Living with War
| Living With War | ||||
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| Studio album by Neil Young | ||||
| Released | May 2, 2006 (Free Streaming Download), May 8, 2006 (US Retail Stores) May 9, 2006 (International Retail Stores and Internet Stores) |
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| Recorded | March & April 2006 Redwood Digital and Capitol Studios |
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| Genre | Rock | |||
| Length | 41:36 | |||
| Label | Reprise | |||
| Producer | Neil Young, Niko Bolas and L.A. Johnson | |||
| Neil Young chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |    |
| Robert Christgau | B+ |
| Mojo | |
| Okayplayer | |
| Pitchfork Media | 7.6/10 |
| Rolling Stone | |
Living With War, released on May 2, 2006, is the Grammy and Juno Award-nominated twenty-eighth studio album by the Canadian musician Neil Young. The album's lyrics, titles, and conceptual style are highly critical of the policies of the George W. Bush administration; the CTV website defined it as "a musical critique of U.S. President George W. Bush and his conduct of the war in Iraq". Written and recorded over the course of only nine days in March and April 2006, its lyrics are in line with the early 1960s albums of folk artists such as Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, although they are set to what Young calls "metal folk protest music" courtesy of Young, bassist Rick Rosas, drummer Chad Cromwell and trumpet player Tommy Bray.
The rhythm section of Cromwell and Rosas and Young's "Volume Dealers" co-producer Niko Bolas were also at the core of Young's 1989 album Freedom, which contained an angry criticism of Reagan-George H. W. Bush America. There are other links between the albums: Bray also performed on Freedom and Freedom's hit single "Rockin' in the Free World" also contained a quotation of a President Bush: "a thousand points of light".
Young began writing songs for Living with War in a Gambier, Ohio, hotel room while visiting his daughter at her college. While retrieving coffee from a vending machine early one morning, Young saw the front page of a USA Today issue documenting a surgery room on an airplane flying seriously wounded US soldiers from Iraq to Germany. He later told Charlie Rose that the combination of the vivid picture and the headline (which focused not on any suffering and death depicted, but rather on medical breakthroughs made during the war) moved him: "For some reason, that was what did it to me. I went upstairs after that. I wrote this song, 'Families'; I started writing another song, 'Restless Consumer'; I started writing all these songs all at once; I had like four songs going at once." Young has said that after writing the songs, he quickly began "coming apart." He called his wife Pegi back to their room, and "I held on to her, and I was sobbing. I was sobbing so hard, that things were coming out of my face."
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Wikipedia