He wasn't worried - at least he wasn't alone
Continuing my trip back through the 1994 album charts.
21/08/94 : Sleeps With Angels - Neil Young And Crazy Horse
I seriously thought we were done with Neil Young after the complete nonsense of Rolling Stone making us listen to some absolute dross of his, but here we are back for our eighth visit with the man. I can't say I'm looking forward to it, but I am intrigued as to what it's got that made it chart so highly. It's not available on Amazon but I seem to recall he has beef with streaming services on a regular basis (along with everyone else) - it's available on YouTube though, so maybe it's just Jeff Bezos he doesn't like.
Well, it's certainly not the worst album we've had from the lad although I'm still not a fan of his voice or his level of quirk. But I have to admit the album feels like it hangs together as a whole and I almost liked "Western Hero", "Safeway Cart" and "Driveby" - the last two did feel a bit too long, but they're no 14:39 of "Change Your Mind" (although that does have some nice guitar work in it). I'm also going to mention "Piece Of Crap" - it's a dreadful song, but the lyrics made me chuckle a lot more than I ever thought I would at a Neil Young song. I won't be revisiting the album, but I was quite pleased at how it wasn't hateful.
We're at a surprisingly high #2 in the charts with a new entry this week on the start of an eight week run which pleasingly featured a drop every week, so this is as high as it got. The top five this week were Prince (a new entry), Wet Wet Wet, Eternal and The Glory of Gershwin, which is a most peculiar album indeed. It's a celebration of Larry Adler for his 80th birthday and features him playing harmonica on a load of Gershwin songs alongside (mostly) contemporary performers including Peter Gabriel, Sting, Lisa Stansfield, Elton John, Kate Bush, John Bon Jovi, Meat Loaf and Issy Van Randwyck (who?) - and it spent three weeks at #2, so I might feel the need to write about it. And the next highest new entry was The Jesus & Mary Chain (#13), who we have yet to meet.
Wikipedia tells us it's his 22nd album and his 7th with Crazy Horse and it "examines the nature of dreams — both the light and dark side — and how they fuel reality in the nineties" (we knew that, right?). Unusually (because he won't normally shut up about such things), Young has not discussed the album or its inspiration saying it's "too sensitive of a subject to isolate comments on" (I don't have a clue what he's on about) - the only exception is the title track which was written in response to Kurt Cobain's death (apparently Kurt quoted Young in his suicide note). It's got a nice weird bit of trivia for you though - this is the only album on which Neil plays flute. Critically, the album was very well received (9/10 from NME and A- from Robert Christgau) and it did well commercially, particularly in Scandinavia getting to #4 in Norway and #2 in Sweden and Finland and it also got to #9 in the US.
discogs.com tells us you can pick up a decent CD version for a couple of quid, but it's a different story if you want a vinyl version with the most expensive one being £149.99! If you like Neil then I can see you're probably going to like this - I'm afraid I just can't get with the dude, but this was a long way off his worst.
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