Data

Soundtrack of My Life (week ending February 24, 2019): Music From The Wood

House

Notes: If, for some reason, you should find yourself in the country late at night -- maybe a weekend vacation rental perhaps-- and also in possession of a good powerful set of speakers, then aim them outside, into the forest, and fill these speakers with Led Zeppelin ( first three albums) and/or Black Sabbath (same). Let Jimmy Page's guitar thunder through the land or Ozzy's wicked bellow shiver the trees. Let their maul pour into the valley below, echoing a sound fuller, deeper and darker than any you'll experience on headphones ("How Many More Times") ("Dazed & Confused") ("The Wizard") ("Black Sabbath").

Just be advised though, that by doing this, you will summon the Dark Spirits. I am serious about this.

.

In Neil Young's catalog of odd, beautiful tunes, "Will to Love" (1977) may be the oddest and, this week anyway, the most beautiful for me. It's perhaps even more singular than "Ambulance Blues," and certainly a lot darker.

Neil recorded the song in front of a gently-cracking fireplace, singing a melody so fluid that he would never again be able to recreate it. The song was about a salmon swimming upstream, literally, relentlessly driven with the need to mate:

And now my fins are in the air
And my belly's scraping on the rocks
I still think someone really cares
And I'll keep swimming till I stop.
Got the will to love, the will to love.

Nothing about this "Will to Love" is ordinary. Played in the background, this song, taken from the rustic 1977 "American Stars n Bars" would sound like just another singer-songwriter acoustic guitar-based ballad.

The crackling fire is only one of the sonic oddities that float through this song, giving it a dark dreamlike-like feel. A piano, and then an organ, rambles in for a few measures, way in the background, off-key and offbeat. Neil's voice swims through various filters, while vibraphone notes frame the otherwise chaotic song gracefully. Neil played all the instruments, and sang the harmonies.

Young offered the going up for Crosby, Still, Nash & Young -- who could never get it quite right. Today, it sounds closer to the offhand surreal Ariel Pink two generations later, than it did to any of his folk-rock contemporaries, aka. Stephen Stills. And Neil himself never played it live. Critics varied wildly in their opinion of the number, though Young himself maintains that it "might be one of the best records I ever made."

Top Artists

#ArtistTracks Played
#1
Neil Young
59
#2
Bla Bartk
25
#3
Brian Eno
25
#4
Hayes Carll
19
#5
Steve Roach
15
#6
Jon Hopkins
14
#7
Buddy Holly
13
#8
John Maus
13
#9
The Dandy Warhols
13
#10
Dolly Parton
9


Top Albums

#NameArtist
#1
American Stars 'n Bars
Neil Young
#2
What It Is
Hayes Carll
#3
Greatest Hits
Buddy Holly
#4
Screen Memories
John Maus
#5
Why You so Crazy
The Dandy Warhols
#6
Ace of Cups
The Ace Of Cups
#7
String Quartets Vol.I
Bartok
#8
Singularity
Jon Hopkins
#9
Zuma
Neil Young
#10
Another Green World
Brian Eno


Top Tracks

#SongArtistTimes Played
#1
Will to Love
Neil Young
14
#2
The Miraculous Mandarin
Bla Bartk
4
#3
An Ending (Ascent)
Brian Eno
4
#4
It Doesn't Matter Anymore
Buddy Holly
4
#5
Homegrown
Neil Young
4



Multimedia:
Previous Weeks

All the Music Stats

Code

Data


Boombox

Blog

Writing

Hacks

Photos

About

Data