By: E&P Staff Veteran rocker Neil Young's new political CD, "Living with War," is one of the hottest sellers in the nation -- number three on Amazon's list today -- and according to an article in the Detroit Free Press on Monday it was significantly inspired by a photograph in that paper.
The CD, which includes several antiwar songs and "Let's Impeach the President," was recorded hastily this spring. It seems that the initial inspiration came when Young saw a photograph by the Free Press's David P. Gilkey, which was republished in USA Today to go with an article by Gregg Zoroya.
Young told Rolling Stone magazine that he was staying in an unspecified hotel on March 27 when "I went down to the coffee machine and there was USA Today. The cover showed a large military craft converted into a flying hospital. The caption said something about how we are making great strides in medicine as a result of the Iraq conflict.
"That just caught me off guard, and I went upstairs and wrote 'Families' for one of those soldiers who didn't get to come home. Then I cried in my wife's arms. That was the turning point for me." An entire album quickly followed.
Gilkey has covered both the Afghanistan conflict and the Iraq war for the Free Press, both embedded and unembedded. He has served a half dozen tours in Iraq.
The Neil Young song "Families" begins:
When you try to bring our spirit home
Won't you celebrate our lives in a way
That's right for our children
and families
A review of the album today in E&P's corporate sibling Billboard terms it a "milestone effort ... a sharp-tongued rock album that serves as a fiery salute to the American spirit and a seething indictment of current political policy." It has stayed in the top three or four slots at Amazon since its release last week, and more than a million listeners plugged into the free streaming version, which is still available online. The two CDs ahead of it on Amazon this afternoon were by fellow "antiwar activists" -- the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen. The next Billboard chart comes out Wednesday.
Click
here to read Greg Mitchell's recent column "Neil Young and the Restless."
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