Harvest
, Neil Young's masterpiece, is fifty years old and it's worth celebrating: Emily Loizeau, Arman Méliès or Albin de la Simone, among other artists, celebrate this album and its author in Paris on Thursday.
This concert event, organized at the Centquatre, was on track long before the American-Canadian returned to the front page with its anti-Spotify crusade: Neil Young withdrew all his titles from the platform to protest against a podcast accused of discouraged vaccination among young people.
Read alsoFrom Bowie to the Stones… These monument albums celebrate their half-century in 2022
Harvest
has marked and inspired generations of musicians and singers.
"
I discovered it in my late teens, when I was starting to get out of the classic, it was love at first sight
," says AFP Emily Loizeau.
This album "
radiates, it is unstoppable, with sublime melodies, a moving subject, on edge, but it is anything but smooth, a folk-rock force emerges from it
", she continues.
The singer had already paid tribute in 2007 to Neil Young at the Printemps de Bourges festival, before resuming one of her titles,
Pocahontas
, in the bonuses of her album
L'Autre Bout du monde
.
For Arman Méliès,
Harvest
is also “
particularly important
”: “
it's a record that I have used, it is one of the milestones in my discovery of music and writing
”.
“
A bit of our personalities
”
Neil Young still irrigates the work of this musician, collaborator of Alain Bashung or Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine, among others.
Arman Méliès, also a singer, released
Laurel Canyon
in 2021 , an album named after a district in the hills of Los Angeles frequented in the 1960s and 1970s by leading artists such as Neil Young, David Crosby and Joni Mitchell.
"Harvest
participated in my musical education and my desire to make music
," adds Raoul Tellier, co-founder of La Maison Tellier, the group behind the evening at the Centquatre.
French artists whose heads are turned towards a real or imagined American West complete the ranks, such as Baptiste W. Hamon, Sammy Decoster or H-Burns.
"
We took the side of the simplest possible tribute, respecting the original form of the album, in the order of the songs
", develops Raoul Tellier, guitarist and composer.
But the idea is not either to play it note by note in a “tribute band” version, these exact copy groups.
“
We are not going to have fun distorting it, but we will take the liberty of putting a little of our personalities into it, by injecting a little modernity, it can be interesting to make it sound like a 2022 show
”, decrypts Arman Méliès, who will be one of the electric guitars of the concert.
“
A punk spirit
”
One of the highlights of the album,
Heart of Gold
, will be performed by Emily Loizeau.
Who is also
A man needs a maid
: "
it's a song of a guy in deep love, I'm going to try to bring my strength of femininity
".
To return to the news, the showdown between Neil Young and Spotify does not surprise Raoul Tellier.
“
He always had this image of a filibuster, who does what he wants, when he wants, always in accordance with his convictions
”.
Read alsoNeil Young withdraws his music from Spotify
Arman Méliès is not surprised either.
"
He's often referred to as the godfather of grunge (Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam have cited him as references), but he's also a punk spirit
."
But the label of punks in the 1970s,
No future
(“Without future”), would not be enough to describe the man with the eternal sideburns either.
In his recent albums, such as
Barn
, released at the end of 2021, environmental concerns surface.
"
Hearing it today is a light in these times of gloom around climate issues, it is very clear about the life that we must leave to our children and grandchildren
", concludes Emily Loizeau. .