A Reminder of Why We Love Blogs

Neil Young has a new album in the pipeline, Living with War. One of the songs is "Impeach the President." As you might guess, it's a protest album. On his Website, he calls it a metal version of Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan.

But what does this have to do with blogs? I first found out about it when Atrios linked to this post by Howie Klein at his blog, DownWithTyranny! He's heard it, and he's very excited. "The album is beyond belief. I mean it's so great I was jumping out of my skin." He had to agree not to write much more because apparently the record company hadn't even heard it yet. But he did add, "Will this go down as Neil's greatest album ever? It will be a contender musically. And the impact lyrically could be profound."

Oh, sure, that's cool, but you don't necessarily need a blog for that. But that's not the end. I went to Technorati to see what else I could find, and I came up with this post, which them led me to a story in Editor & Publisher and a post at Last Left Turn Before Hooterville, the blog of a background singer who sang at the session.

This may be a stretch, but Neil's process in working on the record reminds me of blogs, too. He and Jonathan Demme were discussing their movie at SxSW, and in his intro of the two, Roland Swenson, managing director of the conference made a reference to "Ohio" and mentioned, "Neil, we need a new song." Whether that was Neil's impetus or not, Howie Klein reports that the whole project, from the first songwriting to the final recording, took nine days. Neil had his ideas, got them out, and went with them with few (if any) revisions. I'm trying not to raise my expectations too high, but this definitely seems like something to look forward to.

By the way, if you go clicking on some or all of the links above, stop in at the Editor & Publisher letters page, where a lot more correspondents than I would've expected respond to the initial write-up on the album by loudly asserting that a Republican man don't need him around, anyhow.