T. Rex - The Slider

Released - July 1972

Genre - Glam Rock

Producer - Tony Visconti

Selected Personnel - Marc Bolan (Vocals/Guitar); Steve Currie (Bass); Mickey Finn (Percussion); Bill Legend (Drums); Tony Visconti (String Arrangements)

Standout Track - Metal Guru

This is an album that managed to eventually sneak its way onto the list via the strength of one track. When I initially listened to The Slider, I was generally disappointed with it and even bored by elements of it. I kept coming back solely for the unignorable classic that is "Metal Guru," and slowly some of the other songs began to reveal their virtues, but it's still generally a frustratingly inconsistent record. Ultimately, it's worthy of inclusion because Bolan was an undeniably talented guy and when he was on form he could make truly great music, but it's no surprise that a steep fall in the public's favours was on the cards for T. Rex. In the wake of David Bowie's taking the world by storm via the mythic creation of his alien alter-ego Ziggy Stardust, Bolan was battling bravely. Indeed, the release of The Slider didn't show any fading fortunes just yet for the originator of glam rock, and became one of his most successful albums along with Electric Warrior, spawning two number one singles in "Telegram Sam" and "Metal Guru." The two were fighting on an even keel for a short while, but this album is a clear sign of where the battle was going. Bowie's work was full of so much imagination and inventiveness, such richness and variety, while Bolan seemed content to continue ploughing the same fairly tired furrows of by-the-numbers chugging glam. Even the potential advantage of the continued presence of Tony Visconti (who would go on to be one of Bowie's most innovative and loyal producers) does little to make The Slider sound particularly interesting, beyond the odd vaguely diverting string arrangement.

All this pretty much sums up my sense of unimpressed boredom when I first listened to this album, but as I say, it has "Metal Guru" on it. It might just be the very best of all T. Rex's celebrated classic singles. The clattering drums of Bill Legend, the gloriously simple drone of the descending guitar riff, and the exultant cries of the chorus of backing singers make it one of the most ecstatic, orgiastic classic rock tracks of all time, and one of Bolan's great triumphs. Ostensibly a paean to some kind of imaginary godhead, it's just as effective as some sort of call to arms to have a good time, and must be one of the very best party songs ever recorded. Even if what followed was 100% dross, I'd still be sorely tempted to include The Slider on the list just down to how much fun "Metal Guru" is. But the truth is, admittedly, that it's not dross - there is more than a little tedious material here. "Mystic Lady" consists of little more than an unimaginative strummed guitar riff while Bolan croons "Baby, baby, babe" over and over again, and to make matters even worse, there's another song called "Spaceball Ricochet" that sounds so similar that you start to feel a nagging sense of deja vu as you listen. "Rock On" is one of the only songs on the first half of the album that genuinely entertains by picking up the energy a little, and "Buick Mackane" isn't particularly tuneful but at least has some guts to it.

The album's second half is just as much of a patchy mess, really - "Telegram Sam" is an obvious choice for a lead single as it's one of the few songs with a genuinely catchy tune, although it's a long way from the best tune Bolan's ever penned. Then, after a couple more tepid, by-the-numbers glam tracks, he goes a long way towards saving the whole thing via "Ballrooms Of Mars," one of the best little-known obscure gems in the T. Rex back catalogue. It's a masterpiece of restraint, keeping itself to little more than a simple, folksy tune over a steady drumbeat and a typical lilting croon from Bolan. Just when it starts to sound like any other T. Rex ballad, Bolan's impassioned cry of "Rock!" kicks in and he unleashes one of the most impassioned, melodic and space-age sounding guitar solos ever recorded. It's an incredible moment of cathartic release, and one of very few moments where Bolan demonstrates a genuinely great understanding of structure and song-craft above and beyond writing catchy three minute pop songs, and it's one of my very favourite T. Rex songs. Sadly, the album continues to be very much in the shadow of its standout songs, and nothing else on the second side even comes close to being as memorable or noticeable or interesting as "Ballrooms Of Mars."

This review is coming across very negative, but I feel it's important for me to make the distinction between albums I genuinely love with all my heart, and albums I have a lot of respect for and interest in, and that I really like in places, but that suffer from major flaws and problems that diminish the listening experience for me, and The Slider is undoubtedly one of the latter. It's got some really fun moments, but it's an excellent testament to why Bowie emerged from the early 70s as the truly iconic artist rather than Bolan - he was consistent and he was continually inventive, there was never any sense of creative fatigue. After the release of The Slider, perhaps even Bolan began to acknowledge this as his drive and desire to be genuinely popular seemed to desert him. The albums he made over the ensuing years increasingly failed to strike a chord with the public and showed him running out of ideas (although occasionally the odd great song, like 1973's "20th Century Boy" or 1976's "I Love To Boogie" would emerge). Whether these occasional flashes of genius might one day have stabilised his creative freefall will never be known, as in 1977 he died in a car crash, robbing the world of an undeniable musical talent, regardless of how inconsistent he was. Not long before, he had buried the hatchet with Bowie and performed with him on TV. In the wake of his sad death, T. Rex have left a hugely important musical legacy, even if it's one I find frustratingly directionless and repetitive in places. But, like I said, when they were on form, they really knew how to make great music.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Marc Bolan.

1. Metal Guru

2. Mystic Lady

3. Rock On

4. The Slider

5. Baby Boomerang

6. Spaceball Ricochet

7. Buick Mackane

8. Telegram Sam

9. Rabbit Fighter

10. Baby Strange

11. Ballrooms Of Mars

12. Chariot Choogle

13. Main Man

Steely Dan - Can't Buy A Thrill

Released - November 1972

Genre - Jazz Rock

Producer - Gary Katz

Selected Personnel - Donald Fagen (Piano/Keyboards/Organ/Vocals); Walter Becker (Bass/Vocals); Jeff "Skun" Baxter (Guitar); Denny Dias (Guitar); Jim Hodder (Drums/Percussion/Vocals); Victor Feldman (Percussion)

Standout Track - Do It Again

I feel it's sensible, in the writing of these reviews, to re-listen to an album before I write any sort of account to it, particularly so if it's an album I haven't gone back to in some time. On some such occasions, I'm moved to feel almost guilty and frustrated with myself that music I really love and that means a huge amount to me has gone unappreciated for a long time. (I have a very guilty conscience and can be prompted to feel bad about the most trivial of things). This is how I felt when I listened once again to Steely Dan's masterpiece of a debut, Can't Buy A Thrill, for the first time in perhaps over a year. In 2008-9 or thereabouts, Steely Dan were a hugely significant band for me and I hungrily devoured everything I could find of theirs. I owe my awareness of them to my good friend Frith's mum MeiHsian, who is sadly no longer with us. I was talking to MeiHsian about music at some sort of family gathering many years ago and got onto the subject of Supertramp and prog rock (I remember being particularly amused by her insistence that I listen to a song called Focus by a band called Hocus Pocus, and feeling it was ultimately too trivial a mistake for my inner pedant to correct her on it). She commented that if I enjoyed Supertramp I should definitely listen to Steely Dan, and I soon followed up on her recommendation. It might not seem like an obvious link to make, but it was one that certainly had its effect - Steely Dan are a long, long way from the moody eccentricities of British prog, but they share with Supertramp a combined ability to write incredibly catchy, infectious pop-rock music while simultaneously being able to inject it with a wit and intelligence and a sense of craft that elevates it above so much other soft rock of the time. I started, reasonably enough I feel, with the band's debut album, and I still think it's perhaps their finest, most consistent and clear work, and the perfect point to start getting into them.

