Neil Young - Silver and Gold - Acoustic Version (1999)

I've been in a big Neil Young listening mood lately, so here's another one from him. It's not in chronological order with the other albums I've posted, but I just finished making it, so I feel like sharing it anyway.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you've probably noticed that I have a special love for acoustic music. I think if a musician can strip his or her music down to just a single guitar or piano as backing and the music still holds up, that's really saying something.

So sometimes I like to create alternate versions of albums that are just acoustic versions of all the songs. The problem is, most of the time, the raw material to do that right just doesn't exist. But with this Neil Young album, I got lucky.

His 2000 album "Silver and Gold" doesn't get the praise I think it deserves. At least two of the songs on it are all time Neil classics in my book ("Silver and Gold" and "Razor Love") and the rest are all at least solid. The studio album has a general acoustic vibe, but most of the songs have drums, bass, backing vocals, and the like. What if he went all the way with the acoustic idea, recording the album with nothing but his voice plus either guitar or piano?

Now, you can find out. It turns out that in 1999, prior to the album being released, Young went on a solo acoustic tour and played all the songs from the album. Then, after it was released, he put out a DVD containing solo acoustic performances for seven of the ten songs. I was able to find high quality sounding versions of the other three.

I removed all the audience noise, as I often do, in order to make it sound like a studio performance. But it wasn't just a matter of removing the clapping at the end. I wanted this to sound really great, since I had such pristine sounding source material, mostly thanks to the DVD. So I tried to patch up all the stray audience noises within the songs too. For instance, on the song "Buffalo Springfield Again," when he sang the title phrase for the first time, the audience hadn't heard the song before and there was a lot of hollering and cheering in appreciation for Buffalo Springfield. I took an identical portion of the song from later on and replaced it.

So now you can hear this version of the album. Is it better or worse? I don't know; your opinions may vary. But I do like having the option to hear it this way.

01 Good to See You (Neil Young)
02 Silver and Gold (Neil Young)
03 Daddy Went Walkin' (Neil Young)
04 Buffalo Springfield Again (Neil Young)
05 The Great Divide (Neil Young)
06 Red Sun (Neil Young)
07 Distant Camera (Neil Young)
08 Horseshoe Man (Neil Young)
09 Razor Love (Neil Young)
10 Without Rings (Neil Young)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15258873/NeilY_1999_SilvrGldAcoustc_atse.zip.html

For the cover art, I didn't think I was going to be able to replicate the weird pixelated style of the official cover. But it turns out the back cover has a different photo that's pixelated and colored in the same way. So I used that, but cropped it to remove some text that was near the edges. Then I added in the text in the same style as in the original, but with different colors and different locations. By the way, I don't know what the photo is about exactly, but I'm guessing it's from when Neil Young was a teenager.