Music Arcades: Neil Young: This Note's for You

This album has fallen from grace, or at least it's overlooked in recent accounts of Neil's return from the so-called "wilderness" of his eighties albums, but I loved it at the time, and ever since I've refused to let it slip from my affections. I wasn't the only one, back in '88, either. Sounds definitely gave it a 10/10 review, and I think NME did too — later that year they even featured him on the cover for the first time in a decade or so. John Peel didn't start playing Neil on the radio again — that didn't come until Eldorado, but Andy Kershaw did.

It's true, with hindsight, that some of the impact and charm of the album has worn away with age, and the way it alternates between loud angry belter and smoldering soulful ballad gets a bit predictable. The album that would have been even better than this one would have been This Note's for You Too, a double live album of mostly new material (including Sixty to Zero, which showed up in a different form a year later, and Ordinary People, which didn't arrive for another 19 years) recorded by same band as made this one. But that album became one of the many to be shelved late in the release-planning process — and I'll have to wait for second or third instalment of the Archives before it sees the light of day. Incidentally, I was planning on waiting a while — maybe until I actually got a blu-ray player — before I got the blu-ray Archives, Vol. 1, but from what Guy tells me, rather than coming down in price from £169, it may have already sold out and never be available again. And, well, further incidentally, all the members of Neil's current touring band — whom I'll be seeing in ten days — were also members of The Bluenotes a.k.a. Ten Men Workin'. To their credit, the latter manage to swing and smooch better than Booker T and the MGs did 14 years later on Are You Passionate?.

One thing I really notice listening to this album is that, although it clocks in under 40 minutes, it still feels plenty long enough. This must have been the last album that Neil planned with vinyl in mind (even though the cover announces "a digital recording": as Neil said one time, "if it's going to end up being played on shitty digital formats, you might as well hear it that way when you're recording it"). Every album he's made since has been over 60 minutes, and they've all suffered from it, even the awesome Sleeps With Angels. As I said last month of Ragged Glory and Are You Passionate?, it makes for album that are about as legible as unpunctuated legal jargon. Your ears and brain just really struggle to take in music when it's presented in such large lumps.

A habit I developed on my iPod Shuffle, and which I've carried over onto my iPhone, is to sequence my playlists into old-fashioned vinyl 'sides'. That is, I put together 15-25 minutes of music by one artist (a half or a third of an album), then a similar length of music by someone else, and then maybe go back to the first artist. It just helps make the whole experience breathe a bit better.

I don't know why Neil doesn't release his albums with a similar shape and size to This Note's for You. I can't believe he's not alive to the issue: he's such a perfectionist aesthete on every other aspect of listening. And I can't believe he lets the record company dictate to him on this: he doesn't let them do so on another other issue. Does he just expect us to re-sequence and edit his albums to fit our own tastes? I'm not really buying that explanation, either: he's rarely that democratic.