Young unleashes "War" with urgency

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Journalists loathe deadlines, though they go with the territory. Even the best writers have trouble with them: Reviewers have recently pointed out that Gay Talese, among the most distinguished journalists of his generation, missed the deadline for his new book "A Writer's Life" by about a decade.

Neil Young -- whose late father Scott was a revered Canadian sportswriter and newsman -- would have made a pretty damn good journalist. He knows how to turn his stuff around in a hurry.

Young's new album "Living With War" may not have been even a notion six weeks ago. On March 16, Young sat for a keynote interview at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin; introducing the musician, SXSW managing director Roland Swenson recalled the impact of "Ohio," Young's 1970 song for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young about the Kent State shootings. Noting a similarity in today's political climate, Swenson closed with an appeal: "Mr. Young . . . we need another song."

Young wasn't working on a real deadline, but he might as well have been, so swift was his reaction to Swenson's plea. According to a timeline on the singer-songwriter's Web site http://www.neilyoung.com, sessions for "Living With War" commenced March 29 in northern California. Four of the album's nine original songs were cut the day they were written. Young played the finished collection for Reprise Records executives April 18, just 21 days after recording began.

This isn't the first time he has quickly plucked music from the headlines. Recalling the composition of "Ohio" in the 2002 biography "Shakey," bandmate David Crosby told writer Jimmy McDonough that Young "got out his guitar and wrote the song right there in front of me. . . . I'm sure it wasn't 24 hours before we were in the studio."

Like "Ohio," "Living With War" is an immediate response to the currents of the news. Taking the Iraq war as his subject, Young unleashes his wrath upon President Bush and his staff and offers empathy and consolation to the military and civilian victims of the war.

The album contains the same kind of urgency one finds in breaking-news takes from the wire services. Critic Greg Kot of the Chicago Tribune -- whose paper was castigated by Young last year for its coverage of Farm Aid's finances -- rightly said Young's songs "play like a string of bulletins from the front line of a battlefield."

The online rollout of the album also reflected a correspondent's mentality. For 10 days preceding April 28, when the record began streaming live on Young's Web site, lyrics to a new track were posted there, like a daily dispatch. The lyrics, and Young's journal about the making of the album, unspool on the site in a slow crawl resembling a CNN news ticker.

It is taking some time for Young's label to catch up with its artist; "Living With War" is available only as a download and won't hit stores until Monday.

It's a hot-button record, and it wouldn't be surprising if some cranks call for Young's deportation back to his native Canada.

But -- in a day when former Reagan and George H.W. Bush cabinet member William Bennett maintains that the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists who exposed secret CIA prisons and domestic spying are "worthy of jail" and the Bush administration is exploring the prosecution of reporters who reveal classified information -- such a call would again place the musician squarely in the journalists' camp.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter