Feel the noise

To: Andre Mayer

From: Sarah Liss

Subject: Home Before Dark

Hey Andre –

I don’t know about you, but until recently, I’d always viewed Neil Diamond as the musical equivalent of that goofy uncle who busts out the chicken dance at weddings: great for the kids and oldsters, kinda hilarious when you’re drunk (see: Sweet Caroline as karaoke staple) and endearing in a mildly embarrassing way. Still, he could always be counted on to spice up a dull party (see: Sweet Caroline as karaoke staple).

But then hirsute super-producer Rick Rubin (Beastie Boys, Dixie Chicks) chose Diamond as the next American legend in line for a career makeover. Building on his reverent, unfettered work with Johnny Cash on the Man in Black’s now-classic American IV and V recordings, Rubin shredded away the casino-friendly cheese on Diamond’s tunes for 2005’s 12 Songs. The result was a stunning, sombre collection that made me do a 180 – Diamond still sounded like somebody’s uncle, but suddenly he’d morphed from Wacky Neil to a grizzled, throaty sage, the sort of wise-but-warm elder you’d look to for advice.

Now that Rubin and Diamond have re-teamed for Home Before Dark, I’m worried that Uncle Neil might be losing his way. This disc feels even more stripped down than 12 Songs. It’s completely drum-free (which initially reminded me of Closing Time, Tom Waits’s debut and still my favourite of his albums) and even the orchestral arrangements (by David Campbell, a talented Canuck who just happens to be Beck’s dad) are rendered in thin watercolour washes. For the most part, the songs are based on the rustic up-and-down strumming of a steel-string guitar, which kept making me feel as though I was listening to a camp counsellor in a floppy Tilley hat lead a bonfire sing-along.

To: Sarah Liss

From: Andre Mayer

Subject: Where’s the real Neil?

Sarah,

I agree about Neil’s avuncular charm. I don’t know if the man ever qualified as “hip” (I’d have to ask my mom), but something has to be said for his ability to appeal to multiple generations. A cynic would say it’s evidence of his inoffensiveness; a realist would say it’s a testament to his timeless songcraft. I remember listening to the ballad September Morn as a six-year-old; it moved me then, and it still gives me chills. (I’m not sure what that proves, but aren’t you richer for knowing what I was grooving to in 1980?)

Diamond’s songwriting gifts are evident on Home Before Dark’s very first track, If I Don’t See You Again. It’s a plaintive and heartfelt ode to his lover. Neil sings openly, vulnerably about his days as a virile youth, confessing that he “hated sleeping around,” how he always yearned for something solid and true. The melody tumbles out as though it has always existed — the sign of a craftsman.Another Day (That Time Forgot), his duet with Dixie Chick Natalie Maines, is equally tender and almost as satisfying.

Rick Rubin’s ambition with both Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond was to strip off the decades of unwitting self-parody and recapture their essence as songwriters. This is a fine and noble aim. But I’m not sure this record does much to enrich the Diamond canon. The quietness of Home Before Dark is spellbinding at first, but by the time Neil launches into — or should I say, lurches into — One More Bite of the Apple (the fifth track), I was in desperate need of something jaunty. Something frothy and up-tempo, in the spirit of Kentucky Woman or Cracklin’ Rosie. Rick Rubin, what have you done with my Neil Diamond?

To: Andre Mayer

From: Sarah Liss

Subject: Shine on, you crazy Diamond

About that quietness: I’m all for simple, spare ambiance, but I’m with you – midway through Home Before Dark, I kept hoping some boogeyman (maybe Wacky Neil?) would jump out from behind a tree and add some life to the proceedings. The weird part is that normally, excessive minimalism (is that an oxymoron?) wouldn’t bother me. Diamond is an unequivocally talented songwriter; his work is generally strong enough to stand up to a relatively minimalist treatment. But with the spotlight on his phlegmatic vocals, I couldn’t help but notice that the guy seems to revert to the same melodies over and over and over again.

Like, y’know your comment on how If I Don’t See You Again “tumbles out as though it has always existed”? It felt almost too effortless to me, like Diamond had entered default mode. As I moved through the album, the melodic echoes (Don’t Go There and No Words are particularly guilty of sameness) just reaffirmed that suspicion. Did you pick up on that? And is it just me, or does the writing on Home Before Dark feel … well, not quite up to Uncle Neil’s usual standard?

Seriously, though, what I’m missing is that sense of playfulness and fun that was casino-circuit Neil’s stock in trade. Don’t get me wrong – the world certainly doesn’t need another Red Red Wine; one is more than enough to be on constant rotation in mall food courts worldwide. But even 12 Songs, for all its gravitas, had a sense of humour. That album’s shambolic Delirious Love, a calculated nod to Sweet Caroline, was a cheeky assertion that Casanova Neil has still got it. The gentle Save Me a Saturday Night, on the other hand, with its delicate glockenspiel riff, was a beautifully paced love song that forced Diamond to muster a more nuanced vocal delivery.

Diamond is particularly po-faced when it comes to the lyrics on Home Before Dark (which, let it be known, are epic). I think the graceful exploration of spirituality on the lead single, Pretty Amazing Grace, is quite good, and that Dixie-Diamond duet you mentioned is a nice call-and-response deal, even if our man occasionally slips into lovey-dovey clichés (“Should’ve held you till the storm went by.” Huh?) But when I got to Whose Hands Are These, the Seussian central couplet – “Whose hands are these/These hands are yours” – made me cringe, like I was listening to Grandpa having another bout of dementia.

