Monday, May 01, 2006

Neil Young's new album, Living With War




Neil Young's new album, Living With War, a collection of anti-Bush anthems featuring the bluntly worded single "Let's Impeach the President," started in a hotel room. "I went down to the coffee machine and there was USA Today," Young tells Rolling Stone."The cover showed a large military craft converted into a flying hospital. The caption said something about how we are making great strides in medicine as a result of the Iraq conflict. That just caught me off guard, and I went upstairs and wrote 'Families' for one of those soldiers who didn't get to come home. Then I cried in my wife's arms. That was the turning point for me."

"The guitar was playing itself," Young says of his Crazy Horse-style solos on Living With War's ten emotionally raw songs - which are backed by a 100-voice choir. "The singers were all told there was a song called 'Let's Impeach the President' and if they weren't comfortable with that, then please don't come," says Young. "More people came than we called."

Legendary backing singer Rosemary Butler, who sang on Jackson Browne's "Running on Empty," assembled the choir on an hour's notice. "I was calling people at 3:30 in the morning for a session at 10 a.m.," Butler says. "Everyone came. As the lyrics came up on the projection screen people were yelling and crying. We were in an exalted state. Neil knows Southern gospel. Neil gets down. He was having so much fun he was blushing from head to toe."

* Listen to the full "Living with War" album at: neilyoung.com

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home