Rick Rubin: prediction

Transcript context

…Do you have a favorite Neil Young story that you can share? Well, I’ll tell you a story about this new album that we just made. It was an experience unlike any I’ve had before. We recorded for the first week. Neil comes in with songs written. Normally the way it works is, he comes in with songs written that he can play, and he plays the song for the band one time, and then the band plays along with him, and it happens very quickly. That’s the way it happens with Crazy Horse, I think with everybody, but with Crazy Horse in particular. With this album, Neil wrote the songs in a different way, so he didn’t know them. In the past, he would write songs on guitar and he would play around on the guitar, find chords, write a melody, write words, have the song, know the song, and then come to the studio being able to deliver a solo performance. In this case, he was hiking and whistling, and he noticed that the whistling was interesting, so he started recording the whistling, and then after recording the whistling, he realized, “I think there’s enough whistles here of melodies that are interesting, that this could be an album of songs. ” He’d never done that before, just channeling these melodies. The writing is unlike any Neil Young music you’ve heard before because he’s never written this way before, and it’s just a different process and came out different, and beautiful. It almost seems like it’s from another time. It seems like it’s from a time before Neil Young. He has these whistles. He sat down to write words to the whistling, which he did for all the songs in a two-day window. He wrote all of the words with no revisions and no changes, which is something that he said has never happened to him before in his life. Then he came to the studio with all of his instruments, and he would try to learn the song—how he was going to do the song. While he was learning to do the song, the band was learning the song, the changes. We did this for the first week, and it was really a mess. It was a mess to the point where Neil got to the point where he was able to play the songs, but it didn’t sound like the band would ever be able to play the songs. I can’t tell you why it felt like that, but it just sounded completely lost. That was our first week of recording. I will tell you I was concerned, but we’re thinking, “Okay, maybe next week. Maybe this will be the first step in learning the songs, and next week they’ll learn the songs and be able to play them.” We get to the second week, and we’ve gone through all the songs in that first week, and now it’s the first day, Monday of the second week. Neil says to Ralph, “Let’s play this.” He names one of the songs. Ralph the drummer says, “We already played that one.” Neil’s like, “Let’s try it again.” They’re like, “I think we did it good.” There was this sense of like, were we watching the same movie? Because it was so far off. On the second week, we tried doing some of the songs again. Ralph was not really into it. ink we did it good.” There was this sense of like, were we watching the same movie? Because it was so far off. On the second week, we tried doing some of the songs again. Ralph was not really into it. He’s like, “I feel like we already played them.” We play them again, and it’s certainly not better. Then Ralph’s like, “Let’s listen back to that first week. I think it was really good.” We go back and we listen, and you could hear there’s something there, but it’s so hidden in mistakes. I don’t even know how to describe it because it truly was a mess, but if you really listen to the mess and say, “Okay, let’s take out that instrument in that spot. Okay, what does that sound like? What about if you turn up this guy in this spot?” We went through it, and I would say the entire album was recorded in that first week when none of us knew. I certainly didn’t know it. Neil didn’t know it, for sure. At the end of the first week, he’s like, “Wow, I hope next week’s going to be better than this.” [laughs] It was wild. That’s the first time I ever had that experience. I think it’s a beautiful album. Now it transformed. We did a lot of work to help it transform, but the fact that it was unrecognizable to being something that’s so beautiful now. It’s different. I’ve never had that experience before.…

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