5. Neil YoungHarvest
There isn’t a duff moment on this album and it’s beautifully recorded. It’s not flashy; what you see is what you get. It’s just the musicians playing together and you can hear that. There are no studio tricks but just these incredible songs with that lovely, wavy, falsetto voice that he sings in that goes directly into your heart.
And his politics are clear with songs like ‘Alabama’. You can stick this album on and easily talk about a hundred great moments in each of them or you can be quiet and enjoy it for what it is. The songwriting is deceptively simple but there’s a whole load of magic there and you can’t see where it’s coming from. How does he do it? He has great ideas and he’s a great poet who really knows how to put one word in front of another to have it so it really hits you between the eyes.
The way that he uses the pedal steel is something that’s really informed what I want to do with The Righteous Mind. I’m interested in what he does in Harvest which is a simple method where he uses it almost like strings. It’s a nice thing to do when you’re writing on guitar; it’s like, don’t write it as a guitar part, write it as a horn part but on guitar. When I was explaining what I wanted to our pedal steel player, I said, "Play it like Harvest" and he was like [clicks fingers], "Ah, right! I’ve got you."