Too harsh?

To: Sarah Liss

From: Andre Mayer

Subject: Too many hands

Neil Diamond performs on NBC's Today show on May 2, 2008 at Rockefeller Center in New York. ( Matt Carr/Getty Images)

Ha! I, too, stumbled on Whose Hands Are These, though I didn’t cringe so much as snort with laughter.

Diamond is not the worst lyricist ever; he often manages to be poignant. I’d even go as far as to say that he’s at his best when emotion (nearly) gets the better of him — when anguish, desire, etc. push him to ever more preposterous wordplay. Let’s not forget who authored this masterful lyric: “ ‘I am’ I said/ To no one there / And no one heard at all / Not even the chair.” Who, in the depths of existential despair, stops to wonder what the furniture is thinking?

Neil, that’s who.

Having said that, the only time I buy into such outlandish imagery is when the music, and Neil’s emotion, is writ large. I Am … I Said is silly but it’s epic, which makes it less silly. The problem with Home After Dark is that there are no moments of grandeur. Don’t get me wrong: I think this is a collection of pretty, heartfelt songs. But the muted setting at once exposes Neil’s weakness in the lyrical department and is far too restrained to make any sort of impact in my memory centre.

I feel a little guilty about criticizing what is clearly a very personal record. Maybe my issue isn’t with Neil so much as with Rick Rubin’s much-ballyhooed restoration project. What say you?

A

To: Andre Mayer

From: Sarah Liss

Subject: Diamond lost in the rough

I dunno, dude. In my most profound moments, I have been known to lament the fact that not even the refrigerator feels my pain … but I digress.

Inanimate objects aside, I suspect I have more faith in Neil Diamond’s skills as a lyricist overall than you do; I appreciate how he manages to cram oodles of pathos into simple sentiments. His words aren’t always the prettiest or most poetic, but they’re genuine and speak volumes. He’s a master of allusion – think of his sly “Won’t need bright lights / No, no we won’t / Gonna make our own lighting” on the saucy Cherry, Cherry, or his description of Cracklin’ Rosie as a “store-bought woman.” And man, can he ever write about love in all its many-splendoured forms: Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon; I’m A Believer; Song Sung Blue; You Got To Me. He’s a lover, not a fighter.

But their brevity is precisely what I love about those songs — Neil says just enough, not too much. While Home Before Dark may be full of intensely personal confessions — and I’m sure today’s Diamond has much more to say than when he was just a kid — the narratives on the disc seem to ramble on forever. What our man needs, it seems, is a good editor, and I wish Rick Rubin could’ve risen to the occasion.

After seeing him in all his bearlike, Unabomber-looking glory in Barbara Kopple’s Dixie Chicks documentary (Shut Up And Sing), I would never have taken Rubin as a man easily fazed. But judging from his work here, I kinda feel like the lauded producer was a bit too enthralled with his subject. He obviously didn’t step in to say, “Hey, buddy, this If I Don’t See You Again tune is great, but it would be even better if you cut it down from ten verses to five.” I sense a similar reverence in his arrangements — he has too much faith in Diamond’s skeleton songs and refuses to stir the pot. Part of me wonders whether Uncle Neil was testing his esteemed collaborator. Did he want to see whether Rubin had the cojones to challenge him? What would’ve happened had the producer actually risen to the occasion?

I guess we’ll never know. As it stands, Home Before Dark is a pleasant and rather dull record that could’ve been fantastic, while 12 Songs was a triumphant, evolutionary leap in the career of a musical legend. This is the sound of a savvy uncle kicking back in his La-Z-Boy.

Favourite tracks: Another Day (That Time Forgot); Pretty Amazing Grace; The Power of Two

Rating: **1/2 (out of 5)

To: Sarah Liss

From: Andre Mayer

Subject: Zen and the art of Rick Rubin

I don’t buy the theory that Rick Rubin is awed by Neil Diamond. I think Rick Rubin is awed by Buddhism and, by extension, his own Zen approach to record production. The calmness and consistency of Home After Dark is not unappealing, but it induces torpor rather than enthusiasm.

Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of Home After Dark is Diamond’s accompanying essay, which addresses the various inspirations for the record, the complexities of the writing process and the idiosyncrasies of recording with the aloof and mysterious Mr. Rubin. At one juncture, Diamond gets blocked while recording the undeniably sweet The Power of Two. Here is his description of what happened:

“Rick would occasionally visit us out in the studio, have a quiet word with one of the musicians or whisper something to me like: ‘In the Buddhist religion, the power of two people praying together is infinite.’ Then he’d pad back into the dark of the control room where he’d lie down on the couch behind the engineers and go trancelike again into the music, leaving me to figure out what the hell he was talking about.”

Rubin is responsible for some of the most iconic records of the modern era, including the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill, Run-DMC’s Raising Hell and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik. But methinks he is a little too smitten with the notion of restoring Neil Diamond’s cred. While 12 Songs had a sort of ragged glory to it, Home After Dark is hushed and safe. Rubin seems to have filtered out the quirky qualities that have made Neil such a pop-cultural force.

Favourite tracks: If I Don’t See You Again; Another Day (That Time Forgot); Forgotten

Rating: **1/2