Perhaps what sets Steely Dan's music apart from so much other classic rock of the era is the uniqueness of the band's setup and guiding principles. While it did have something of a stable lineup for a while (involving guitarists Denny Dias and Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, and drummer Jim Hodder), essentially it was always the pet project of its two originators and co-songwriters, bassist Walter Becker and keyboardist and singer Donald Fagen. Becker and Fagen had met in college in New York and struck up a musical partnership, immersing themselves in the Beatnik lifestyle of late 60s Manhattan and playing in a variety of local bands to limited success. Only when their mutual friend Gary Katz moved out to LA to become a music producer did they begin to get a glimpse of their future as musical legends - Katz recruited the two as songwriters for ABC Records, but the record company soon cottoned on to the fact that the kind of material Becker and Fagen were producing was too complex to be handed out to other artists, and so Dias, Baxter and Hodder were drafted in to complete a band lineup and to develop the newly christened Steely Dan (named after a make of dildo in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch) as an artist in their own right. Despite the presence of guitarists and a drummer to legitimise them as a "proper" band, Steely Dan would always be something crafted and sculpted by the whims and perfectionism of their two leaders. As such, things sound refreshingly different from what was going on elsewhere in rock music at the time - with keyboardist Fagen and bassist Becker calling the shots, the majority of the songs are keyboard-driven, with the guitars kept largely for ornamentation via the odd solo (the guitar solo on the brilliant "Reelin' In The Years" has become almost iconic, although it's outdone by the solo on "Change Of The Guard").

Becker and Fagen were also such perfectionists that, even with their stable lineup, they would continue to bring in a whole host of session musicians for every album (by the time of 1980's Gaucho, they were recruiting over 40 musicians to play on one record), and this fine-tuned attention to detail makes for a sound that is meticulous and clear while never being soulless or devoid of any real grit. One simply gets a sense listening to Can't Buy A Thrill that this is the result of work by a couple of guys who are wholeheartedly devoted to every facet of their craft. The songwriting itself is refreshingly different as well, with Becker and Fagen drawing influence from diverse musical styles and backgrounds. The career-best opener, "Do It Again," is heavily influenced by Latin jazz, with its slow, shuffling rhythms propelling forward the loping organ riffs, while the obligatory guitar solo is replaced by Dias's brilliant electric sitar solo. The song also gives us our first glimpse of Fagen's vocals, which would become a defining characteristic of the band's music. Similarly strangled and weird-sounding to the timeless voice of Randy Newman, Fagen's voice nonetheless caused him a great deal of embarrassment, no doubt down to its unconventional sound. Although he could sing on record, the prospect of singing in front of a live audience terrified him and on Can't Buy A Thrill he shares lead vocal duties with singer David Palmer, who takes the lead on a number of songs. Palmer isn't a bad singer, but his voice sounds like it belongs in a more bland, conventional soft rock group like Chicago, with none of the sass and charisma of Fagen.

"Kings" is one of the best simple pop songs the band ever recorded, again driven by Fagen's brilliant, slouching piano and boasting the finest, chest-beating chorus of any song in the band's discography, then there's the timeless hit single "Reelin' In The Years." The focus on Can't Buy A Thrill is much more on concise, radio-friendly pop songwriting rather than jazzy indulgence as they would come to shift towards on their future work, and "Reelin' In The Years," with its unforgettable guitar riff and catchy chorus, is another fine example. Things do get a bit more jazzy and unusual on "Fire In The Hole," another one of the band's very best songs. Fagen's piano is jazzier and bluesier and cooler than ever, and he finds time to let loose on a tantalisingly restrained, rolling solo partway through that ranks as one of his best moments, while the sing-along chorus of "Change Of The Guard" is another album highlight. In general, Can't Buy A Thrill is perhaps a little anomalous in the wider context of the band's work - it's the closest they came to an album consisting entirely of radio-friendly pop hits and only songs like "Do It Again" and "Fire In The Hole" really carry any sense that this band would become one of the great jazz pioneers within rock music in a few years. But, safe and conventional as a lot of the songwriting here may be, it still sounds excitingly new compared to so much other generic rock of the time, by virtue of Fagen, Becker and Katz's meticulous and innovative approach to studio production and down to the sheer imagination and creativity of Fagen and Becker, who manage to just about keep the listener on their toes even when the music threatens to become predictable.

The album spawned two hit singles in "Do It Again" and "Reelin' In The Years" and marked Steely Dan out as a highly capable and interesting new artist to look out for. Of course, the band would slowly shift in its approach and sensibilities over the following years. Becker and Katz, feeling they much preferred Fagen's interpretations of songs to Palmer's, gradually convinced him to take over lead vocal duties, prompting Palmer's departure, and not long after the band would retire from live performance to focus on recording. This was no doubt down to Fagen's stage fright in part, and it also meant that the notion of the group as a regular band became even less well defined. Without having to keep half an eye on taking songs out on the road, Becker and Fagen could really indulge their imaginations, their jazzy sensibilities and their perfectionism in the studio, relying increasingly on legions of session musicians rather than one core lineup and writing songs that became increasingly sprawling and unusual in place of their early radio hits. This metamorphosis came slowly, and their next album would not be so very different from their first, but the journey towards becoming one of the most innovative American rock groups of the 70s all started here, with this timeless masterpiece.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Walter Becker and Donald Fagen.

1. Do It Again

2. Dirty Work

3. Kings

4. Midnight Cruiser

5. Only A Fool Would Say That

6. Reelin' In The Years

7. Fire In The Hole

8. Brooklyn (Owes The Charmer Under Me)

9. Change Of The Guard

10. Turn That Heartbeat Over Again

Roxy Music - Roxy Music

Released - June 1972

Genre - Art Rock

Producer - Peter Sinfield

Selected Personnel - Bryan Ferry (Vocals/Piano/Mellotron); Brian Eno (Synthesiser/Tape Effects); Andy Mackay (Saxophone/Oboe); Phil Manzanera (Guitar); Graham Simpson (Bass); Paul Thompson (Drums)

