "On the Road Again" is just a slapdash mess; White's vocals somehow sound abrasive, and similar to the Springsteen cover, Neil's voice just isn't well-suited to tackle Willie Nelson's register.
Young said the songs he picked to cover were "songs that I love, songs that changed my life," and said behind the archaic recording quality was some "beautiful music". There's nothing more beautiful or potentially life-changing on A Letter Home than his take on Bert Jansch's "Needle of Death". It's a gorgeous, heartbreaking song about a heroin overdose—it's devastating and beautiful coming from Young, a longtime Jansch disciple who also lost friends to the needle (and wrote some of his best songs about it).
There's a video of Young performing the song, and at the end, White comes up and says, "That sounded good." Young replies, "That's a heavy song." He wasn't focused on how it sounded—he was thinking about what he was singing. In that way, A Letter Home doesn't contradict his work on Pono. Both projects, different as they are, stem from his deep love for the material. If anything, the crackling whistle that introduces "Needle of Death" speaks much more strongly to the life-changing power of music than any extra-musical project ever could.
