“Much like all the work I’ve done with Neil, we’re learning the songs as we’re recording them. “It’s a lot of muscle memory, but it’s more emotional memory of the excitement and being comfortable being in a situation where you’re playing live, you’re literally on a stage in a barn,” Lofgren says. The latter provided a crash course in the process that has been passed down through the years to Barn. Along with the first Crazy Horse LP he sat in, with Talbot and Molina, on a couple of Young’s greatest works: 1970’s After the Gold Rush and 1975’s Tonight’s The Night. Lofgren has been playing with Young and Crazy Horse on and off since the early 1970s, when he was basically still a kid.
There’s a different feel when you’re not that comfortable.” It keeps you from even having a chance to settle into parts. Then you add on to the fact that you don’t know the song that well. Between doing that and performing like a band at a club, the roar and the mess of everything really was a familiar thing. Everything is bleeding into everything else. “We did this when we made Colorado too, you took a day or so to get everything to where you heard each other and you saw each other, and you were singing out of a PA. “When you record with Neil he takes it to an extreme of not just live recording, but live recording with no headphones,” Lofgren observes. In that space it feels like things are happening, rather than things are being willed to happen. There is a sense of familiarity between the players that doesn’t really translate to the recording, which is kept open-ended and experimental. Following up 2019’s Colorado, which marked Lofgren’s return to the Crazy Horse fold, it’s both woody and pastoral and blown out and noisy. All of a sudden, we had 10 songs.”īarn is a neat encapsulation of Young’s overarching obsessions. He thought we might do that in two or three other locations through the year, just to work towards a record. “Neil had about four songs – we’ll all be vaccinated, have testing, wear masks, and play in this old draughty barn in the middle of nowhere in the Rockies. You get to be a much stronger group, despite our half-century history. I was so excited to get on the road with Neil and Crazy Horse, because every 10, 20 shows everything changes. We had a tour that was going to start 29 April in Chicago, the place where I was born. “I loved it, because we were talking about being a year or two away from playing live. “It was an adventurous idea in the middle of a pandemic to try and safely record,” he says. Lofgren, also a 35-year veteran in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street band, bounces between guitar, piano and accordion, the band displaying easy chemistry and rough-hewn chops. Cramped together on stage is more than five decades of knowledge, nous and rock ’n’ roll pedigree, with stories and jokes flying back and forth as songs are loosely pulled into shape. The scene, captured by Daryl Hannah in a film accompanying the creation of the group’s new record, Barn, is idyllic and, for music nerds, thrilling. READ MORE: “I’ve always considered Howlin’ Wolf the heaviest of the blues giants”: Warren Haynes on adapting blues classics for their new LP, Heavy Load Blues.
Night changes guitar plus#
A couple of beautiful white things, who can be seen lounging in the sunlight while Lofgren works alongside Neil Young, plus bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina, the long-serving spine of the storied band Crazy Horse. There were dogs up at the barn in the Colorado Rockies, too. Coyotes are a thing around his way, he explains. Framed in a Zoom window, the guitarist peers outside and, satisfied that his pet is safe, settles down to talk. Nils Lofgren is looking for one of his dogs.