[AGL] LWW (living with war)

[Harry Edwards]

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April 28, 2006
Critic's Notebook

Neil Young's 'Living With War' Shows He Doesn't Like It
By JON PARELES

Neil Young unleashes a digital broadside today. His new album, "Living 
With War" (Reprise), was recorded and mostly written three to four 
weeks ago and as of Friday can be heard in its entirety free on his Web 
site, www.neilyoung.com, and on satellite radio networks.

Mr. Young half-jokingly describes "Living With War" as his "metal folk 
protest" album. It's his blunt statement about the Iraq war; "History 
was a cruel judge of overconfidence/back in the days of shock and awe," 
he sings, strumming an electric guitar and leading a power trio with a 
sound that harks back to Young albums like "Rust Never Sleeps" and 
"Ragged Glory."

Some songs add a trumpet or a 100-voice choir, hastily convened in Los 
Angeles for one 12-hour session. During the nine new songs he 
sympathizes with soldiers and war victims, insists "Don't need no more 
lies," longs for a leader to reunite America and prays for peace.

In a song whose title alone has already brought him the fury of 
right-wing blogs, he urges, "Let's Impeach the President." It ends with 
Mr. Young shouting, "Flip, flop," amid contradictory sound bites of 
President Bush. But Mr. Young insists the album is nonpartisan.

  "If you impeach Bush, you're doing a huge favor for the Republicans," 
he argued, speaking by telephone from California. "They can run again 
with some pride."

Mr. Young is a Canadian citizen. But having lived in the United States 
since the 1960's, he sings as if he were an American. The title song of 
"Living With War" quotes "The Star-Spangled Banner," and the album ends 
with the choir singing "America the Beautiful."

The album's release is a high-tech, globe-spanning update of a topical 
song tradition that's much older than recordings: the broadside, a 
songwriter's rapid response to events of the day. "They had these songs 
that everybody knew the melodies to," Mr. Young said. "They'd just 
write new words, and the minstrels would be traveling around spreading 
the word. Music spreads like wildfire when you do it that way."

On Tuesday a higher-quality version will be for sale as a download from 
online music stores, and a CD will be in stores next week as soon as it 
can be manufactured and shipped. Eventually a DVD will be released with 
video of the recording sessions, which took place March 29 to April 6. 
Many of the songs on the album were first takes, recorded immediately 
after Mr. Young taught them to the band. On March 31 he wrote three 
songs: "Let's Impeach the President" before breakfast, "Looking for a 
Leader" after he recorded "Let's Impeach the President" and "Roger and 
Out" the same evening.

Mr. Young's Web site will have a more elaborate presentation, available 
free. It will include a page designed like a cable-news broadcast, 
complete with visuals (including recording-session scenes), ticker and 
logo: LWW (for "Living With War") rather than CNN. "Even if it turns 
out that we can't sell it with the news in it, we won't sell it, we'll 
just stream it," he said. "We don't have to sell it. We can still get 
it out there. This has nothing to do with money as far as I'm 
concerned."

Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play 
through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable 
copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. "That 
first impression is so important," he said. "Instead of just going to 
'Let's Impeach the President,' people will have to absorb the whole 
thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole 
album's coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work 
presented the way I created it."

Mr. Young has always been impatient with the time lag between writing a 
song and getting it to the world. When four student protesters were 
shot dead at Kent State University in 1970, he wrote "Ohio," recorded 
it with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and released it two and a half 
weeks later by sending acetates — preliminary pressings — to radio 
stations. (He will be on tour this summer as a member of Crosby, 
Stills, Nash and Young in what's billed as the Freedom of Speech Tour.)

After 9/11 Mr. Young wrote "Let's Roll," a song about the passengers 
who brought down a hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, and released it free 
online. "Now we have the Internet," he said. "It doesn't sound as good, 
but it's much faster, and it gets around the world. That's huge, that's 
as big as we get."

The songs on "Living With War" are straightforward and single-minded, 
setting aside the allusive, enigmatic quality of Mr. Young's rock 
classics. "These are all ideas we've heard before," he said. "There's 
nothing new in there. I just connected the dots."

The protest song, rocked-up slightly from its folky 1960's form, has 
been making a comeback during the Iraq war, from arena bands like Pearl 
Jam, the Rolling Stones and Green Day to indie-rockers like Bright Eyes 
and blues-rockers like Keb' Mo' and Robert Cray. Bruce Springsteen's 
latest album is a tribute to the protest-song mentor Pete Seeger, 
although it features old folk songs rather than Mr. Seeger's topical 
material.

"We are the silent majority now, and we haven't done a damn thing," Mr. 
Young said. "We've stood by and watched this happen. But there's more 
of us than there is of them, and we have to do something. When people 
start talking and see they can get away with it, it's going to happen 
everywhere. It's going to be a landslide, it's going to be a tidal 
wave. This is just the tip of it."

Mr. Young said that he made "Living With War" not with a plan, but on 
an impulse. "I don't know what actually did it," he said. "It happened 
really fast, faster than I think I've ever experienced. There was just 
a kind of a wave."

  As in the 60's, protest songs risk self-righteousness and preaching 
only to the converted. Only the most generalized ones outlast the 
interest in whatever headlines inspired them. There's not a lot of 
mystery to the songs on "Living With War"; they make their points as 
forthrightly as possible. Yet in the Internet era information — not 
just songs but blogs, videos, photos, drawings, e-mail jottings — is in 
the paradoxical position of being published worldwide and perhaps 
archived forever, but also being impulsive and ephemeral. A song for 
the Internet doesn't have to be one for the ages. Like an old 
broadside, it just has to get around for its moment, for right now. 
"Living With War" — irate, passionate, tuneful, thoughtful and 
obstinate — is definitely worth a click.