Neil Young -Greendale (Part Two)

                                       Tweeter Center Camden, New Jersey  July 2, 2003

 Greendale is the 27th studio album by Neil Young. Young and Crazy Horse's Greendale is a 10-song musical novel^[12] set in a fictional California seaside town of the same name. Based on the saga of the Green family, Greendale combines numerous themes on corruption, observation of the passing of time, environmentalism and mass media consolidation.

                                                                         Carmichael     

Young recorded the album between July and September 2002 at his Broken Arrow Ranch. The sessions were produced by Young and filmmaker L. A. Johnson. The sessions feature Young on guitar, organ and harmonica backed only by drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot of longtime collaborators Crazy Horse. Unlike other works credited to the band, it does not feature a rhythm guitarist. Frank "Poncho" Sampedro does not appear on the album but did perform with the group during the album's tour

                                                                                 Bandit

 Young recorded each song as he wrote it, beginning with "Devil's Sidewalk". "The songs started to unravel, I saw the story, what happened next. I wrote the songs one at a time and recorded each one before I'd write the next one. The songs just happened. First thing in the morning, I'd pick up a guitar, play two or three chords and go, 'That's the blueprint. That's what my soul told me, so that's what it is.' Then I'd go to the studio. I would write the words, without guitar, in my car. I'd keep stopping on the way – write two verses, go a hundred yards, stop, write some more. I kept moving, and writing, until I got to the studio. Whatever I had then, that was the song. "Devil's Sidewalk" – the recording is the first time I sang it, the first time the band had ever heard it."

                                                                     Grandpa's Interview

Young did not start with an overall premise and write the songs to fit the overall story, but rather wrote each song one by one, and the overall story emerged from the individual songs themselves.  "I simply started writing. I don't know exactly what happened. I've never written songs with characters in them before. I simply wrote a song and then thought: 'Hey, that's interesting.' And then I wrote another song. In the first song, I found it exciting that there were characters with names, that conversed.

                                             Bring Down The Diner

 he next day I wrote a new song with the same characters.""I just let it out. I never tried to make things fit together or anything. I just kept on going. Luckily I could jump from character to character and so continuity wasn't that important. And I found out later that the continuity was golden all the way through."

                                                             Sun Green/Be The Rain

  A contemporary review of the album by The Guardian succinctly rehashes the album's storyline as follows: "Grandpa Green is an ornery patriarch who finds himself in the media spotlight when his great-nephew Jed accidentally shoots a cop. Grandpa then suffers a fatal heart attack while fending off a reporter. The death somehow prompts his granddaughter Sun to become an eco-warrior, until FBI surveillance prompts her to leave Greendale for good."