Standout Track - Chance Meeting

These days, Bowie is probably thought of as the great art rock innovator of the seventies having devoted himself wholeheartedly to avant-garde weirdness once he'd outgrown the wham-bam simplicity of glam rock (and his subsequent flirtation with blue-eyed soul). But it's fair to say that, when Bowie was busy taking the world by storm with simple, world-shaking theatrical pop, the artist really pushing the envelope of what could be achieved in mainstream pop/rock music was a little band called Roxy Music. The whole "art rock" thing is a curious little subgenre, and one that stands wholly separate from prog. While both had at their hearts a desire to inject intelligence and craft into rock music, to render it strange and unusual in order to challenge the listener, art rock generally avoided going completely off-piste. The weird sonic experiments and off-kilter weirdness of Roxy Music was always bolted onto fairly conventional song structures rather than the time signature-shifting, multi-part instrumentals of prog. Art rock was therefore able to tap into a far wider market than prog could ever have hoped to, and managed to survive into the modern day far better. And in the early 70s, nobody was approaching conventional songwriting with such a kitsch sense of theatricality and avant-garde innovativeness than Roxy Music - not even Bowie. When I came to Roxy Music, I was familiar with their 80s hit "More Than This" from their final album Avalon, which I loved, and was unprepared for just how weird and strange their earlier work was considering the fact that by the 80s they had morphed into a (remarkably capable) straightforward New Romantic synthpop outfit. As my burgeoning love of weird, off-kilter and avant-garde music was driving me forward at the time, Roxy Music were an easy fit for my musical sensibilities, and the fact that they were also enormously accomplished at making brilliant undemanding pop music appealed equally to the teenage pop fan within me. They're one of the few artists who've been able to master the mainstream as well as indulging their artistic flair and their creative imagination, and as such are one of my all-time favourite bands.

Roxy Music came to form around the creative nucleus of lead singer and songwriter Bryan Ferry, a man whose carefully cultivated image of some sort of glamourous, dandyish throwback to the Golden Age of Hollywood, perpetually draped in monogrammed dressing-gowns and tuxedos, was reportedly already in place even before Roxy Music existed. One of the most charismatically odd and offbeat frontmen in music history, Ferry has always been the spirit that drove Roxy Music forwards, and initially the band came to respond to his adverts for collaborators merely because he needed some outlet to showcase his own talent as a singer-songwriter. One gets a sense that, at heart, Ferry had a desire to just write and record great, retro-sounding pop music and that the sonic weirdness and kitsch sound of Roxy Music was something that came courtesy of his sidemen - certainly, his later work with Roxy Music and his own solo career would go in a far more mainstream direction than the songs evidenced on Roxy Music. Undoubtedly the most significant figure pushing things in this direction was Brian Eno, whose tenure with Roxy Music was short-lived but enormously significant. A self-avowed "non-musician" Eno, a friend of saxophonist Andy Mackay, was there to simply use his beaten up old synthesiser and experiments with tape effects to lend a distinctive "voice" to the band's music. Eno would record sounds on tape and then distort them in playback and generally apply his unique brain to a musical problem in order to create a sound or an idea that was totally alien and new. After leaving Roxy Music he would go on to have a brief solo career in rock music, making some of the most imaginative and brilliantly weird rock music in history before effectively inventing ambient music and becoming one of the most influential record producers of the century. Roxy Music kept a lot of their avant-garde style even after Eno's departure, but one does get the sense that if it weren't for his unique presence here the band might have ended up sounding a lot less interesting. Alongside Ferry, Eno and Mackay was bassist Graham Simpson (an old friend of Ferry's and the first to initiate the band project along with him), drummer Paul Thompson and maestro guitarist Phil Manzanera (actually drafted into the sessions for the debut album at the last minute after original guitarist David O'List of The Nice dropped out).

Roxy Music was recorded under the watchful eyes of King Crimson's former lyricist Pete Sinfield of all people before the band even had a record deal, and were tentatively signing with Island Records. Ultimately, it was the album's proposed, retro-styled cover shot of a 50s starlet that sealed the deal for them and won them the contract. As a primer to everything the band were capable of doing, it's unbeatable, and still one of their finest albums. It serves not only as a showcase for Ferry's masterful songwriting, but also for the glamourous sense of adventure and daring that the band could inject into their music like nobody else. Of course, Ferry is the most prominent presence, his bizarre warbling, crooning vocals standing apart from pretty much every other figure on the musical landscape at the time, but Manzanera, for a last-minute addition, more than acquits himself via some incendiary guitar work, from the frenzied, tuneless, distorted solos of "Sea Breezes" to the more melodic riffing of "Re-Make/Re-Model." Mackay, Thompson and Simpson are given less opportunity to shine here, but the latter two make for a fine understated rhythm section, and Mackay offers some great flourishes via saxophones and woodwinds, most notably on "Re-Make/Re-Model." And, though he doesn't really play any instruments and therefore never really makes his presence felt, Eno's influence is everywhere. The distortions and delays that lend every song its sense of being just slightly off are all courtesy of his careful hand, while songs like "Ladytron" give him an opportunity to really assemble a collage of scraps of sound as he attempts to recreate, at Ferry's instruction, the sound of a lunar landing.

The songs themselves are uniformly excellent - album opener "Re-Make/Re-Model" is a Roxy Music classic, from the nonsense chanting of the licence plate number "CPL5938" to Manzanera's frenzied, infectious riff and Ferry's delirious, almost-in-tune vocals. As a declaration of intent introducing Roxy Music to the world, it's peerless. "If There Is Something" is almost the best song here, starting out almost as a sarcastic piss-take of country music with its lazy twang but eventually developing into a funereal, menacing second half that gives Mackay a chance to really stretch his muscles on the sax. "If There Is Something" is narrowly pipped to the post of album standout by the miraculous "Chance Meeting," which is perhaps the simplest song here. There are no solos, no jams, just a short and simple song that finds Ferry at his piano singing forlornly of running into a former lover unexpectedly while Manzanera's tortured guitar wails, distorted into a truly alien sound by Eno, lend a sense of menacing weirdness that make it one of the most heartbreaking, and at the same time one of the most frightening songs, in the band's back catalogue. The wonderful "Sea Breezes" moves in the opposite direction to "If There Is Something," starting out as a melancholic dirge over Eno's maritime sound collage, and then shifting, courtesy of one of Simpson's few standout moments on the record, into a playful groove for the final minutes. And, of course, there's the delightfully retro and silly "Bitters End," which sees Ferry in full-on croon and a full host of Monty-Python-esque backing vocals over playful percussive sounds. It's a song so gloriously silly that it ably demonstrates that Roxy Music weren't a band that felt the urge to take themselves seriously - they could write music that was exciting and new and affecting but they were also aware of the need to have fun with what they were doing.

It's difficult to say which of Roxy Music's brief discography is their finest, but Roxy Music is a strong contender - it's so bold and colourful a debut and nails its colours to the mast with far more conviction than any of their other albums. For Your Pleasure is perhaps a more nuanced and inventive work, but Roxy Music will always be one of their truly great achievements. It's tough to say just how pleased Bryan Ferry was with it - over the following year, he and Eno would engage in a bitter popularity contest (not driven by any desire of Eno's to control the band, merely down to the clash of their own personalities) that would eventually see him depart, at which point Ferry would slowly begin steering the band back towards a focus on simple songwriting rather than sonic experimentation. Still, at this stage Ferry had no cause to worry - Roxy Music won them a fair amount of critical acclaim and the subsequent success of the non-album single "Virginia Plain" would see them lauded even further as one of the most exciting new bands on the scene, and rightly so.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Bryan Ferry.

