Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Ragged Glory - Smell The Horse (2023) [Hi-Res]

"Ragged Glory" is the 18th studio album by Canadian / American singer-songwriter Neil Young, and his sixth album with the band Crazy Horse.

Neil Young had a rough go of it in the 1980s. After spending his entire solo career with Reprise, he decided to take a chance on an old acquaintance. So he signed with David Geffen’s label in 1982 and immediately started pissing him off by releasing Trans, an album of cold, digital, new wave-leaning songs, most of which were recorded using a vocoder effect. That was followed by the all rockabilly (and all-too-short) Everybody’s Rockin’ (1983) (co-credited with the “Shocking Pinks”), and the straight-up country of Old Ways (1985). These stylized genre exercises caused Geffen to file an unprecedented lawsuit against Young for making albums “unrepresentative” of his music.

"Having re-established his reputation with the musically varied, lyrically enraged Freedom, Neil Young returned to being the lead guitarist of Crazy Horse for the musically homogenous, lyrically hopeful Ragged Glory. The album's dominant sound was made by Young's noisy guitar, which bordered on and sometimes slipped over into distortion, while Crazy Horse kept up the songs' bright tempos. Despite the volume, the tunes were catchy, with strong melodies and good choruses, and they were given over to love, humor, and warm reminiscence. They were also platforms for often extended guitar excursions: "Love to Burn" and "Love and Only Love" ran over ten minutes each, and the album as a whole lasted nearly 63 minutes with only ten songs. Much about the record had a retrospective feel -- the first two tracks, "Country Home" and "White Line," were newly recorded versions of songs Young had played with Crazy Horse but never released in the '70s; "Mansion on the Hill," the album's most accessible track, celebrated a place where "psychedelic music fills the air" and "peace and love live there still"; there was a cover of the Premiers' garage rock oldie "Farmer John"; and "Days That Used to Be," in addition to its backward-looking theme, borrowed the melody from Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" (by way of the Byrds' arrangement), while "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)" was the folk standard "The Water Is Wide" with new, environmentally aware lyrics. Young was not generally known as an artist who evoked the past this much, but if he could extend his creative rebirth with music this exhilarating, no one was likely to complain." (William Ruhlmann, AMG)

Neil Young, guitar, vocals
Frank "Poncho" Sampedro, guitar, vocals
Billy Talbot, bass, vocals
Ralph Molina, drums, vocals

Recorded April 1990 at Plywood Digital, Woodside, CA (except "Mother Earth": The Hoosier Dome)
Produced by Neil Young, David Briggs

Digitally remastered