Bring Le Noise!

2:17 PM GMT 17/12/2010

How low end and the full moon inspired Neil Young’s Le Noise. By engineer Mark Howard.

Mark Howard is the go-to producer and recording engineer best-known for the records he has made with Daniel Lanois, including Peter Gabriel's Us, Willie Nelson's Teatro, Tom Waits's Real Gone, Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind and, most recently, Neil Young's Le Noise, the questing artist's first solo electric guitar record. Here he offers a fascinating insight into the eccentric MO of this month's MOJO cover star...

"Dan [Lanois] had gotten the invitation from Neil because Neil saw some YouTube videos of Daniel's new band Black Dub and he liked the way those looked. So he said, Would you film me and record me doing some acoustic songs? So that's how we started out. That's where Love And War and Peaceful Valley Boulevard came from.

"But he also had his electric guitar there: 'Blackie', the '50s Les Paul goldtop painted black. So we fired up some amps for the song Hitchhiker and we came up with that huge sound and tripped it out. When he heard his guitar coming back through the system - I had 18-inch subwoofers and I had a real heavy sound on 'em - he was so excited he wanted to keep goin' in that direction. And Dan pushed him to write a couple more songs and to mix a heavier-sounding record.

"When Neil heard this new sound I dialed up for him he was like, Wow. He's always had the top end, it's always been bright, but he's never had the low end. I put a subharmonizer on his guitar on the low end, so the low end tracks like a bass. Not only are you getting guitar but you're getting these low bass frequencies. He' doing the chord changes and it sounded bigger than you've ever heard anything!

"I've been spending a lot of time in Jamaica the last couple of years and I've gotten a handle on how the DJs dub the music. We started to do these dubs on top of Neil's record, just dubbing his vocal: "hey-hey-hey-hey" [like an echo] or taking one word and trapping it and that became the sound of the record. It was just him but with the subharmonizer and doing these dubs on top of it, it created this wall of sound. Neil really got into it and started pushing us: 'Go further! More! I want more of that stuff!'

"His whole trip was he'd only work three days before the full moon, so he'd come in each month for three days and only record for those three days. He'd come back the next month. He claims that three days before the full moon, that's when you're the most creative. If anything's gonna happen, it's gonna happen then. It might have some kind of truth to it. At least, it worked magically for this record. We would never do more than three takes, mostly one or two takes of each song and they were filmed live. He says 'I don't overdub,' so you either got it or you don't.

"With Neil nothing is premeditated. Songs come out of him, he doesn't work on them. He's not like a Dylan where he's thinking, I'm not gonna give the song away by tellin' ya that right away. There's no twist in the way he writes. He's always sayin', 'The song just came outta me that way. It's not like I was thinkin' about it.'"

As told to Michael Simmons

Posted by Ross_Bennett at 2:17 PM GMT 17/12/2010

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