Trans (album)

Trans
Studio album by Neil Young
Released	December 29, 1982
Recorded	September 24, 1981 – May 12, 1982 at Modern Recorders in Redwood City, California, and Commercial Recorders in Honolulu, Hawaii
Genre	Electronic rock, synthpop, new wave, experimental
Length	44:26
Label	Geffen
Producer	Neil Young, Tim Mulligan, David Briggs
Neil Young chronology
Re-ac-tor (1981) Trans (1982) Everybody's Rockin' (1983)

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]
Blender	[2]
Robert Christgau	A−[3]
Rolling Stone	[4]

Trans is the twelfth studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released in 1982. Recorded partially and released during his Geffen era in the 1980s, Trans baffled many Neil Young fans. A Sennheiser Vocoder VSM201^[5] features prominently in six of the nine tracks. While the album was poorly received, some critics point out that the melodies are strong and that the album involves Young addressing new musical movements, as he did previously on Rust Never Sleeps and later with the grunge movement on Mirror Ball.

Originally released as an LP, the album was re-issued in 1998 on CD, although not in the US.

Background

In 1982, Young left Reprise Records, his record label since his debut album in 1968, to sign with Geffen Records — the label founded and owned by David Geffen, who had worked with Young as manager of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young's contract guaranteed him $1 million per album, as well as total creative control over his output.^[6]

From late 1980 to mid-1982, Young spent much of his waking hours carrying out a therapy program for his young son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. Neil disclosed to almost no one at the time that he was doing so, or that the repetitive nature of the songs on both the previous album, Re-ac-tor, and this one related to the exercises he was performing with Ben. Work on Trans began in late 1981 as a continuation of Re-ac-tor, with the usual Crazy Horse lineup. But then Young started playing with two new machines he had acquired, a Synclavier and a Vocoder. Crazy Horse guitarist Poncho Sampedro recalled, "Next thing we knew, Neil stripped all our music off, overdubbed all this stuff, the vocoder, weird sequencing, and put the synth shit on it."^[7]

Young's direction was influenced by the electronic experiments of the German band Kraftwerk, but more importantly he felt that distorting his voice reflected his attempts to communicate with his son. "At that time he was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other people. That's what Trans is all about. And that's why, on that record, you know I'm saying something but you can't understand what it is. Well, that's exactly the same feeling I was getting from my son."^[6][8]

Young's first work for Geffen was a group of songs for an entirely different project, Island in the Sun, recorded in May 1982 in Hawaii. According to Young, it was "a tropical thing all about sailing, ancient civilisations, islands and water."^[8] Young recalled later, "Geffen thought it was okay, but he didn't think it was good enough."^[7]

Instead of recording more new material, Young went back to the synthesizer tracks, actually recorded in the last days of the Reprise contract, and put together an album of songs from the two very different projects, three from Island in the Sun and six of the synthesizer tracks. Young proposed making a video to go with the album that would have clarified what the album was about. "All of the electronic-voice people were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button."^[7]

After a year of work, the album was mixed in a hurry because Young was eager to go out on tour, and a last-minute change in the running order is evident in the inclusion of a song called "If You Got Love" in the track listing and lyric sheet, even though it is not on the album.^[9]

Portions of several tracks appeared in Young's 1982 feature length comedy film Human Highway.^[10]

Trans, along with Young's next Geffen release Everybody's Rockin', formed the basis of a 1983 lawsuit filed against Young by Geffen on the grounds that he had produced deliberately uncommercial and unrepresentative work.^[6]

Track listing

All songs written by Neil Young.

Side one

1. "Little Thing Called Love" – 3:13
2. "Computer Age" – 5:24
3. "We R in Control" – 3:31
4. "Transformer Man" – 3:23
5. "Computer Cowboy (aka Syscrusher)" – 4:13

Side two

1. "Hold On to Your Love" – 3:28
2. "Sample and Hold" * – 5:09 (CD - 8:03)
3. "Mr. Soul" – 3:19
4. "Like an Inca" * – 8:08 (CD - 9:46)

*Different mixes of these tracks appear on the CD release

Personnel

• Neil Young – guitar, bass, Synclavier, electric piano, vocal, Sennheiser Vocoder
• Nils Lofgren – guitar, piano, organ, electric piano, Synclavier, vocal, Sennheiser Vocoder
• Ben Keith – pedal steel guitar, slide guitar, vocal
• Bruce Palmer – bass
• Ralph Molina – drums, vocal
• Joe Lala – percussion, vocal
• Frank Sampedro – guitar, stringman
• Billy Talbot – bass

Covers by notable artists

American alternative rock band Sonic Youth covered the song "Computer Age" during their Daydream Nation era.

References

External links

• Lyrics at HyperRust.org
• review in Rolling Stone dead link