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From The Desk Of John Wesley Harding: Neil Young’s “Fork In The Road”

jwhlogofJohn Wesley Harding knows when he gets an email, phone message or a piece of postal junk addressing him as “John,” it’s coming from someone who’s never met him. He’s known to friends as “Wes,” since his real name (the one he uses in his second career as an award-winning author) is Wesley Stace. Harding’s 15th album, Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, depicts an artist well aware of what he does best: marvelously witty lyrics delivered in an emotion-wracked singing voice. Harding will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.

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John Wesley Harding: The Neil Young shows at Madison Square Garden before Christmas were very good and extremely diverse, unified by a loose and attractive concept in which Young was a painter, his clothes splattered in that Williamsburg way, and everything around him was his junk-filled studio (including a painter who was creating some large canvases at the back of the stage.) At most of the shows, he played, say, 22 songs, but at MSG, he added an extra six or seven from the forthcoming album (that has finally forthcome). He said he was playing them for the record company and that the audience should pretend to like them even if we didn’t. Where “Just Singing A Song” was a standout, “Cough Up The Bucks” seemed a bit of a clunker. As he played all these new songs in a monolithic block in the middle of the set, I thought: “I’m actually at one of those weird Neil Young concerts you read about, where he pulls out a shocking pink suit and plays rock ‘n’ roll for an hour.” It wasn’t quite that crazy. (Not even, somehow, as crazy as the set the previous year at United Palace Theatre where, during the first acoustic half, he kept pretending to consider what song he was going to play next, wavering absent-mindedly between guitars as if deciding, when he knew perfectly well.)

But I was really looking forward to the new album (feeling that I was somehow present at its inception), and Fork In The Road doesn’t disappoint. It’s carefree rather than slapdash, light of touch rather than ponderous. There may be some concept about biofuel, as all the reviews say, but you really don’t need to know that at all—and it’s probably better if you don’t. The placement of Young’s thin voice above the tracks makes him sound almost like David Byrne at times, a similarity that had never previously occurred to me. The bonus DVD includes a high-end audio version of the album (for what my friend calls the “audio homos”) and four videos, the three DIY one-takers to accompany the songs on the album (the best of which is the title track, with stand-out line “I’m a big rock star/My sales have tanked/But I still got you/Thanks”) and a live version of the Beatles’ “A Day In The Life,” the song he finished his shows with last year. (At MSG, he massively screwed up the “Woke up/Got out of bed” re-entry after the strum-und-drang. He was quite annoyed about it. It was quite excellent.)

I’ve grown to appreciate Neil Young more in my latter years—I used to like him a lot, now I love him. The brutal simplicity used to irk me (the un-finesse of the lyrics, the limited range of melody); now he’s got me for good. He’s my favorite rock star. I hear a joyousness in his singing, even when he’s complaining, that’s completely absent in the work of many of his more self-important contemporaries and successors. He still likes to rock. YouTube clip of “A Day In The Life” at MSG after the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU-Ce0iC8bw