Neil Young

[Chief]

Neil Young's protest album heads to Internet first
By Steve Gorman

22 April 2006
01:46 GMT
Reuters News


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Neil Young's newly recorded protest album
"Living With War," including a song calling for the impeachment of
President Bush, will be posted for free Internet streaming next week,
his label said Friday.

Starting April 28, fans can log onto Young's Web site,
www.neilyoung.com , and listen to the 10-track collection in its
entirety, free of charge, said Bill Bentley, a spokesman for Warner
Music Group's Reprise Records.

The album will first become commercially available as a digital
download beginning May 2, "and we plan to get it into retail stores
as soon after that as we can get them manufactured," Bentley said.

He said the label anticipates getting the album into retail outlets
between May 5 and May 15. "Neil wants this album out there as soon as
possible," Bentley added.

The Canadian-born Young, 60, who has tackled social and political
themes through four decades as a singer-songwriter, wrote and
recorded his latest studio offering over a two-week period this
month, backed by a 100-member choir, according to his longtime
manager, Elliot Roberts.

Much of the album conveys a sense of outrage, vowing repeatedly in
the title track "to never kill again," mocking Bush's conduct of the
Iraq war in "Shock and Awe" and calling for his removal from office
in a provocative song titled "Let's Impeach the President."

The album also strikes a chord of empathy with soldiers separated
from their families, and features lyrics ridiculing America's
consumer culture, political corruption and religious fundamentalism.

Juxtaposed to "Let's Impeach the President" is one of the album's
more hopeful selections, "Lookin' for a Leader," with such lyrics as:
"Someone walks among us ... and I hope he hears the call. And maybe
it's a woman, or a black man after all."

The album closes with an a capella version of "America the Beautiful."

Young, who voiced support for Bush's efforts to expand
law-enforcement powers in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001
attacks, acknowledged in published remarks Friday the provocative
nature of his latest work.

"You're always going to rub someone the wrong way when you sing,
'let's impeach the president,"' he told the Los Angeles Times. "But
that's what this country's all about -- being able to express your views."

Young's new set comes just seven months after the release of his last
album, "Prairie Wind," which has sold about 450,000 U.S. copies,
according to Nielsen SoundScan.

[Krispy Kreme]

Cool. Neil Young is one of my favorite artists. Talk about productive! he is the anti-Axl. He puts out an album a year consistently, and they are good, not shit. And he has experimented  with  different styles. Truely, he is a music genius.

[Gordi]

That was quick!  Didn't Praire Wind (great album by the way) come out in January?! Awesome, I can't wait.

[Butch Français]

Cool. Neil Young is one of my favorite artists. Talk about productive! he is the anti-Axl. He puts out an album a year consistently, and they are good, not shit. And he has experimented  with  different styles. Truely, he is a music genius.

sure is, and a great lyricist too!

[Chief]

Neil has put out several Crap albums.  the last one was pretty good but greendale was just mediocre and the one before that i didn't even bother with. 
but it is nice that some artists are putting a lot of material out there..

[Mr. Dick Purple]

I've heard a few records of this guy and I gotta say is just amazing 
Hoping to hear this album too 

[MR.BROWNSTONE]

I have not heard any of his new work.  I have heard a lot of his old work and like very much.  That is cool how you can hear the new songs for free on his webiste. I think I'm going to check it out.

[DCGNR2006]

Love the music

Hate the subject matter that will be on it

Puts me in a tough spot

[SLCPUNK]

Love the music

Hate the subject matter that will be on it

Puts me in a tough spot

Well if it makes you feel any better, he was behind the president at first.........before he was able to admit he was duped.

[DCGNR2006]

Love the music

Hate the subject matter that will be on it

Puts me in a tough spot

Well if it makes you feel any better, he was behind the president at first.........before he was able to admit he was duped.