1. Re-Make/Re-Model

2. Ladytron

3. If There Is Something

4. 2 H.B.

5. The Bob (Medley)

6. Chance Meeting

7. Would You Believe?

8. Sea Breezes

9. Bitters End

Randy Newman - Sail Away

Released - May 1972

Genre - Jazz Rock

Producer - Lenny Waronker & Russ Titelman

Selected Personnel - Randy Newman (Vocals/Piano/Arrangements); Ry Cooder (Guitar); Russ Titelman (Guitar); Jim Keltner (Drums); Wilton Felder (Bass); Milt Holland (Percussion)

Standout Track - Lonely At The Top

Like, I imagine, a lot of people of my generation, the work of sarcastic weirdo Randy Newman has been familiar to me since a very young age due to his role as one of the go-to film score composers for the masterful films of Disney-Pixat, most notably Toy Story in 1995, for which he wrote and sang the timeless "You've Got A Friend In Me." It's probable that one day, when the dust settles, Newman will be remembered more as a composer of film scores than as an artist in his own right, which is a terrible shame as his (admittedly brilliant) film work overshadows a truly magnificent career as a singer-songwriter that has all the catchiness and impish sense of fun of his Pixar scores but far more witty, inventive, and in some places, genuinely profound. I first became aware of Newman's own work, having been familiar with his songs for Disney for years, in my teens when my mum discovered and fell in love with the brilliantly sarcastic "Short People" from his career-best 1977 album Little Criminals. From there, my mum and I embarked on a very limited voyage of discovery into Newman's work that never really got much further than Little Criminals and his impressively star-studded musical adaptation of the Faust legend, imaginatively titled Randy Newman's Faust. Nonetheless, both those albums contained music so compelling, inventive and emotive that they became a significant part of the soundtrack to my teens. Eventually, in a trajectory familiar now to anybody who's been reading this blog regularly, I started to delve further into the discographies of artists I'd loved on a limited basis for years, and it wasn't long before I found myself at Sail Away.

It's a testament to the impact Newman had on the imaginations of other American artists at the time that a number of the songs here were already familiar to me in altered forms, most notably "Sail Away" and "You Can Leave Your Hat On," which have been covered extensively. Newman's own versions of his songs are rarely well-known, but he's had a significant impact on the musical landscape, with his timeless classic "I Think It's Going To Rain Today" from 1968 having virtually become a Great American Songbook standard, covered by everyone from Nina Simone to Katie Melua to Peter Gabriel. He's a songwriter of incredible variety, as well, with a keen, mocking and savage eye for political and social satire but an equally attuned ability to write a jaunty pop song with a winning melody or a poignant ballad that tugs at the heartstrings. Of course, by 1972 this is to be expected as Newman had spent the best part of a decade working as a songwriter for other artists like Dusty Springfield and Cilla Black. By the time he had built up his confidence enough to launch himself as a performer as well as a composer, his songwriting skills had been developed to peak condition. Of course, as a performer he's a figure who takes some getting used to courtesy of that weird, strangled voice, but as off-kilter as it is, it's a voice so full of character that it's impossible not to love it, really.

The songs on Sail Away run more or less the full gamut of what Newman was capable of as an artist - the title track is a gloriously tongue-in-cheek character sketch of a slave trader trying to entice Africans back to America. Newman excels at these character moments written at a distance from himself, and "Sail Away" is one of the best, though it's hilariously been misinterpreted over the years as some kind of patriotic espousal of American pride by people apparently not listening to lyrics like "Climb aboard, little wog, sail away with me." "Lonely At The Top" is actually one of the very first Newman songs I fell in love with having seen it in a film as a kid. There's something brilliantly world-weary and plodding about the sax and horns arrangement while Newman croons fitfully about the perils of success, again imagining himself into the shoes of some megastar likes Frank Sinatra, who the song was written for though he never recorded it. "Political Science" revisits the biting satire of "Sail Away" by imagining America instigating total nuclear annihilation around the world, while "Old Man" and "Dayton, Ohio - 1903" let him prove himself as a ballad writer. Both are beautifully simple pieces limited to just voice and piano, both reflecting in some way on the passing of time, the first by looking at the ageing of one individual and the other by thinking back to a time of less hostility and cynicism, "when things were green and moving slow." It's a song I actually sang with my school choir back in the early 2000s but never knew the provenance of until I discovered Sail Away.

Two of the album's other great standouts offer the same biting sarcasm of "Sail Away" itself, but this time addressing broader themes. "You Can Leave Your Hat On" is a brilliantly pathetic sketch of male lustfulness and perversion, rendered all the more tragic and hilarious by Newman's thin, reedy vocal and the plodding arrangement. It's been repositioned over the years as some kind of raunchy, glamourous striptease number but it's rendered far more potent and hilarious when Newman sings it with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Then there's the portentous and dark, yet still amusingly cynical, album closer "God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" - the general theme is one Newman would revisit decades later with Randy Newman's Faust, but here it's done very succinctly. Newman casts himself as God, looking over the human race and revelling in their pettiness and their indentured servitude. Imagining God as such a smug, vindictive figure is a gloriously funny, yet simultaneously daring move, and it's one of the most thought-provoking songs in his discography.

Sail Away is over in a flash, with Newman having honed himself as a writer of short, concise songs at this stage, but every single second of it is funny or touching or deliciously barbed. Over the next few years he would gradually become more ambitious as a songwriter, composing pieces that were more unusual or grand in scope, but always staying true to the catchy jazzy spirit that made his work so great. If the only Randy Newman stuff you're familiar with are his Disney scores then it's well worth going back and listening to what he's really capable of - Little Criminals is the best thing he would ever do, but there's no harm in starting with Sail Away, as it's a brilliantly concise example of the breadth and scope of his work.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Randy Newman.

