Trans (album)
| Trans | ||||
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| 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 | Synthrock, synthpop, new wave, experimental | |||
| Length | 39:48 | |||
| Label | Geffen | |||
| Producer | Neil Young, Tim Mulligan, David Briggs | |||
| Neil Young chronology | ||||
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| Professional ratings | |
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| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| AllMusic |   |
| Rolling Stone | |
| The Village Voice | A– |
Trans is the twelfth studio album by Canadian musician and singer-songwriter Neil Young, released on December 29, 1982. Recorded and released during his Geffen-era in the 1980s, Trans baffled many Neil Young fans upon its initial release—a Sennheiser vocoder VSM201 features prominently in six of the nine tracks.
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.
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."
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."
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." Young recalled later, "Geffen thought it was okay, but he didn't think it was good enough."
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