Who to trust?
Many of us are out to sea, out to lunch.
Then I learn that it turns out even our own memories are super-unreliable. We can't even trust our own memories. So we are our own unreliable narrators spinning out our own unreliable tales.
We tell the story, we make it up as we go, the story can change, morph, grow foggy, become a whole new narrative. I suppose it's true, we are hopelessly lost in a hall of mirrors of our own conjuring. We can't trust the mirror, our own eyes, our memories, or the reliability of our own bodies.
Yikes.
The a.m soundtrack - Neil Young's "American Stars & Bars" (1977). A rambling, shaggy-dog of a record. Recorded in multiple studios over 29 months. It's a mess. A holy, beautiful, loose, funky, glorious mess. Most of the tracks seems live in the studio, very little over-dubbing, but who knows? It starts with a few tracks with an amiable country lilt (with backing from Linda Ronstatdt, Nicolette Larson and Emmylou Harris), and also includes some epic songs, "Like a Hurricane,"(with Crazy Horse), and "Will to Love" (Neil all on his own. He sings from the perspective of a salmon swimming upstream to spawn, and to die, recorded in one long, stoned-out session with David Briggs, Neil is singing in front of a raging fire, you can hear the logs sparking and popping on the track). It's just a great, crazy-cool record from Neil. A shaggy-dog wonder.