1. Sail Away

2. Lonely At The Top

3. He Gives Us All His Love

4. Last Night I Had A Dream

5. Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear

6. Old Man

7. Political Science

8. Burn On

9. Memo To My Son

10. Dayton, Ohio - 1903

11. You Can Leave Your Hat On

12. God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)

Pink Floyd - Obscured By Clouds

Released - June 1972

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - Pink Floyd

Selected Personnel - David Gilmour (Vocals/Guitar); Roger Waters (Vocals/Bass); Richard Wright (Vocals/Keyboards); Nick Mason (Drums/Percussion)

Standout Track - Obscured By Clouds/When You're In

This is an album that most new Pink Floyd fans won't get around to listening to until after exhausting their more well-known material. Weirdly, it was one of the first I listened to. I certainly experienced it before I experienced the likes of Meddle, Atom Heart Mother or their later stuff like The Final Cut and The Division Bell. I might have even listened to it before I heard Animals, which is generally accepted as being one of their four all-time classic albums. I forget exactly, but certainly I came to Obscured By Clouds far earlier than might be considered usual given its relative obscurity within the Pink Floyd canon. As such, it's come to be an album far closer to my heart than it is for most Floyd fans, and I still hold it up as one of their very best. It shows the band in an interesting state of almost-readiness, being recorded in the midst of their preparations for their seminal, game-changing The Dark Side Of The Moon. The material isn't quite up to the standard of what was to come once they truly announced themselves as one of the all-time great bands the following year, but the atmospherics and mood of the music they assembled for this interim project demonstrate a band on the very cusp of achieving their full potential, having shown steady improvement and flashes of brilliance over the previous few years. In many ways, it's the culmination of what they had slowly been working on over their early albums - there are no lengthy epics or instrumental jams, but the increasing sense of atmospheric innovation has now been condensed into more concise and memorable songs. That one year later they would create perhaps the first prog album to be a huge, popular, radio-friendly hit is perhaps no longer as surprising as that idea might have seemed after Atom Heart Mother - the Pink Floyd of Obscured By Clouds is a band that has honed their approach to music and captured the spirit of progressive rock, poised to take the world by storm.

When Floyd were contacted by the French film director Barbet Schroeder, who had earlier commissioned them to record the soundtrack to his film More in 1969, asking them to work with him again to produce a soundtrack to his new film La Vallee, they were already in the early stages of preparing their magnum opus, having performed it live a few times and started work on recording. Nonetheless, having achieved some great stuff via their earlier work with Schroeder, they agreed to put Dark Side... on a brief hiatus and write some new material for the film. As with More, I've never seen the film that Obscured By Clouds was designed to accompany, but for a film soundtrack, Floyd have certainly managed to make every song have a life and identity of its own and to feel fully formed as a piece in its own right. There's nothing here that feels unnecessary, as if it was purpose-built to fill time and accompany something onscreen. Only the closing strains of "Absolutely Curtains," featuring the chanting of the Mapuga tribe, feels vaguely dependent on the film to be totally effective, although it's still an affecting and interesting moment without any visual accompaniment. Of course, this sense of independence may well be a deliberate move on Floyd's part considering that they fell out with the film company shortly after the soundtrack's completion, leading to it being released as an independent album with a different title rather than being released under the title of the film itself. Having not seen the film, I couldn't comment on whether the band made any alterations to the final versions of some songs in order to make it feel more like their own work than an ordinary film soundtrack, but it's a possibility.

Regardless, it certainly shows the band being far more committed, gutsy and original than on More. There is none of the meandering and ponderousness of that album here, merely one great song after another. It's also perhaps the first album where, on every song, every single band member feels totally integrated with the band as a unified whole. Earlier, Floyd had experimented with separating their albums into individual solo works (on Ummagumma and Atom Heart Mother), or things had very much felt like they were being steered by the guiding hands of David Gilmour and Roger Waters. Of course, Gilmour and Waters still shoulder the majority of the songwriting duties here, but there's none of the tyranny and absolute control that Waters would come to exercise over the band by the end of the 70s. Rather, it feels like the four of them have finally come together as a truly unified whole. This is nowhere better expressed (perhaps in the band's entire discography) than on this album's devastating opening salvo of "Obscured By Clouds/When You're In." Considering that Obscured By Clouds is a little-known interim soundtrack project from before their glory days, it's ironic to think that it contains one of the band's all-time greatest songs in the form of this double bill, where their sense of mood and atmosphere is expertly demonstrated. The slow drumming of Nick Mason and menacing keyboard drone from Rick Wright provide a backdrop for Gilmour's slow, pregnant guitar licks. The piece shuffles through its portentous groove, anchored by Waters' ponderous bass, before exploding into the monstrous release that announces "When You're In," now blasting its way through the same song structure but this time with all the ferocity and energy that had been kept sinister and restrained on the first run through.

The rest of the album never matches up to the early brilliance of that opening instrumental, but it does its best. "The Gold It's In The..." is an uncharacteristically straightforward, but brilliant, rocker, more or less in the thrashing vein of "The Nile Song" from More. "Childhood's End" is driven by Wright's organ frills and flairs and marches its way through an undeniably cool stomp and "Mudmen" is another glorious instrumental showcase for Gilmour's searing, passionate guitar over Wright's plangent, mordant organ. Unusually considering his later prominence in the band's work, Waters is largely relegated to the sidelines, with Gilmour being the central figure far more frequently. One of Waters' moments to shine, however, is the brilliant "Free Four," a song whose jaunty, T. Rex-esque pop arrangement hides the snide, cynical lyrics that would become his trademark, concerning, for the first of many times in Floyd history, the death of Waters' father. Waters' sneered, cynical vocals are a joy. The other song worthy of note is Waters and Wright's beautiful "Stay," which gives Wright an unusual opportunity to take on the lead vocals of a song without sharing the role with anybody else. His voice has less character than Waters' and is less musical than Gilmour's, but there's something about its unaffected simplicity that makes it perhaps more emotionally affecting than anything either of the band's other vocalists can muster. In a band not known for their profound ballads, "Stay" certainly ranks highly as one of their most beautiful songs, exploring the frustrations of a casual sexual relationship, with Wright's elegiac piano given the greatest opportunity to emote that it would ever receive in the Floyd discography, aside from "The Great Gig In The Sky."

There's nothing on Obscured By Clouds that feels remotely unnecessary or needless, although some songs are admittedly better than others. Perhaps the fade-out with the Mapuga tribe's chanting goes on too long, but it's a small complaint to make considering the fact that most soundtrack albums contain at least a couple of supernumerary tracks to fill up time while something more interesting happens onscreen. With Obscured By Clouds, Floyd succeeded in the task of creating perhaps the most consistently entertaining soundtrack album of all time, while also finding time to write some of their best little-known songs while they were about it. The album did surprisingly well in the US for an obscure soundtrack from a little-known English psychedelic group. It didn't set the charts alight, but was the first Floyd album to get a decent chart rating across the pond, while "Free Four" also did fairly well as a single. Having met Schroeder's demand and reinvigorated themselves by throwing themselves into a totally new musical project, Floyd returned their attentions to their ongoing principal concern - The Dark Side Of The Moon. The next step they took would be the one that turned them into musical legends.

