release date: Apr. 19, 2014
format: cd
[album rate: 3,5 / 5] [3,58]
producer: Jack White and Neil Young
label: Third Man / Reprise Records - nationality: Canada
Track highlights: 1. "A Letter Home Intro" - 2. "Changes" (live) - 3. "Girl From the North Country" - 4. "Needle of Death" - 5. "Early Morning Rain" (live) - 7. "Reason to Believe" - 9. "If You Could Read My Mind" - 12. "I Wonder If I Care as Much"
34th studio album by Neil Young released on Jack White's label Third Man Records and recorded using a 1947 recording booth-device named Voice-O-Graph, which in the day (would be found all over the country up until the 1970s) was introduced to the ordinary man as a possibility to record his / her own record of a message or song directly onto vinyl. This particular device has been re-established at White's Nashville headquarter of Third Man Records, and the whole album has been recorded using the technique of the Voice-O-Graph.
I think, one has to dig into the idea behind this album to fully be able to appreciate it. Against his normal writing process, Young has covered familiar and classic songs by various artists of various styles and decades including artists like The Everly Brothers, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Bert Jansch and Bruce Springsteen. Most of the tracks are played solely by Young playing guitar, harmonica and piano. Jack White contribute on guitar, piano and with backing vocals on two tracks. Because of the recording process, all tracks have been recorded in one take and without any post-processing, i.e. without dubbing, mixing, mastering, and any normal post-production methods, which has its obvious limitations but also a unique form and strength. The songs are country, traditional folk and singer / songwriter material and the most apparent common denominator is naturally the sound of the recordings, and Young's fragile vocal. The scratchy and narrow tone could be experienced as annoying but the result is more an album with a strong historical message and something genuine. Young's force with just a guitar and harmonica at hand is something that will forever live on and follow his legacy, and that is here only once again underlined. The best songs here are perhaps the strongest "natural" sources of inspiration found on this for Neil Young - as he explains in his phone-call intro to "Reason to Believe", he explains his mother that he and Jack [Jack White] have discovered some of the original songs, he used to sing.
A Letter Home is a homage to ancient days, lost values, and a reminder of what it takes to make music: great songs, and it's not a necessity to have 56 tracks available in a million-dollar studio with all the right producers and mixers to make an album worthwhile. Even nowadays. It's an album that would serve well as introduction to all contemporary pop and rap artists. Listen and learn - and: skip most of your recording tracks and cut down to the essence!
The idea and the songs together make this a nice and warm album and then the narrowness in the production sound also showcase natural limitations - its perhaps like treasuring a vintage wine from a specific fine year - it's there to look at and to talk about but as for drinking with pleasure... Of course this is for listening but for hours and day after day, I guess you have to be more than just a bit nostalgic. The whole album is not Young at his most vivid and utmost inspiring but nonetheless it has great moments and it's one of his better studio releases since Silver & Gold (2000) and consequently it's an album worth more than just a quick glance. In Young's late career this serves as a recommended listen.
[ allmusic.com 3,5 / 5 stars ]
