Experience the virtuoso instrumentation and exuberant musical creativity of guitarist and composer Neil C. Young in the latest EP ‘ReWorks, Vol. 2.’ The music is alive and animate, with deeply engaging themes and intricate arrangements that truly captivate your senses. Lost In The Manor interviews Neil C. Young about the themes, musical influences, future plans, and creative processes involved in making the EP ‘ReWorks, Vol. 2.’
Tell us about yourself. Name some of the influences that have shaped your music?
Hi! I’m Neil and I am a guitarist, composer and arranger based in the North West of England and my main musical focus is with the incredibly inventively named 'The Neil C. Young Trio' (ahem...).
My music has and is being shaped by a whole range of music that I have been exposed to over time, firstly it was mainly orchestral music as that's where my first music making journey began on the violin with the music of J.S. Bach mainly and then it spread into the worlds of jazz, (Cannonball Adderley, Miles Davis, George Benson) fusion (Allan Holdsworth, Wayne Krantz, Billy Cobham), and rock (The Black Crowes, Aerosmith) as I began playing the guitar which then led me to really enjoy and become obsessive with the composition and arranging processes, there is always something to get deeper into, every time you come back to a track your working on.
Your EP, ‘ReWorks, Vol. 2’, is compositionally brilliant and creatively expansive. Tell us more about the sounds, and the inspirations behind it.
Thank you! The inspirations all come from within the track itself which then hopefully adds to or at least helps to create a sense of uniqueness to each one. So, with 'Mouse In A Windmill' it was originally written as a Waltz but I've taken the idea of triplets in the melodic line but put this over the top of a more familiar 4/4 to place the lil' mouse in a different musical place, maybe the 'Windmill' was recently refurbished and the mouse is even more excitable than usual!
The second track, 'Troublemaker' is more direct, it takes the bridge/pre-chorus riff from the original and then uses it to form the intro and then it continues to underpin the verse and bridge sections throughout, possibly to add more 'trouble' to the overall arrangement which then could be thought of as that the riff is the trouble, or representing the troublemaker in this 'I know I shouldn't but I can't help myself' battle of wills.
'What's Going On?', track 3, is a flipped version of the first track in that it was originally in 4/4 time but I've taken some of the melodic phrasing ideas from it and used them to create a triple time feel rhythmically which then adds to general questions, concerns and anxieties which the lyrical content is reflecting upon from when it was first released, which are still very much still present today, sadly.
Finally, track 4 'Miss You' is built on two elements from the original piano and vocal version of the track (the original was first released as a opo/dance track) which is firstly, another of the 4/4 to triple time feel changes which is taken from the vocal phrasing at the end of the chorus where it uses a single bar of 3, I've flipped this idea and used the triple time as the basis of our version with a single bar of 4 at the end of the chorus. Also, there is a vocal line in the bridge sections 'Will you be my best friend...' and this has been turned into a riff that forms the introduction and drum solo chord sequences and also the first main riff that the trio play when all enters as a second intro. It also reappears at different times but it returns in its original format of 4/4 at the every end of our ReWorked track.
So, the inspirations are found within each track and explored further either through deliberate compositional work or a freer improvised structure, and this is something that I have realized over the course of this project as a whole, it's not all about bringing things and applying them to something, but look inside and within and see what is going to then bring out, what else has the initial or original idea got going on.
Describe your creative process. How do you approach songwriting?
When an idea appears, it can go two ways, either it unfolds quite naturally and it forms through repeated playings in a relatively short space of time or, it goes the opposite way and needs further and more trial and error, crafting and amendments to it.
Mainly I’ll try and write the arrangements on the guitar so that it works as a solo piece but then begin to use rehearsals and a DAW (Logic or GarageBand in my case) to keep working away on it.
I have just finished a new track that took a couple of hours to get to a point of ‘yep, that’ll do for me!’ but, there’s another track that I’ve been wrestling with for a year! Even though we can and do play it live, it’s still not at the ‘yep, you’ll do for me!’ place yet.
Some days the ideas fall nice and sit comfy, some bounce and keep bouncing…
Can you tell us about the themes and tonalities behind the tracks on the EP?
Each track has its own theme, which hopefully is not lost with it’s new arrangement but either viewed from a different angle or intensified maybe. I think that with track 1 I think the sense of fun and joy has been kept and with track 2, the sense of trouble is very much there with the riff more than niggling away, almost like your conscience when you know you shouldn’t be doing the thing you're doing.
Track 3 I hope has not lost the sentiment of the original, to me it hasn’t, it has supported the general feeling of the title, the conflicting situations on social, cultural and political levels and finally track 4, I think this is focusing on the intensity of feelings that you can have for someone when they’re not there, your mind is going to all sorts of places and you almost just want to cry out.
Is there any track on the EP that was particularly challenging to create and how did you overcome it?
Track 4, ‘Miss You’. I wanted to arrange it in a triple time from the start but the melodic lines were a challenge to put into this structure without losing its own original shape. Through transcription and a process of trial and error it worked out in the end. Once the melody was sorted and I could play it everything else fell into place around it.
What are some of the musical evolutions and/or connections in ‘ReWorks, Vol. 2’ from your previous work, ‘ReWorks Vol. 1’ ?
Between Vol 1 and 2 it is mainly about connections (Vol.4 is already out, err, long slightly disorganized story that’s not for now…). They are connected by the way in which each track has been worked and arranged, to create a new musical environment for the original message but, and importantly, not losing sight of that original message.
What are your future plans and what do you look forward to?
We are currently in the middle of ‘ReWorks Vol.3’ which is set for an Autumn release and features much more improvised sections than on the previous ReWorks releases. As well as that there’s a couple of DuoWorks releases that are almost ready to be let out to the world and then there’s the gigs as well dotted around the place over the last half of the year.
So plenty of good stuff and I can’t grumble at all, no way, bad form if I did!
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