Track Listing:

1. Obscured By Clouds (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

2. When You're In (David Gilmour; Roger Waters; Richard Wright & Nick Mason)

3. Burning Bridges (Roger Waters & Richard Wright)

4. The Gold It's In The... (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

5. Wot's...Uh The Deal? (David Gilmour & Roger Waters)

6. Mudmen (David Gilmour & Richard Wright)

7. Childhood's End (David Gilmour)

8. Free Four (Roger Waters)

9. Stay (Roger Waters & Richard Wright)

10. Absolutely Curtains (Roger Waters & The Mapuga Tribe)

Paul Simon - Paul Simon

Released - January 1972

Genre - Folk

Producer - Roy Halee & Paul Simon

Selected Personnel - Paul Simon (Vocals/Guitar/Percussion); Hal Blaine (Drums); Ron Carter (Bass); Jerry Hahn (Electric Guitar); Larry Knechtel (Piano/Organ); Los Incas (Flute/Charango/Percussion); Joe Osborn (Bass); David Spinozza (Acoustic Guitar); Stephanie Grappelli (Violin)

Standout Track - Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard

Although I've been slowly becoming a fan of Simon & Garfunkel for a few years now, and I've long been a big fan of Simon's seminal 1986 solo album Graceland, my general awareness of his solo career is pretty limited, and at present doesn't really go far beyond that classic and this, his proper debut as a solo artist in his own right. Quite why that is I couldn't say - I love his work with Garfunkel, and I love those two solo albums even more, but somehow the wider scope of his discography has remained off my musical radar so far. I'm sure that's something that will change in due course. My awareness of this album in particular is very recent - when I first listened to it the only song I was familiar with was the timeless "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard," and the only reason it was familiar was due to its use in the most recent Muppets film (which is still more or less one of the most beautiful films of all time). When I first listened to Paul Simon, I found it hard to get into, feeling much of it was fairly tame singer-songwriter fare. Still, its handful of undeniable classics kept hooking me in until I was a big fan of it, while "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard" became the backing track for a gag in one of my character comedy routines involving a dance and a bag of semen that I performed for a long time until I realised it was gross. So it's become an album very close to my heart.

Paul Simon wasn't actually the first time Simon had recorded a solo album - his first had been the timid The Paul Simon Songbook way back in 1965, which had never been released in America and would become the template for much of his work with Garfunkel. At that point, however, Simon was simply writing songs and wasn't deliberately trying to define himself in opposition to success he had already achieved as duo. Releasing a solo album in 1972 was a very different matter. His songs had seen Simon & Garfunkel become one of the most popular folk artists of the 60s and, though Simon had always been the creative heart and spark of the duo, trying to acquit himself as a solo artist who didn't need to rely on the arranging and the general creative support of Art Garfunkel would be a major undertaking. Perhaps recognising the significance his first solo album would have, and the importance that it was something he should only make if he really needed to rather than because he felt he should, Simon took a backseat from writing and recording in the two years since Bridge Over Troubled Water, instead choosing to teach songwriting classes at New York University. Perhaps this opportunity to pass on wisdom to others in the field of music prompted him to reassess his own approach to composition, as the music on Paul Simon seems to indicate a far more ambitious and diverse mind than the simple folk troubadour of the Simon & Garfunkel years.

As a clarion call to signpost how much more creative and ambitious Simon had grown since 1970, the sublime "Mother And Child Reunion" can't be beaten. Recorded in Kingston, Jamaica, it showed Simon experimenting with reggae music and proving surprisingly adept at it considering his bookish New York collegiate image. The syncopated organ and guitar are all classic hallmarks of great reggae, and it's all done with such commitment and undeniable capability that it doesn't even feel trite or contrived. It's perhaps significant that Simon was one of the first white artists to experiment with reggae considering how significant Graceland would be in introducing African music to the western market. Elsewhere, Simon continues to demonstrate the broadening cultural influences behind his music, via the incorporation of Latin percussive group Los Incas into the beautiful "Duncan," or the iconic squeaking of the Brazilian Cuica drum used to create the unique percussive sound on "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard," which is truly the album's crowning achievement. Essentially a piece of vague almost-nonsense reportage about a couple of boys witnessed committing a crime and reported to the town's authorities, it's mainly an excuse for an infectious acoustic guitar riff, a characteristically unforgettable melody, and the most brilliantly memorable and feel-good whistling solo of all time. Elsewhere, outside of the world music influences, there are other indications of Simon's growing ambition as a songwriter - "Armistice Day" breaks down into an almost funk-infused guitar break accompanied by horns that sounds unlike anything Simon & Garfunkel did, while "Run That Body Down" also features a bluesy, jazzy guitar lick that sounds totally new for Simon.

That's not to say that Paul Simon paints a picture of Simon as some tireless innovator or brilliantly radical mind - by and large it's still a collection of catchy traditional folk music, but with enough creativity behind it to make it truly great. Beneath all the Latin flutes, "Duncan" is simply a great 60s-esque folk song, telling a story of a down-and-out drifter who discovers love in the midst of his directionless existence. "Run That Body Down" is a beautifully resigned imagined conversation between Simon and his then-wife Peggy in which they accuse each other of fooling themselves and trying to deny the effect ageing has had on their bodies and their relationship. Simon's relationship with Peggy is a common spectre on this album, also informing the weary "Congratulations," which explores the degradation of a relationship between a married couple and reaching the bleak conclusion "Love will do you in and love will wash you out." In general, the album approaches a number of fairly bleak themes - death in "Mother And Child Reunion," marriage breakdowns, homelessness on both "Duncan" and "Papa Hobo," but it approaches it with such a vibrance and positivity in the music itself that it can't help but come across as a really great feelgood album. One doesn't get the sense here that Simon is trying to hide some bleak mindset behind beautiful music as with Nick Drake. Rather, one gets the sense of an eternal optimist who is able to approach such tough topics with the same joy and smile he approached the sunnier territory of his work in the 60s. Oh, and it's also worth mentioning the brilliant violin instrumental of "Hobo's Blues," a co-write with violinist Stephanie Grappelli, which sounds like something lifted straight out of the 1950s skiffle craze in the UK, which really should be a sound reinvoked more often in music given how delightfully upbeat it always is.

Paul Simon was generally well-received critically, and "Mother And Child Reunion" and "Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard" both became successful singles. Simon went on to foster a successful solo career having proved himself more than capable of fulfilling the role having delivered an album that was more consistent, ambitious and exciting than anything he'd done with Simon & Garfunkel (even if "Me And Julio..." is perhaps the only song here that truly stands on the same level as some of the very best Simon & Garfunkel material), and all the while he would continue to develop his fascination with world music to the extent that his innovations and cultural explorations in that area introduced a whole area of music to the west that it might never have found on its own. A hugely significant artist, and one that I will find time to listen to further one of these days.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Paul Simon except where noted.

