what is wrong with Neil Young and the future of Shoot the Moon by risa
Yesterday night Dan was over hanging out with me and Elran and we were listening to an old Neil Young album, On The Beach, and singing along and loving it and Dan, in his straightforward way, wondered what people mean when they say folks like Neil Young or Bob Dylan can’t sing. Any thoughts? Maybe it’s because the question has been bubbling back there in my brain, but just now I remembered a conversation I overheard on the Concordia university shuttle bus awhile back, and which I feel is somehow related to this question of judgement and taste. I can’t remember the exact phrasing, but the context of the conversation was music and culture, and in the end both girls agreed: they didn’t like anything hard.
Of course, I can’t claim to know whether either lady would have said they liked Neil Young or Bob Dylan. But those guys’ greatest songs are definitely hard to listen to- they tell the truth and there’s always something in it that’s hard to hear, and they sing with a voice that sometimes sounds as though it’s being pressed out through the edges of the skull, or from between chords and vertebrae, and personally I like that, love it even.
DOn’t get me wrong, I got nothing against some easy listening, but I think, maybe, that I like the hard singing better because it’s like being willing and able to tell the truth, even though the truth is difficult, dying, heartbroken, dirty, funny; even if the truth is that you’re flawed.
The interesting thing is that I sometimes think Dan has the same kind of potential in his voice and songs, especially on the new things he was playing me the other day- recordings of songs he wrote that’ll be on the new album. He’ll be pushed even further in his singing in the coming little while, and I’m kind of excited to see what happens.
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