Pegi Young Preps First Album

[Analogman]

Pegi Young has toured as a backing vocalist with her husband Neil for years, but on June 12, her own music will be in the spotlight with the release of her self-titled debut for Warner Bros.

 

The project blends originals such as "Heterosexual Masses," "Fake," "Love Like Water" and "White Line in the Sun" with covers of Spooner Oldham and Den Penn's "I'm Not Through Loving You Yet" and three cuts penned by Will Jennings: "When the Wildlife Betrays Me," "Hold On" and "I Like the Party Life."

 

"They helped tell this story I was thinking about and was taking shape in my head; it's sort of a melancholy theme and a reflective record," she tells Billboard.com.

 

Young recorded the album in her husband's studio at their Northern California ranch with assistance from bassist Rick Rosas, guitarist Anthony Crawford, drummers Karl Himmel and Chad Cromwell and pedal steel whiz Ben Keith. And yes, Neil wound up playing on a host of tracks, including an electric sitar solo on "Love Like Water."

 

"Leading up to it, I put the band together and we just sort of avoided discussing whether Neil was going to play on it or not," Young says. "He dropped by the first day and kind of listened, and the next day, the guys at the studio had wisely created a little space for him, should he want to participate at all. And then he just ended up playing on everything, all the way through."

 

The sessions were so productive that Young already has a dozen fully mixed songs ready to go for a future release. "The more I write, the more I write," she says. "It's not necessarily condition-specific; all of the sudden there's an idea and it comes out in verse. It starts to make itself a poem or a future song."

 

Young is hoping to play live in the months ahead, having already spent three days rehearsing with a retooled version of her studio band. And Neil fans can rejoice, as Pegi confirms all signs point to a fall release for the former's long-awaited "Archives Vol. 1" boxed set. "You know, from your lips to god's ears!," she says with a laugh. "From what I've seen and gleaned from just being around, it looks like the first bit of it will be out this year."

 

 

billboard article

[intodeep]

Very Interesting. Thanks for sharing. I'll probably skip this unless for some unlikely reason i hear that it is great. Best news is it looks like the archives will arrive before Christmas

[Vacant Horizon]

Don't know about some of the song titles. This could be a good album if neil is all over it. sounds like a concept album, maybe greendale(ish)?

[Analogman]

 

 

SFGate.com

People do strange things when their children finally grow up and leave the house. It's the so-called empty-nest syndrome. Pegi Young, wife of rock star Neil Young, made an album and started a singing career.

 

"It's something that I probably always wanted to do," she says. "I've been writing a long time. I've been playing music in my own way for a long time. It's just been put over here, while I had other things that I needed to do. I guess it's just sort of an evolution. Playing and singing more with Neil and with my Mountainettes singing group just sort of led to it. It was Elliot's suggestion, actually (Elliot Roberts, Neil Young's longtime manager). I'd been thinking about making my own record, but I'd only been thinking about it. I hadn't sort of jumped in."

 

Pegi Young, married to Neil Young for nearly 30 years and the mother of two grown children, is spending a Saturday afternoon holding a couple of practice interviews in advance of her June album release, in the South San Francisco video studio where her husband supervised the editing of his 2003 movie "Greendale."

 

She is an attractive ash blonde with piercing, sparkling eyes and no makeup, freshly returned from the Big Island of Hawaii, where she and her husband have a 1920s beachfront home on the Kona coast. For the first time since they bought the place, the couple went to the island for Christmas, and just stayed.

 

Their daughter, Amber Jean, 23, has moved into an apartment of her own in San Francisco. Their son, Ben, 29, who has cerebral palsy, is living independently. His condition led Pegi Young to found the Bridge School for disabled children in 1986 in Hillsborough.

 

She is wearing a black tunic she bought at a Burlingame boutique, black leggings and short black boots; her fingers are covered in jewelry. She has an easy laugh and an offhand, casual grace.

 

For 20 years, Young, 55, has been the face of the annual October Bridge School benefit concerts at Shoreline Amphitheatre. Over the years, fans have watched as she started putting her toe in the musical waters of the show, starting out by singing background vocals in a chorus and slowly working her way to the front of the stage to sing with her husband.

 

"I guess the more I've done it, the more he gives me to do," she says. "I played guitar in the 'Heart of Gold' movie at the Ryman (Auditorium in Nashville). I really hadn't played guitar in public before, so what a place to break out the guitar, this hallowed ground, this hallowed stage and all these musicians in the audience. Sort of like my first singing in public with Neil was the Academy Awards -- just plunge in."

 

Of course, Pegi Young had certain advantages not usually available to someone making a first album. She easily landed a big-name record producer, Elliot Mazer, whose previous work includes the classic Neil Young record "Heart of Gold," his best-selling album. She put together a stellar band of musicians who have played in various Neil Young projects. The Youngs' ranch in the La Honda hills has a world-class recording studio, and Young received serious attention from her husband's record label.

 

"I'm getting tremendous breaks in getting it heard," she says of her self-titled album, "in getting to work with these fabulous musicians, getting to work in this wonderful studio. I'm not a young, emerging artist. I am an emerging artist. So to get my record played for Warner Bros., (Neil's connection) had everything to do with it."

 

Although she has been writing songs since she was Pegi Morton, a student at San Mateo's Aragon High School, she never played her own songs in public, even when she first started experimenting with music.

 

"People would just get together and play in living rooms, but I never sang my own stuff," she says.

 

She played some of her songs for producer Mazer, but they started working on the album by recording other people's songs, including Lucinda Williams' "Side of the Road," one of the many tracks that didn't make the final cut. Young says she never planned to record her own material.

 

"Once we got started, and it was two days (later), the guitar player, Anthony Crawford, said, 'Well, when are we going to do your songs?' So I broke out a couple of my songs, and that was really exciting because some of them I've carried around so long."

 

She ended up using seven of her own compositions on the 12-song disc. Mazer brought in three songs by well-known songwriter Will Jennings; Southern soul writer Spooner Oldham, keyboard player on the sessions, supplied the set's climactic ballad, "I'm Not Through Lovin' You Yet"; and Young, who spent plenty of her teenage years hanging out at the Fillmore, Avalon Ballroom and Winterland, remembered "Sometimes Like a River" from the Joy of Cooking, one of the unsung greats of '70s San Francisco rock.

 

Also, perhaps not surprisingly, her husband played guitar in the band on the entire album, although that wasn't part of the plan either.

 

"The thing was that, when I did assemble the band mentally and we made contact with everybody, I had never asked Neil if he was going to be in my band, and he never said," she says. "He always supported what I was doing, and he would give me ideas when he would hear me practicing at home. It was only on the day it started. I think he wanted me to step out and just do it on my own and not have it be this big shadow that maybe he would cast if people thought he was going to be involved from the start.

 

"But the studio guys were very smart, and they made a little space for him, just in case he dropped by. He came by the first day and kind of listened. The next day he came and sat in, and he was on everything. It was great. He's great. What's not good about that?"

 

She takes her show on the road this week with several warm-up dates, and she is scheduled to appear July 18 on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" with her band -- guitarist Crawford, steel guitarist Ben Keith and bassist Rick Rosas, the musicians who backed her on the album and also happen to be the backup band for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.

 

Her husband is not advertised as part of the package, but it's hard to imagine him staying home.

 

"Maybe it's an intimidating factor," Young says. "The opportunities have presented themselves, which is fantastic. Like I say, if I wasn't doing the job that he wanted done, singing the songs with believability and enthusiasm -- it's so obvious that I love to do it. He doesn't just hire me because I'm his wife."