Not really my friend. If I buy an album of a band/ artist that I admire, if it's got a few songs on there politcally opposite of what I believe, no big deal.
I can live with it. But when I hear beforehand that there's actually a song called impeach the president, I can't say that I'll be on line to buy it -
That's all I mean

[makane]

Some reviews:

In a move that deliberately echoes the rush release of "Ohio" in the wake of the Kent State shootings, Neil Young bashed out his 2006 protest record Living with War in a matter of days, sometimes recording songs the day they were written, and then seized the opportunities of the digital age by streaming the entire album on his website only weeks after it was recorded, with the official digital and CD releases trailing several days later. It's the best use yet of the instant, widespread distribution that the Web has to offer, and it also hearkens back to the days when folk music was topical, turning the news into song. But if the ballads of the 19th century were passed along gradually, growing along the way, or if the protest tunes of the folk revival of the 1950s and '60s grew in stature being performed regularly, gaining strength as singer after singer sang them, Living with War captures a specific moment in time: early 2006, when George W. Bush's approval ratings slipped to the low 30s, as discontent sowed by the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, rising gas prices, and much more turned into a general malaise in the country (or in political shorthand, it was the moment when George W. turned into Jimmy Carter). To some, the specificity of Young's writing on Living with War will forever date it, but that's a risk with any topical folk, rock, or pop, from "We Shall Overcome" to "We Are the World" -- or "Ohio," for that matter. Young is aware of this and embraces the allegedly short shelf life of his songs for Living with War by directly addressing the political turmoil in the U.S.A. in 2006 and the real human wreckage it has left behind. As such, it will function as a vivid document of its era, as much as any journalism of its time, but Living with War isn't rock-as-CNN: it's a work of art, and it's a canny one at that, with Young drawing on familiar words and music to create both historic and emotional context for his songs. It's not merely clever that "Living with War" quotes "The Star Spangled Banner," or that "Flags of Freedom" consciously reworks Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom" -- it helps tie Young's work to the past and gives his new work greater resonance. And nowhere is that more true than on "Let's Impeach the President" and how its melody recalls "The City of New Orleans" to help underscore what was lost in the government's bungled reaction to Katrina's devastation to the legendary American city. With a grandstanding title like that, along with its George W. soundbites, "Let's Impeach the President" is the flashiest song here, and it crystallizes what's good about the album: sure, it pulls no punches and it's angry, but it's not just ranting; it's artfully written and effective, as is Living with War as a whole. It's not perfect, but it has a vitality lacking in Young's recorded work of the last 15 years or so, and its blend of Greendale's loud, meandering guitar rock and the bittersweet mournful, aging hippie vibe of Prairie Wind is not only appealing, it's better executed than either of those good yet flawed records -- and that execution not only applies to the ragged glory of the recording, but to the songs themselves. They manage to be unified in a way that Young wanted Greendale to be but didn't quite pull off, yet they also stand on their own and are, overall, more memorable than those on Prairie Wind. And that's the reason why, politics aside, Living with War stands as a very strong, effective Neil Young album that will continue to have a punch long after the George W. Bush administration has faded into the history books.

source: allmusic.com

In a time of crisis, subtlety is not an option, and speed is essential. Neil Young recorded the nine original songs on this album in six days, just a month ago. He wrote four of those songs on the day he cut them. And in all nine, Young charges the current president and his administration with, among other things, lying, spying, waging war with no right or reason and dereliction of duty to the nation's founding ideals. He then calls for the most extreme judgment available to the American people in "Let's Impeach the President," with rusty-fuzz guitar, the righteous muscle of a hundred-strong choir, a trumpet playing "Taps" and the self-incriminating voice of Bush himself.

Living With War is one man's opinion: Young reports, you decide. But it is an indictment of the sorry state of open debate in this country -- and its rock & roll -- that the most direct, public and inspiring challenge to the Bush presidency this year has been made by a sixty-year-old Canadian-born singer-songwriter who, even at his most apoplectic, can't resist a line like "trippin' down the old hippie highway" ("Roger and Out"). It is also an impressive measure of Young's refusal to burn out or fade away that he states his case with clarity as well as dirty garage-trio momentum. For me, the most damning lines in "Let's Impeach the President" have nothing to do with Iraq and everything to do with Washington's shameful delinquency at home: "What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees?/Would New Orleans have been safer that way/Sheltered by our government's protection?"

