A Letter Home
| Neil Young
A Letter Home
A Letter Home is the 33rd studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young. It was released on April 19, 2014 on Record Store Day by Third Man Records. The entire album, which consists of covers of classic songs by artists Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Gordon Lightfoot and others, was recorded in a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth at Jack White's Third Man Records recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee. Of this method, White said, "we were obfuscating beauty on purpose to get to a different place, a different mood." The opening spoken-word track, and other spoken lines throughout the album, were addressed to Edna "Rassy" Young, Neil's mother who died in 1990. A message on Young's website described the album as "an unheard collection of rediscovered songs from the past recorded on ancient electro-mechanical technology captures and unleashes the essence of something that could have been gone forever". -WIKIPEDIA
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
2014 - For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home.
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CoS
2014 - This one is as baffling as it is intriguing, and it’s tough to imagine Young gives a shit about what you or I think of it.
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RollingStone
2014 - A Letter Home plays like a crackly field recording from a lost world.
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The Guardian
2014 - In a career full of wilfully perverse moves, this ought to take the cake – but in fact, Neil Young's deliberately crackly, muffled covers album turns out to be a very powerful thing.
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DROWNED IN SOUND
2014 - Be it a bad joke, a big mistake or simply wild misjudgement the truth remains: no matter the quality, good songs sung well always win the day.
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Writer's Bone
2014 - The whole album feels like it’s a relic of the past and brand new at the same time.
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The Telegraph
2014 - The result is a quirky and poignant little time capsule.
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glide magazine
2014 - With his latest ‘new’ release, a novel collaboration with jack White, Neil Young continues to redefine the career path of the veteran rock musician.
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NewStatesman America
2014 - a froggy echo travelling up the U-bend of time.
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Los Angeles Times
2014 - is stripped-down Neil Young in his ragged glory.
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ALL MUSIC
"an art project," which is an appropriate term for this curious collection of covers from his contemporaries.
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Financial Times
2014 - The sound quality is appalling yet the decrepit recording technology gives lyrics about loss a fragile, tenuous touch.
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antiquiet
2014 - is like listening to Young’s personal demo tape collection, putting the listener right in the room with the artist.
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Record Collector
A Letter Home is an endearingly crackly covers set recorded to one-track mono in a restored 1947 Voice-O-Graph booth refurbished down at Jack White’s Third Man studios.
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AV/MUSIC
2014 - Young and White have managed to make an album that’s absolutely useful with a recording process that is absolutely central to that use.
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CHORD Company
2014 - Never mind the quality, feel the emotion.
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UNCUT
2014 - A Letter Home, though, is also part of a larger, all-encompassing project: Neil Young’s ongoing attempt to memorialise and catalogue his own past through a patchwork of new song.
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popMATTERS
2014 - This set of covers is a scuffed-up, messy ode to purity. It's the kind of contradiction we might expect from artists like Neil Young and co-producer Jack White, though it still surprises.
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American Songwriter
2014 - an album that’s more of a tribute to Neil Young’s ever-loving idiosyncrasy than to any of the artists covered.
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spin
2014 - Young covers 11 songs that mean a lot to him with tender, unfeigned affection.
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musicOMH
2014 - A Letter Home is not without its considerable charms and is in many ways really quite clever.
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SPECTRUM CULTURE
2014 - A Letter Home mimics the crackly, scratchy, warped sounds of your grandparent’s records.
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RENOWNED FOR SOUND
2014 - A Letter Home is a really beautiful concept for a record with the kind of shaky, everyman execution that has endeared Neil Young to fans the world over for nearly 50 years now.
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The Irish Times
2014 - Inside is a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth, the kind onto which many a hopeful recorded their first song.
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The Shields Gazette
2014 - The choice of songs is interesting, but sadly it sounds like a particularly poor bootleg, which even the quirky way it was recorded can’t overcome.
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Empty Lighthouse
2014 - is endearing due to the recording situation, the album does not have a whole lot of replay value.
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blogcritics
2014 - falls disappointingly short of the mark.
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Rock The Bosy Electric
2014 - There is a fine line between kitschy cool and cheese ball, A Letter Home manages to stay on the successful side of that divide, but it is close.
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Blurt
2014 - for Neil and White, the trick is pulled off in spades, especially when you get to the haunting takes on Phil Ochs’ “Changes” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind”, where Young’s voice permeates through the crackle and pop of the antiquated technology of the Voice-O-Graph’s primitive means of cutting wax before him in the booth.
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Sonic Abuse
2014 - This is a curio, a collector’s item, something for completists only.
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the arts desk
2014 - A Letter Home is one for Neil Young fanatics only.
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mxdwn.com
2014 - The gimmick of A Letter Home deserves praise for its ingenuity if anything, but not quality.
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