THE Cultural meeting is dedicated to a rock and folk monument: Neil Young. The Canadian singer and guitarist unveiled, on August 11, 2023, Chromium dreamsan album which surprisingly disappeared from the circuits as soon as it was recorded in 1977. The singer had preferred to keep it secret for nearly 50 years.
For Neil Young, the idea of publishing unreleased albums by drawing on his archives does not date from yesterday, but rather from the beginning of the 1990s, and this concerned about twenty recordings in all, all of which have remained in the shadows… The disc Chromium dreams is undoubtedly the most anticipated of these recordings. It allows you to dive back into a time when the artist was at his creative peak.
Thomas Boujut is the author of the documentary The Reasons Of The Wrath dedicated to Neil Youngbroadcast in 2022 on Arte: “ He is in a period of great popularity in 1977. Afterwards, we begin to get dangerously close to the years 1980, which will not be the best period in Neil Young’s discography. THE Chrome Dreams, it is mythical because, in fact, there were those who had heard it, those who had not heard it, those who dreamed of hearing it. There were pirated versions that could be found for quite exorbitant prices. »
Some of the songs on this record had been previously released, but were scattered on records released between the late 1970s and mid-1990s, but these were not the original versions. Chromium dreams allows you to discover them as the singer had imagined them at the start. This is the case, for example, of Sedan Delivery very different from the one published in 1979.
L'” love of sound by Neil Young
Beyond his talent as a composer, singer and guitarist, it is Neil Young’s archivist obsession that seems singular. The prolific singer has carefully preserved all the recordings made in the studio or on stage. His website offers a continuous flow of unpublished, often fascinating, and he regularly revisits with new sounds.
” Beyond music, it is his love of sound and technology that is important to Neil Young. It’s a bit like Prince, obviously in a very different register, musically, but I think there’s something of that order, that is to say someone who spends his time in the studio who records, who records! »
With Chrome Dreams, Neil Young therefore allows you to rediscover with a new ear titles that many thought they knew by heart. As Like A Hurricanewhich appeared on the album American Stars’n Bars in the late 1970s.
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