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Despite criticisms, Neil Young works at his own pace
BY L. KENT WOLGAMOTT / Lincoln Journal Star
Friday, Mar 24, 2006 - 12:01:28 am CST

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Neil Young had been nervous for months, worrying about his South By Southwest Music Conference keynote interview.

But when Young, film director Jonathan Demme and Harp Magazine senior editor Jaan Uhelszki sat down in the overstuffed chairs for the interview, the veteran rocker appeared totally relaxed and turned the hourlong session into a discussion of songwriting and, to a lesser degree, his career.

The packed ballroom session became a seminar in creativity led by a man who has been writing songs, performing and creating performance films for four decades.

“Getting at the essence of creativity is like coming upon a caged animal — well, not a caged animal, an animal in a hole and trying to get it to come out and not scare it,” Young said. “If you get too close to it, the thing is going to run away. If you try too hard, you’re not going to get there at all. You have to be ready for it.

“I just start writing. I’m proudest of my work when it comes really fast and there’s no thought about what it is and I don’t try to adapt it and I don’t try to edit it. That’s the purest form of creativity for me.”

Beyond that, however, Young said he doesn’t worry about where the inspirations for songs come from. He’s sure not a Nashville tunesmith who sits down with a guitar and a legal pad and hammers out songs every day. Sometimes, he says, he won’t write a song for months. Then they’ll come in bunches, as they did when he was writing “Prairie Wind,” his most recent album.

“I really don’t know where anything comes from,” he said. “I write totally out of the air. … I try not to think about it. The more you think about it, the worse you get. … I’m still doing whatever it is that music makes me do. I’m looking for input to send it back. I really am, more than anything else, a reflection of what I see.”

The main thing, Young said, is to grab the idea when it comes to you.

“The one constant is to not let yourself get distracted,” he said. “Your responsibility to the muse is to follow it. There is nothing more important. Commitments are one of the worst things for music making. They’re annoying.”

One thing Young isn’t is a human jukebox. Much to the frustration of some of his fans, he goes out of his way not to repeat himself.

“People want to know why you don’t make your most famous record over and over again,” he said. “Because it’s death. That’s why.”

That need for constant motion led Young to once be sued by Geffen Records for not making records that sounded like Neil Young records. And he’s been criticized for failing to play his biggest hits in concert — criticism he embraces as the highest form of praise.

“The longer you can go on and do things that people don’t like, the better off you are,” he said. “When I read in USA Today that I was ripping off my audience (with his ‘Greendale’ tour), I knew I was onto something. … The business has gotten so big that there is this contract and I wasn’t living up to my contract. I can’t help it. It was a trip having people telling me I was ripping people off. I knew I was doing the right thing. That felt good.”

“Prairie Wind” was an acoustic-based, country-feeling record. Demme filmed Young performing the songs and talking about them for his new documentary, “Neil Young: Heart of Gold.” Now, Young said, the time may have come for him to reunite with the earth-stomping band Crazy Horse.

“There’s something about playing with that band that enables me to write different lyrics,” he said. “When I play with that band, I know the songs are going to come. But it’s not going to be ‘Heart of Gold.’ Those songs aren’t going to come to the party.”

Deciding to get back together with Crazy Horse means Young is in for an intense experience.

“If I played with Crazy Horse every tour, I’d be dead,” he said. “The lights are like 110 degrees and I’m freezing. There’s this cold chilling wind blowing through my body. That’s when you’re transcending. Crazy Horse enables me to do that.”

That said, it appeared from the conversation that Young was ready to rock again.

“I’m waking up with the massive, distorted noise in my head,” he said. “It makes me feel like I’m going home.”

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.