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Jul 18, 2014This one is an expression of respect to people whose work shaped his, as well as grateful a shout-out to a few pals who haven’t passed yet.
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Q MagazineJun 13, 2014It's a curious artifact for sure, but it casts a unique spell. [Jul 2014, p.111]
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May 27, 2014Its gloom is potent and pervasive, and, while you're mired in it, A Letter Home doesn't seem like a baffling act of wilful perversity. It makes perfect sense, as it presumably does to the man who recorded it.
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May 27, 2014Without any studio trickery to distract from the songs, versions of Bert Jansch's Needle of Death and Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind sound particularly affecting.
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May 27, 2014Accompanied by Jack White, at whose studio he recorded on the Voice-O-Graph, Young sings with a perspective and appreciation that his 68 years undoubtedly bring.
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May 27, 2014As a whole, Young and White have managed to make an album that’s absolutely useful with a recording process that is absolutely central to that use.
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UncutJun 4, 2014A Letter Home illustrates that vagaries of sound quality can sometimes enhance the drama of a record, and rarely undermine the potency of a good song. [Jul 2014, p.68]
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May 28, 2014Once you've heard the undoctored edition of Bert Jansch's heartbreaking "Needle of Death," a harrowing tale of self-destruction by heroin predating Young's own "The Needle and the Damage Done," the noisier approach feels like needless gimmickry that diminishes, rather than enhances, one of his strongest sets in a long time.
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May 27, 2014Some will find A Letter Home something of a gimmick and it’s hard to see it being anything other than a peripheral addition to his substantial catalogue.
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May 27, 2014Sure, there's artifice and humor here, but there's also heart, and this blend of emotions is what makes A Letter Home one of Neil Young's quintessential, endearingly odd records.
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May 2, 2014At its best, though, A Letter Home plays like a crackly field recording from a lost world.
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May 27, 2014Is it essential? Not really. Get Young's "Unplugged" instead. Still, underestimate this would-be throwaway record at your peril.
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May 2, 2014For an album recorded primitively inside a Nashville box, there are some stunning performances on A Letter Home.... Occasionally, though, the recording quality distracts from the album's content.
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MojoJul 24, 2014At root, it's a heart-warming little curio. [Jul 2014, p.86]
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Jun 6, 2014The result is a quirky and poignant little time capsule.
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Jun 5, 2014One should not have to turn in anywhere from one-to-two-hours of wages to hear the old coot warble out Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again”, regardless of how novel the way by which he crafted it.
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Jun 5, 2014The songs are old, and the album sounds really old.
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May 27, 2014It’s a scuffed-up, messy ode to purity. It’s the kind of contradiction we might expect from artists like Neil Young and co-producer Jack White, though it still surprises.
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May 27, 2014You’re not listening to songs so much as attempting to pull up the past as if it were an old pair of trousers, and then rope it into place with lengths of digital cable. It is both ridiculous and oddly moving.
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May 2, 2014There is a one-take charm to the performances on A Letter Home, an album that’s more of a tribute to Neil Young’s ever-loving idiosyncrasy than to any of the artists covered.
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May 2, 2014It’s a flinty, raw and ravaged recording, like some audio equivalent of a message in a bottle long ago tossed into the sea. It may be hard to listen to but it lends the disc an arcane charm.
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May 2, 2014A Letter Home won’t in future decades be listed alongside the best or the worst of those offerings, but it might find mention as one of his oddest fleeting experiments, alongside Everybody’s Rockin’, Trans, Greendale, Living with War, or lord knows what else is still to come.
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May 28, 2014In general, the songs that began life as full band, large productions numbers undergo Young’s intimate reimagining far better than the already bare-boned tunes.
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Jul 1, 2014There’s nothing here as radical as Young’s brazen take on God Save The Queen, for his far more engaging 2012 covers set, Americana, and the performances are decidedly tossed-off, even by Young’s capture-the-moment standards.