Neil Young – “Music just takes you wherever you want to go”
ND: But you’re generous with it. You’ve lent it to some of your friends.
NY: Well, I — for a while, Bob Dylan was using my bus. He didn’t have his own tour bus yet, and he was just getting into using buses, so I let him use mine. And when I gave it to him, I told him that Hank was in the back, and if he wanted to use Hank, that Hank would be there for him. So I don’t know what he did with it, but he had it with him for a long time. I don’t know what he wrote or what he did, but I know something must have happened back there.
ND: Prairie Wind seems a definitive snapshot of where you’re at today as you approach 60. And it’s a beautiful piece. But in the hundreds of songs you’ve written, it’s been rare that you’ve sung directly about God. I think of maybe “Red Sun”, maybe “Star Of Bethlehem”. And they’re not as direct as “When God Made Me”. You premiered this at Live 8 in Ontario. What were the circumstances of you composing that song?
NY: First of all, I didn’t know what I was doing. There’s a little room with a piano in it, and the piano is locked in the room. It can’t leave, because the room was built around it. And the room is in a church. And the church — the studio is in a church. So the ceiling of the studio has got a few little vents in it. And if you stand on top of a ladder with a flashlight and look up through the holes, you can see the church windows and this old, huge roof and everything. It’s closed off because to get the right sound and everything, they made a lower roof. But when you see that, it really gets you.
And so I was sitting in there, and I’d been working on “He Was The King” and, you know, Elvis singing his gospel songs and thinking about that….And then I just started playing this hymn. And you know, Spooner Oldham plays beautiful gospel, on the organ. And it’s just great. He’s just alive with it. I’ve learned a lot from him over the years, just listening to him. Some of the passing chords and the blending of things together.
But all hymns seem to have these little passages on the piano between them that sets up the next verse, kind of gets everybody in the key, and kicks it around and gets ready to go. So I found myself just playing this. And I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I still don’t. But, you know, this building that I was in was an old church from the 1700s. It was a morgue — a Confederate morgue. It was a Confederate hospital. It was a church again. Then it was Monument Recording Studios. So there’s a lot, you know. Just the name, Monument, in this church. So there’s a lot of spirit in this place.
And one of the things that bothers me today is how religion seems to have been hijacked and been politicized by the administration. The thing that bothers me the most is how one political party can say that the other political party is not faith-based. How can you say something like that? You know, of the founding fathers, there was, I believe, 15 or 20 percent of the founding fathers of the United States of America who were religious, god-fearing men. OK. Now, today, in our government, it’s like 100 percent or 90 percent of the cabinet and all of these people surrounding our president are all leaning toward Jesus Christ and Christianity and their interpretation of what’s right for — in faith.
They have every right to believe what they believe. And I respect that. But I think it’s out of balance. And I think that doesn’t represent America. It only represents part of America. And I think that faith has a lot to do with family and loving God. And it doesn’t matter — you know, we all want to be right before God. And it doesn’t matter whether you read the Koran or whether you’re a Buddhist or whatever you are. You’re still trying to get in touch with the one thing that made us all who we are, the Great Spirit.
And so I feel like that’s been taken away from us. It’s being used as a tool against some people. And so that bothers me a lot. I don’t like to go into church and hear “The Star Spangled Banner”. That’s a song about bombs bursting in air. Let’s have “God Bless America”, if we’re going to sing a song like that. I don’t think that one’s really needed either. But if you’re going to have one, let’s have one that tries not to think about our country only. Let’s have a song that tries to think about humanity.
“[The Ryman is] like being inside an acoustic guitar…it has so much of a hallowed kind of feeling to it, and the history, obviously, it speaks for itself. So we wanted to pay our respects to our roots, and to the great musicians that have gone before us, and to kind of re-establish the connection.” Neil Young
“I called Willie and I said, ‘You know, we could power Farm Aid with biodiesel, with fuel grown by farmers. Do you think we ought to do it?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, we ought to do that! Let’s do it.’ So we did it first on the West Coast, up in Seattle. And all the trucks were running on it. We had farmers bringing in their tankers and filling up the trucks and we ran the generators off of it and we powered the lights and the sound system and the whole venue off of vegetable oil.” Neil Young
“There was one candidate that did say, ‘This is not a problem that you can drill your way out of. You’re going to have to invent your way out of it.’ That is the one thing and the only thing said in the whole presidential campaign that I remember.” Neil Young
“I just want my kids to know that I’m there. And I don’t want to be in the way, but I want them to always know they can get back to me, if they need to.” Neil Young
“You can put a label on a person like me, an environmentally-conscious person, and dismiss it. It’s an easy thing to do. A lot of people are taking the easy route. But there’s a price to pay for that. All you have to do is remember what your grandparents said and what they talked about and look around and see what we’ve got now and wonder, you know, what are you going to tell your kids?” Neil Young
“We all want to be right before God. And it doesn’t matter whether you read the Koran or whether you’re a Buddhist or whatever you are. You’re still trying to get in touch with the one thing that made us all who we are, the Great Spirit.” Neil Young