Laid down in Jack White’s Third Man HQ in Nashville, Neil Young’s thirty-fifth album sounds as though it was recorded about 70 years ago. Hardly surprising given that he made it in the only working Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth on the planet, first built in 1947 and lovingly restored to full functionality by the studio proprietor himself.
The seeds of A Letter Home were apparently sown early last year when Young was filming a promo video at Third Man. A local amateur musician entered the phone box-sized Voice-o-Graph to record a cover of one of the Canadian rocker’s old songs – and was obviously shocked and delighted when he realised that his musical hero was actually on the premises. The moment inspired Young to investigate the machine’s potential, and ultimately put together what he describes as an “unheard collection of rediscovered songs from the past recorded on ancient electro-mechanical technology [that] captures and unleashes the essence of something that could have been gone forever.”
Featuring eleven cover versions, the album opens with a gravelly spoken word letter to his dead mother. Wry, humorous and increasingly absurd, it sounds like a Tom Waits routine as he tells her that she should talk to his father (his parents divorced in 1961), asking her to pass on a message to his late bandmate Ben Keith (“I’ll be there eventually but not for a while, I still really have a lot of work to do here”), and regaling her with stories about his new meteorologist friend, Al, and his frustrations dealing with the general public when they don’t like the weather conditions.
It’s an appropriately offbeat opening given that the rest of the album sounds as though it’s being transmitted via Burroughs’ Dead City Radio. Each song was recorded in a single take, utilising limited resources – just his acoustic guitar, a harmonica, a piano and, occasionally, Jack White.
It would have been interesting to hear Young’s Voice-o-Graph versions of some of his own material, but instead he has chosen to strip down and reinterpret such classic songs as Phil Ochs’ ‘Changes’, Bob Dylan’s ‘Girl from the North Country’, Bruce Springsteen’s ‘My Hometown’ and fellow Canadian legend Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘If You Could Read My Mind’.
The primitive production is so bad that it’s good. There’s atmospheric hissing and crackling throughout, and he’s left in his occasional mistakes, all of which gives these recordings a strangely ancient and ethereal energy. Not everything works (most notably the Springsteen cover), but his sparse version of Willie Nelson’s ‘Crazy’ sends chills down the spine. Likewise, his heart-breaking take on Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle of Death’.
Young might have recorded this experimental album in a studio the size of a phone booth, but he wasn’t phoning it in. A Letter Home might be flawed, scratchy and rough, but it’s a welcome addition to his canon. When he eventually joins his parents and Ben Keith in the afterlife, these songs will sound even spookier than they do already.