1. Mother And Child Reunion

2. Duncan

3. Everything Put Together Falls Apart

4. Run That Body Down

5. Armistice Day

6. Me And Julio Down By The Schoolyard

7. Peace Like A River

8. Papa Hobo

9. Hobo's Blues
10. Paranoia Blues

11. Congratulations

Nick Drake - Pink Moon

Released - February 1972

Genre - Folk

Producer - John Wood

Selected Personnel - Nick Drake (Vocals/Guitar/Piano)

Standout Track - From The Morning

Just the other day a work colleague happened to get me onto the subject of music and asked me which bands I liked. He asked me whether I was a Nick Drake fan and we got talking about his music, with me telling him that he was one of my major musical discoveries of the last few months. He then revealed that a friend of his had actually studied alongside Drake at Cambridge and that he was a very kind, quiet and fun guy. It's an assessment of his personality that chimes well with the softly spoken breathy dreamer that Drake comes across as in his brief recording career. But it's one that, history informs us, came to be less and less the sum of his own mindset as he grew older. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Drake's death in 1974 means to this day reports of just what his own outlook and mindset were like are conflicting and hazy at best. Certainly, we know that in his last few years of life he struggled with severe depression, and his feelings of shyness and inadequacy that had been evident in his music all along came to drive him to even greater extremes of isolation and self-criticism. That his troubled mental state should be hidden behind his kind-hearted and friendly outward performance (although, admittedly, this colleague's friend knew him years before his depression reached its extreme) corresponds tragically well to how the incredible simple beauty of his music could obscure some of the darker and more desperate content in the lyrics.

After Drake's two previous efforts at launching himself as a musician, 1969's Five Leaves Left and 1970's Bryter Layter, failed to strike any sort of chord with the public or the press, the depression that had been lurking behind his music for years took full hold of him. It seems at odds with Drake's quietly withdrawn persona that he desperately wanted fame and fortune and success, but rather it seems more that all he wanted was validation - some sense that he wasn't as alone as he felt and that his music did something to inspire people. When this sense of validation was so non-forthcoming, it drove him to become ever more withdrawn and desperate. His record label wanted nothing else from him, having seen the failure of his two albums as proof of his lack of commercial stock, and for the next year he sought the company of nobody but himself, avoiding friends and family and travelling around Europe to try and straighten out his thoughts. On returning to the UK, he contacted producer John Wood telling him he wanted to record again, and perhaps even then he knew this record wouldn't be another stab at proving himself to people, it would be a resigned goodbye to the world of music before fading away. It was recorded quickly in just two late night sessions (the studio being fully booked during the day), and this time Drake knew he had no interest in finding a mainstream audience so there would be no concessions to chasing a mainstream sound, no instrumental overdubs or strings or full band arrangements. This time he would stick to the impulse he had wanted to follow way back on Five Leaves Left, to record with nothing but his own voice and acoustic guitar (and one overdubbed piano part, also played by Drake himself, on the title track).

The result is by far and away the most mesmerising and beautiful thing Drake ever produced, and perhaps one of the most mesmerising and beautiful folk albums of all time. The idiocy of Joe Boyd for imposing stark, overly dramatic strings and band arrangements onto every single song on his previous two albums is made all the clearer when one hears just how compelling Drake could be with nothing but his own strumming. Despite the sparseness and bareness of the way these songs are composed and arranged, there is never a sense of fatigue listening to this album, or of songs beginning to sound familiar to one another. Each one is a masterclass in concision and simple elegance, each one quietly, softly but insidiously burning its unforgettable melody into the listener's brain. By and large, the music is so beautiful, and Drake's vocal delivery so characteristically soft and hazy that the utterly bleak desperation of the music can pass one by.

Things start positively enough with the title track (the only song to be really given a different sonic palette via the aforementioned bright chimes of the piano), which seems to be little more than an ode to natural beauty, with nothing to particularly make one worry about Drake's mental state. The beautiful yearning of "Place To Be" starts to chart a downward descent as Drake sings of how lost and unsure he feels in his adulthood compared to the hope and innocence we all have of children, and longing to find some place where he can feel truly himself. "Which Will" is desperately lovely, apparently a heartfelt plea to the world to help him understand how he can achieve the admiration and respect of people around him. The song is nothing but a torrent of questions and pleas, and one begins to sense the flailing uncertainties of his mindset. "Things Behind The Sun" and "Parasite" are similar in that they both see Drake examining himself in the context of the society around him, and his feelings of persecution and isolation caused by the judgmental and accusatory way he perceived society in general. "Parasite" is by far the more affecting of the two, seeing him chart the unhappiness and frustration of people in their day-to-day lives before proclaiming "I am the parasite of this town," as though blaming himself for the misery he saw around him. It's an uncomfortably sad moment, and perhaps the emotional lowpoint of the album. Things recover a little with the fantastically powerful closing track, "From The Morning," which sees some semblance of hope creep back into Drake's songwriting as he sings of the effort to find the beauty in night and in darkness by approaching it with the same positivity with which we approach light - "So look see the sights, the endless summer nights, and go play the game that you learned from the morning." In the midst of all the bleakness and darkness that surrounds it on this album, the homespun optimism and faith of that song is enough to bring a tear to the eye and perhaps even to restore our faith in Drake's own health, until we remember his tragic death not long after this album's release. Still, that timelessly beautiful song has gone on to be one of his great legacies, with the lyrics "And now we rise and we are everywhere" inscribed on his gravestone.

Upon completion of the album, Drake delivered it to his record label, who weren't expecting or planning on ever receiving another product from him. (A persistent urban legend concerns Drake dropping the final tapes of the album off anonymously in a plastic bag - it's not true, although one suspects that the non-committal sense of finality and unimportance that story conveys is probably close to Drake's genuine attitude to the album). Again, Pink Moon would struggle to achieve notable sales or anything more than passing critical notice. Drake's downward spiral continued over the next two years, with him becoming increasingly withdrawn from everybody except his immediate family and increasingly irritable and angry at the lack of attention his music had achieved. In early 1974, Drake contacted Wood again suggesting he wanted to record a new album, and Wood was shocked at the short-tempered irrationality of the man he went to start working with. Although a few tentative sessions were commenced, Drake passed away due to an overdose of antidepressants before work could be completed. To this day, whether or not this overdose was suicide or merely an accident resulting from the negligent attitude of somebody who no longer particularly cared if he lived or died remains unclear. Drake remained a long way from anybody's musical radar throughout the 70s, though by the mid-80s the liks of R.E.M. and Robert Smith of the Cure were beginning to cite him as a musical influence and gradually his work came to be revisited reassessed and slowly found its wider audience. Today, Drake is rightly heralded as one of the great doomed heroes of folk music, and one of its most talented and beautiful minds. His tragic death, suicide or not, robbed music of one of its greatest potential talents, and nowhere is that fact more purely and succinctly distilled than on the magical music of Pink Moon.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Nick Drake.

