A Letter Home (2014)

The irony that Neil would follow up “Driftin’ Back,” Waging Heavy Peace, and the Pono player with an album recorded in a “Voice-o-Graph” carnival booth is not lost on any fan of his, I wager. And probably not Neil either. Of course, two years also separate Psychedelic Pill and A Letter Home, during which time he and Crazy Horse embarked on an off and on three year tour all over the world. So maybe he just needed a little break. Apparently, Neil visited Jack White’s Third Man Records in 2013 and came across this restored piece of musical history where people could record themselves and a record of it cut. I remember DJ Shadow collected these kind of recordings for awhile and incorporated them into his Private Press album (the intro and outro of that album is titled “Letter from Home”). He liked what he heard and a concept for A Letter Home was born. Namely, the idea is that this booth can send music to the deceased. Neil chose his mother, the infamous character, Rassy Young (read Shakey to understand the meaning of infamous). It’s a strange one.

Neil starts out with a hopelessly goofy intro talking to his deceased mother. He updates her somewhat randomly about Al, “the weatherman for the world,” a reference to Al Gore that has a purposeful allusion to Al Roker. He also asks her to talk to his dad again. Overall, it’s a very uncomfortable but undoubtably sincere frame device. One of the many issues with the sound of this album is that apparently the recordings didn’t sound old-timey enough, so Neil and Jack added a fake dusty/low-quality record backing track to the entire thing. Not a fan of this effect at all, mostly because it robs the songs of their intended intimacy and gives them a gimmicky veneer. Someone apparently thought the same, because there’s also a “Clean Tape Feed” version of the album released separately about a month later as well as in a deluxe set with the original album. I prefer the Clean Tape Feed version myself. I’m not sure it’s enough to make me return to this album much, though.

These are all covers, starting with Phil Ochs’ “Changes.” It’s lovely and intimate, like listening to Neil play for you in your living room on the old acoustic at the back of your closet. Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country” is a great performance from Neil for me. I like how he modulates his voice on this one. If “Changes” was a living room song, this is a campfire scene. I get a sense this is a song Neil sings to himself a lot, the way he belts it out, stretching the microphone of the booth. Neil has talked about his admiration for Scottish folk singer Bert Jansch and honors him with an emotional “Needle of Death.” Like a lot of Neil’s own work, this song concerns watching fellow musicians succumb to drugs (specifically Jansch’s friend Buck Polly). It’s reverential and sad, just like “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Neil is still thinking about people like Danny Whitten decades later. Who can blame him, though, when he saw many of the young musicians who came after him run into the same unfortunate problems.

Gordon Lightfoot has two songs represented here, with “Early Morning Rain” being the first. It’s pretty good, but it’s at this point (early, I know) where the conceit of this record starts to sound a bit too similar for its own good. I don’t like Neil’s rendition of the Willie Nelson song “Crazy,” but then I’m not much of a Willie fan, either. Of course, Patsy Kline owns this song as much as Aretha owns Otis Redding’s “Respect” in the musical zeitgeist, so it’s really that version that sticks out in the mind. And Patsy is Patsy, you know? Don’t need to be a fan of her to recognize how good that performance is. Neil returns to chatting goofily to Rassy before Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe,” which doesn’t strike me as a very good song (despite Rod Steward charting with a cover of it), but it sounds like it’s a song Neil and Rassy would listen to together. Too bad it wasn’t Hardin’s other hit “If I Were a Carpenter.” I’d like to hear Neil’s version of that song.

“On the Road Again” is a song I just can’t hear without the sounds of a thousand non-sequiturs in my ears. It’s just a phrase you constantly hear throughout life in an almost parody. This version sounds like Neil and Jack got drunk in the booth and just started playing. It’s messy and Neil’s voice feels like a mockery. Another Lightfoot tune “If You Could Read My Mind” fares better, which has a subtle and sincere feel (it’s also just a great song). Taking a break from folkies, next up is an Ivory Joe Hunter rhythm-and-blues song Neil does on the piano, “Since I Met You Baby.” I like this a lot, it approaches something you’d hear Neil do in a concert once in awhile. It’s typically Neil to bring it down a little emotionally and that tweak does a lot for it.

Not sure Bruce Springsteen fits Neil’s style very well. “My Hometown” is a great song, but Neil’s performance is a bit awkward. I could see him doing this live with a band, but solo on an acoustic shows the limits of his voice, I think. This song needs a bit more energy on the upper end. Then again, this might just because I know this song well enough to compare it strongly. The Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If I Care as Much” has a subject matter that feels very fitting to Neil (although the lyrics are a bit trite) so I get why he did it. But his slapdash duet with Jack is not great and it really detracts. Nothing quite fits together on this. A bonus cover of “Blowin’ in the Wind” is okay, but doesn’t improve on the Weld-era Crazy Horse rendition. I do like the bonus alternate take of “Crazy” on piano more than the guitar rendition on the album. He seems to take the song a little more seriously on piano. I think that helps the vocal performance a lot.

Overall, this album is a far cry from the interesting covers of Americana and that’s too bad. While there are some cool bits, the off-the-cuff aspect of it feels half-baked (how could it not?). That’s a shame, as Neil is a fantastic folk singer and guitar player and a bit more thought (and different kind of production) could have made this a lovely late stage album.

Top 3:

1. If You Could Read My Mind
2. Girl from the North Country
3. Since I Met You Baby

Cut song: On the Road Again

The film that accompanies A Letter Home gives a lot of context to the recording. Between black and white videos of Neil playing on a mini acoustic in the cramped booth, you see him discuss the songs with Jack White in a cool room the booth sits in. It makes me respect the project a lot more and wish it had been a little more successful or perhaps treated more as Jack producing Neil on a covers album. The recording booth just doesn’t quite have as cool of a contribution to make it worth it. The intimacy of the booth is neat, but the quality detracts a bit too much (even before the fake vinyl coating).

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