Young has stuck his neck out before, not always in the expected direction ("Even Richard Nixon has got soul," he noted in "Campaigner"). But he has not written and recorded with such emergency since "Ohio." You can hear the haste in the sometimes odd balance of Young's strangled tenor and the gospel army behind him. And many songs are built on mantralike repetition: Young's chanting of "Don't need/No more lies" in "The Restless Consumer," the circular worry in the melody of the title song. But much of the album is set to the rhythm of Vietnam repeating itself. In "Flags of Freedom," a young girl watches her brother march off to certain death to a chorus that echoes Bob Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom." And since the White House ensures that we don't see the soaring price of Iraq -- the coffins coming home -- on the evening news, Young has trumpeter Tom Bray blow a bruised, elegiac solo for the dead in "Shock and Awe," against sandstorm guitar and the harsh splash of drummer Chad Cromwell's cymbals.

Right-wing foghorns will go to town with the fact that Young is not a U.S. citizen, even though he has lived here since the late Sixties and has three American-born children who will have to live through the consequences to come. But at the end of the album, Young lets America speak for itself, in the choir's Sunday-prayer-meeting delivery of "America the Beautiful." There is no irony, anger or guitars, just faith and a final warning that until we truly live up to the perfection in the final verse -- "Brotherhood/From sea to shining sea" -- no one has the right to say, "Mission accomplished."

David Fricke

source: Rolling Stone

Even if you don't agree with Neil Young's politics, you can't help but be daunted by the intersection of his genius and ire on his second album in less than seven months. It is the very rare artist who is able to channel indignation and moral disgust in such a coherent and forceful way--without sacrificing any of the vivid imagery, passion, or the high level of musicality that we have come to expect from him over the past four decades. But that's not what elevates this album: it's his pure, naked, visceral reaction to the Bush administration's foreign policy, building on a canon of outrage that he began with 1970's "Ohio," penned in the wake of the Kent State student deaths. But here he goes one better, filling in the lines that he began to draw on 2003's Greendale about a family caught in changing times. But Young's done with musing about lost ideals. On Living with War, he demands much more from his audience, and himself. This is nothing less than a call for fearless action in extraordinarily fearful times. --Jaan Uhelszki

source: amazon.com

Just finished listening it. And I liked it.
Opinions.

[Booker Floyd]

I wouldve appreciated a less obvious, dated approach to most of the subjects ("Maybe its Obama, but they say hes too young") and I dont care much for the sing-along for "Lets Impeach The President" but overall I like the album.  The music is great and so is its spirit.

[gilld1]

I read where he wanted someone from this generation to stand up and make an album like this but sadly it's yet to happen.

[Krispy Kreme]

Aside  from the politics, how  is the music? The last album, I even forget the name, was too sappy for me. Neil is better  than  that, so I hope he can still rock.

[gilld1]

The music is rockin' and for the entire album process to have on;y taken a couple of weeks makes it even more impressive.

[Tomorrows]

Love Neil Young (see the avatar) but I havent checked this album yet.

[Chief]

its coming out next week!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000F48D00/qid=1149532612/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0356823-9022213?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=130

[Tomorrows]

Cool. I am a big fan (note the avatar).

Neil Young is one of the few artists I dont mind seeing doing their stuff in old age. Hes actually making new stuff thats good and isnt just going around doing 30 year old favs to please the crowds (like the Rolling Stones).

[Chief]

right on man, yeah i think the stones now suck compared to neil young!!

Cool. I am a big fan (note the avatar).

Neil Young is one of the few artists I dont mind seeing doing their stuff in old age. Hes actually making new stuff thats good and isnt just going around doing 30 year old favs to please the crowds (like the Rolling Stones).

[Tomorrows]

Just got the album the other day. I fucking love it. I assumed this would be another Prarie Wind, slow, soothing and mediative but instead its rocking! And man he sounds young, pissed and intelligent. My favourite record of the year so far.

Neil has the midas touch. Sure, hes put out some real bombs, but most of his catalogue is really capativating whether its slow folk, country, rock or whatever (just as long as its not that electronica thing from 1982).

Fuck yeah, Neil Young is the man and he proves it everytime he releases an album, but for different reasons.