The Neil Young album he said no one could understand: “You know I’m saying something”
One of the powerful parts of music is being able to relate to the audience. Even though an artist might write certain lyrics that are about a very specific time in their lives, the best songs can transcend all the little details and make every listener in the world find a piece of themselves between those lines. In the case of Neil Young, though, he was always going to make music that was about him more than anything, and by making Trans, he knew that no one would understand what he was doing.
Because at this point in his career, trying to put Young into one musical box was fighting a losing battle. He did have certain genres that he liked to dip in and out of, like country, folk and hard rock, but whichever one would turn up on a record either came down to how he was feeling that day or if he was using Crazy Horse or not.
But after the sessions for albums like Rust Never Sleeps, those styles started running a little dry for Young. It was time to switch things up again, and as he began to enter the 1980s, fans were already a bit sceptical when listening to an album like Reactor, complete with keyboards and synthesisers that didn’t suit his voice at all.
If fans were apprehensive then, they had no idea what they were getting into with Trans. Compared to the last album, this electronic mess makes Reactor look like the epitome of class, with Young using a vocoder for most of the album and coming off like an old grandpa trying to do his best impression of A Flock of Seagulls.
While anyone with ears would consider this a major betrayal for Young, it’s far more heartfelt than people realise, telling Mojo, “You see, my son is severely handicapped, and at that time was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other people. That’s what Trans is all about. And that’s why, on that record, you know I’m saying something, but you can’t understand what it is.”
For all the people calling out Young for selling out to the masses, this wasn’t just some cheap cash grab or wild experiment gone wrong. This was the sound of a man desperately trying to communicate with his son, and when listening to ‘Little Thing Called Love’, it’s enough to bring you to tears in some spots.
Definitely a good message, but not exactly one that sold terribly well. Since Young had already been on a hot streak with zany records, he ended up getting back at his record company one album later, making Everybody’s Rockin’ once he got a call from his higher-ups insisting that the next album had to at least be rock adjacent.
Trans is far from the worst thing Young has ever produced, but when looking at it as an outsider, it’s easy to see that his heart is at least in the right place. No matter how many good intentions, sometimes even the greatest ideas don’t produce the best music. Considering where Young was on the timeline of his career, the long road to making an album like Freedom couldn’t have come fast enough.
