May You Live in Inneresting Times: The Neil Young Voting Thread (deadline July 8)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bYOcKCCr2M&feature=watch_response

I think I'm going to cut it here and do my ballot without hearing Silver & Gold, Eldorado, Chrome Dreams II and a handful of others; tracking them down on youtube is ruining Neil for me.

Just listened to Everybody's Rockin' and listening to Old Ways now, the last of his pre-Greendale full-lengths I hadn't heard. Everybody's Rockin' was kind of fun if obviously slight, but four tracks in, Old Ways seems like the biggest crock of shit he ever put his name on.

also plan to check out that "A Promise" album, though

yeah not much to like about old ways. a promise is pretty enjoyable though.

silver&gold has some classic tracks esp 'razor love'

a promise is pretty enjoyable though.

the live stuff on the second half of Old Ways is such a step up from the first that i believe it

first half is like, Self-Portrait bad

the first half is Waylon Jennings territory (i.e. sentimental and gross)

I think I'm going to cut it here and do my ballot without hearing Silver & Gold, Eldorado, Chrome Dreams II and a handful of others; tracking them down on youtube is ruining Neil for me.

You should at least hear Ordinary People from Chrome Dreams II. A friend of mine once dismissed it as being overwrought and too long but that groove just hooks me.

the first half is Waylon Jennings territory (i.e. sentimental and gross)

― a regina spektor is haunting europe (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, June 29, 2012 6:05 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

check yo self

Yes to Ordinary People. That is going to be high on my ballot.

If I have to include a recent track I'd go with "Fork in the Road."

lol, forgot I never heard This Note's For You. Not awful, but I'm not sure why Neil was making this music if he wasn't making it for Spud.

Just submitted! I hate to load it up with 1970s stuff, but even though I like a lot of his stuff from the past 2 decades, his god-like genius is just unstoppable in the 1970s. it's tough to ignore.

xxposts to Alfred: you're sentimental and gross etc

Thanks to everyone for keeping this afloat; school's finished now, so I'll be able to chime in more often. Some notes after 15 ballots:

--now three or four songs vying for #1
--135 different songs + 2 covers
--highest post-Rust song at #30
--two albums with votes for every song

lol in my head in the original post you gave us the option of voting for 100 songs, 200 songs, or 300 songs and i was like 'thank god, 300 it is!'. this is gonna take some time. thank you for p&j scoring as i can move on past figuring out how to rank my top 2 and deal w/ how to rank the other 298.

That's funny--I intended the exact opposite in my original post, but you're right. "Ballots of any length are encouraged": I was thinking about people who might only have five or ten songs they wanted to list, trying to get them to be okay with sending in abbreviated ballots, but the other interpretation works too. As I said a few posts ago, a limit of 40 works best for me.

Here's a review I wrote of Archives when it came out--the local weekly it was in has since folded (mutated, actually), so the link is to a longer version I posted on my site: http://phildellio.tripod.com/archives.html. (My imagination when it comes to titles has progressed impressively.) It was the first writing I'd been paid for in quite a while, so it was a surprise to find out...I wouldn't be getting paid. Getting to keep the box (regular DVD version) was my payment.

Truthfully, I wish I'd sold it right after the review was written, when I'm guessing I could have gotten something close to the full retail price for it. The editor obviously assumed I would--he laughed and said something like "Good luck on eBay" as he handed it to me, but I've hardly sold or traded anything since I started collecting records as a teenager. I'm a hoarder. But once I watched Journey Through the Past, downloaded all the mp3s (about two-thirds of which I already had on vinyl anyway), and stored the few new ones I wanted to keep on my hard drive, the box became useless to me. I haven't opened it since.

At least it's not oddly shaped and inconvenient to store. Oh, wait ...

I probably should use it when we cover surface area of rectangular prisms next year.

realizing ragged glory might make my top 3 neil albums, don't think my ballot's going to be seventies dominated at all

Are we doing an albums poll too?