1. Pink Moon

2. Place To Be

3. Road

4. Which Will

5. Horn

6. Things Behind The Sun

7. Know

8. Parasite

9. Free Ride

10. Harvest Breed

11. From The Morning

Neil Young - Harvest

Released - February 1972

Genre - Folk Rock

Producer - Neil Young; Elliot Mazer; Henry Lewy & Jack Nitzche

Selected Personnel - Neil Young (Vocals/Guitar/Piano/Harmonica); Ben Keith (Pedal Steel); Jack Nitzche (Piano/Slide Guitar/Arrangements); Tim Drummond (Bass); Kenny Buttrey (Drums); James Taylor (Banjo/Backing Vocals); Linda Ronstadt (Backing Vocals); David Crosby (Backing Vocals); Stephen Stills (Backing Vocals); Graham Nash (Backing Vocals)

Standout Track - Heart Of Gold

I mentioned in my review of Neil Young's After The Gold Rush that I owe my awareness of Neil Young and, in some respects, my increased interest in folk and country music since 2010 to my friend Emily, who also happens to be one of two people I have ever actually shared this blog with and might be reading this now. While her gift of that album to me on my birthday that year had opened my eyes to Young's music and spurred me to discover other artists from the same scene and genre, it wasn't until I moved to London in early 2011 that I finally got round to devoting more time to other areas of Young's discography - I think perhaps at least partly because I missed her having just moved to a big frightening city and wanted to capitalise more on the music she had opened up for me. The logical place to start seemed to be 1972's Harvest, which to this day is Young's best-selling album and features his only Number One single in "Heart Of Gold." Emily and I have always been in agreement that, ultimately, it lacks the cohesion and consistency and sense of an independent identity that After The Gold Rush has, but what it has in its favour is a number of individual songs that are actually even better than the individual tracks of his previous album, which works best when considered as a work in its own right rather than as a collection of songs.

In the aftermath of the success of After The Gold Rush, Young embarked on solo acoustic tour of the States, playing reworked, stripped-down versions of songs by Buffalo Springfield; Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and from his own solo records while also gradually beginning to introduce new songs he'd written on the road, many of which would find a home on Harvest. The initial plan he hatched with his record company was to release a live album to document this acoustic tour, but these plans all changed when Young arrived in Nashville to perform on the Johnny Cash show along with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and others. Invited to visit a local recording studio by producer Elliot Mazer, Young was so impressed by what he saw, and by the local session musicians working in the studio, that he set about recording some of his new songs that same night, with Ronstadt and Taylor themselves contributing additional vocals and instrumental overdubs. The final album took longer to be polished off, with Young adding extra sessions back home in California with some of his more regular musical cohorts like Jack Nitzche, but the plans for the live acoustic album were scrapped and replaced with a whole new studio album in the course of a single day. It's remarkable that anything to come out of such a spontaneous period of creativity should be as masterful a work as Harvest, and even more miraculous still that it should end up being the best-selling record of the year, and of Young's career.

The mood in general is slower and more reflective than on After The Gold Rush. Some of the anger and dynamism of that album seems to have been diluted here, though it's still present. In its place is a thoughtful young man taking stock of the world around him and offering his reflections on it. This newfound sense of peace and distance might partly be attributed to Young's recent back injury, which prevented him from doing much writing or playing on electric guitar, preferring to focus on acoustic which he could play sitting down. It's also presumably significant that for the Harvest sessions Young was mostly working with musicians he'd never worked with before, so had to rely entirely on his own creativity and ability rather than knowing he can lean on his bandmates in places. So the record he ended up creating is a mellow country-folk record, comprised largely of slow, introspective ballads. The album opener "Out On The Weekend" is one of the most affecting songs in his repertoire, with its slow bass chug and lazy country harmonica lines conveying a hazy mellow feel that betrays the lonely, soul-searching desperation of the lyric, concerning the apparent abandonment of a loved one in an attempt to sort out one's own problems and find some direction in life. It's a theme at least partially revisited in "Heart Of Gold," Young's most well-known song. Again, it's that wonderful harmonica playing, paired with the keening cry of Ben Keith's pedal steel, that sets the song apart from others, and it sees Young reflecting on his constant journey to find the purity and goodness within him, no matter how long it might take or where that journey might take him. It's one of the more uptempo songs on offer, but it's still pretty meditative in its pace when compared to the more dynamic songs on After The Gold Rush. In general, the songs on Harvest seem to find Young trying to make sense of a newfound peace in his life having bought a ranch in California and had his first child with the actress Carrie Snodgress (who is the subject of the simple domesticity of "A Man Needs A Maid," a melancholic piano-based song transformed by the orchestral overdubs recorded by Nitzche with the London Symphony Ochestra). It seems a natural enough response to writing songs while on tour to have one's thoughts return to the place you call home and try to work out what it means to you. So it is that "Old Man" sees Young addressing the elderly caretaker on his ranch and try to bridge the generational gap between them to discover some meaning in his current lifestyle.

"There's A World" again sees Young supported by the LSO, although now those orchestral overdubs seem overly dramatic and threaten to swamp the song, but it's followed up by the wonderful "Alabama," at which point some of the anger of the Neil Young of old begins to show itself again. "Alabama" is a spiritual successor to the blisteringly vitriolic "Southern Man" from After The Gold Rush. It sees Young again making the southern state the target of his ire for its lack of cultural and social progress (southern rockers Lynyrd Skynyrd would later make a characteristically brainless and inane riposte in the guilty pleasure classic "Sweet Home Alabama" - "Well I heard Mister Young sing about her, well I heard ole Neil put her down. Well I hope Neil Young will remember a Southern man don't need him around anyhow.") From "Alabama" onwards the mellow reflection of most of the album is a thing of the past. "The Needle And The Damage Done" may not have the anger of "Alabama," but it has ten times the bleakness and desperation. The only survivor of the initial "live and acoustic" idea, it finds Young alone at his guitar, singing a desperately tender song about his own observations of the lives wrecked by heroin abuse, in particular Danny Whitten of Young's band Crazy Horse, who had lost his life to substance abuse. Just as the live audience give politely restrained applause at the song's close things lurch abruptly into the album closer, "Words (Between The Lines Of Age)," which sees Young back at the electric guitar and unleashing all its gnarled, raw power. It's allegedly a song about his frustrations with the people surrounding him at the ranch and his desire for solitude and peace, and channels all the rage and vitriol that's been pretty much absent elsewhere on the record, closing things on a bleak and fiery note which, while undeniably powerful, feels slightly out of keeping with the generally quiet and thoughtful tone of Harvest as a whole.

Harvest would prove to be Young's greatest success, but it also became something of an albatross around his neck for the rest of his career. Perhaps the spontaneity of its recording meant Young didn't have time to stamp much of his own personality or ideology onto the songs, but he would later bemoan it, and "Heart Of Gold," for making him into a "middle of the road" artist who had made concessions to the musical mainstream. He would resolve to move further away from the popular consensus in future and to keep searching in the fringes for inspiration. His next project would certainly be far bleaker and less radio-friendly than Harvest, but this is certainly not an album that any self-respecting artist need be ashamed of. Popular it may have been, but it's certainly not a mainstream embarrassment by any stretch of the imagination. The songs, by and large, are stronger than on After The Gold Rush and the album as a self-contained work with its own agenda and identity is only slightly behind that earlier classic. It's an album that's deserving of far more of Young's pride and respect than he gives it.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Neil Young.

1. Out On The Weekend

2. Harvest

3. A Man Needs A Maid

4. Heart Of Gold

5. Are You Ready For The Country?

6. Old Man

7. There's A World

8. Alabama

9. The Needle And The Damage Done

10. Words (Between The Lines Of Age)