Neil Young - After the Gold Rush - Acoustic Version (1970)

In the past couple of weeks, I've posted acoustic versions of Neil Young's earliest solo albums. Here's the next in that series, tackling his classic 1970 album "After the Gold Rush."

To reiterate what I'm doing here, I've done my best to find solo acoustic versions of each song on the album, and I've repeated the exact song order of the album. (I've also added four songs at the end that weren't on the album, but date from roughly the same time period.) In most cases, I was able to find live versions done in the solo acoustic format. They're either from officially released live albums, or from pristine soundboard bootlegs. 

Either way, I've stripped the songs of audience noise, hopefully making them sound like studio tracks. For some of those, you'll see "[Edit]" in the titles. That's generally because there was a lot of cheering when the song began, and/or when the singing began. In such cases, I was able to find repetitions of the intro chords to get the cheering to go away. With "Southern Man," the first line or two was covered in audience response, but luckily that verse was repeated later in the song, so I was able to patch that in.

The trickier part comes with songs where there's no good live or studio acoustic versions. There are four such songs on this album: "Till the Morning Comes," "When You Dance I Can Really Love," "I Believe in You," and "Cripple Creek Ferry." For those, I had to resort to editing tricks I've learned using the programs Spleeter and X-Minus. X-Minus is particularly good at removing backing vocals, so that's what I used it for here. Spleeter is good at removing the bass and drums, so I used that here too. 

I had to do a lot of finesse work getting those four songs in a listenable state. For instance, I might boost the volume of a word or two that didn't come through loudly enough, due to the program taking the backing vocals away taking some of the lead vocals too. Or I'd patch a line that didn't come through well with that same line repeated elsewhere in the song where it came through better.

The most difficult song, by far, was "When You Dance I Can Really Love." This is a full-on electric song, in contrast to all the other songs on the album, and these programs can only do so much in transforming such songs. To make matters worse, there's heavy backing vocals on all the vocals of the song, which again doesn't match how the other songs on the album are done. X-Minus wasn't able to take all those backing vocals away. So I found a live version where Young did sing solo, and used that to patch in the vocals sometimes. Even then, the last line of each chorus didn't work well, so I kept the backing vocals there.

These albums are an experiment to see how viable making decent sounding all acoustic versions of albums can be. Also, I'm curious to see if people enjoy this sort of thing or not. I plan on making one more, 1972's "Harvest," since that's such a great (and mostly acoustic) album, but I'm not sure beyond that. So please let me know what you think, especially of the songs where I had to resort to some editing tricks.

The original album is 35 minutes long. This acoustic version of just the album songs is 31 minutes long. But since I added four songs at the end, the total is 42 minutes long.

01 Tell Me Why [Edit] (Neil Young)
02 After the Gold Rush (Neil Young)
03 Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Neil Young)
04 Southern Man [Edit] (Neil Young)
05 Till the Morning Comes [Edit] (Neil Young)
06 Oh Lonesome Me (Neil Young)
07 Don't Let It Bring You Down (Neil Young)
08 Birds (Neil Young)
09 When You Dance I Can Really Love [Edit] (Neil Young)
10 I Believe in You [Edit] (Neil Young)
11 Cripple Creek Ferry [Edit] (Neil Young)
12 It Might Have Been [Edit] (Neil Young)
13 Bad Fog of Loneliness (Neil Young)
14 Ohio [Edit] (Neil Young)
15 See the Sky about to Rain (Neil Young)

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The official album cover uses a photo of Neil Young passing an old woman on a sidewalk in Greenwich Village in New York City in 1970. Young had the photo "solarized" for the cover, which was kind of an inversion, turning his face black. I've used the undoctored version. Also, Graham Nash was in the original photo, but got cropped out of it (since it wasn't his solo album, after all). I've cropped things to remove some of the space on the left of Young, but managed to keep Nash on the edge of the frame on the right side.