Thanks for the Silver & Gold recommendation btw - I've checked out a couple of tracks and they're really good (the title track especially). I guess I've got a bit more homework yet.

No albums poll, no. I threw out album covers, but so far only one person tacked that on to his ballot, so that probably won't happen either. Which is fine. What I will do at the end is total up points assigned to each album, which is always of interest to me. Seeing as Neil's albums are almost always so thematically/stylistically cohesive, there's a good argument as to how meaningful that is vs. a straight album poll. To me, still very meaningful.

He's really not a very graphic artist, I can only think of a couple of sleeves I really like. And one of them is Trans.

Gotta disagree there. In terms in capturing the mood of certain albums (which is largely the way album covers always affected me), there are at least half-a-dozen brilliant ones for me.

I don't suppose anything on Rust is in danger of being overlooked, but I would like to campaign for "Sedan Delivery."

Let me amend my previous post, having just scrolled through all of Neil's covers. The five I think are fantastic are among my favourite ever--but yeah, he's had a bunch that are ordinary or worse.

hard for me to judge his album covers (at least from the 70s) as good or bad -- at this point they seem just like "what LP covers from the 70s look like".

I don't suppose anything on Rust is in danger of being overlooked, but I would like to campaign for "Sedan Delivery."

and "Welfare Mothers"!

definitive welfare mothers for me is the Weld version. so messed up!

I just heard "Safeway Cart" and "Driveby" again -- they're going in.

Because of this thread I've watched the live clip of "Thrasher" 3 times this afternoon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t00MXZKbW0M&feature=related

Sort of amazing there how young (no pun intended) he still was in 1978, given how harrowed the songs sound.

yeah, but also he didn't sound much older than he did in Buffalo Springfield, or especially on his early solo albums. Lots of collateral damage in them times.

We are talking about the guy who wrote "Old Man" when he was, like, 24 or something.

I don't suppose anything on Rust is in danger of being overlooked, but I would like to campaign for "Sedan Delivery."

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Saturday, June 30, 2012 2:47 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The only Rust songs not making my ballot are "Ride My Llama," "Sail Away," and "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)." "Pocahontas" will probably place highest; possibly my all-time favorite acoustic Neil song.

I don't think I realized that I liked On the Beach more than Gold Rush until this poll...

Happy Canada Day, Neil!

Age has been a preoccupation of Neil's since day one. After the Gold Rush's cover, worrying about leaving 20 too soon on "Sugar Mountain," brooding over mysterious changes he's undergone on "Mr. Soul" and "On the Way Home," etc. Then he'll break all that up by detours into the wide-eyed childlike side of himself.

There's only one song from Rust that hasn't gotten a vote yet--probably obvious which one.

sail away is one of the most gorgeous things he ever wrote

There's so much from throughout his entire career I'm compelled to acknowledge that I don't think I could do anything as indulgent as vote for entire albums. Gotta spread the love.

Was listening to some Neil yesterday and one song suddenly clicked from "will probably be on the ballot" to "wow, this is top-5 at least".

"Motorcycle Mama"?

Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze

Both currently locked in a raging 871-way battle for 150th place...I'm afraid to go back and check, but I think I kind of liked "Surfer Joe" at the time.

Ha, that's on my list too ... except spotify cut off the title so I had to guess the last word ('syzlak')

any love for "Like an Inca"? Always my favorite Trans number: Santana boogying in Peru.

I'm having the weirdest experience of hearing a song on album I once owned that I have NO recognition of at all - "Loose Change" on Broken Arrow. While I can see why I tossed, you'd THINK i'd remember there BEING a 9 minute track between "Big Time" and "Slip Away" at the very least, or recall it upon hearing it.

xpost "Like An Inca" is no "Cortez the Killer" but better than "Inca Queen"

oh wait now I vaguely remember the "one chord played for a couple minutes" "climax" of "Loose Change"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJLAyrTN5Fc