Another round-up, this one musical. First up: I took in a wonderful Alejandro Escovedo show at the Englert Theatre in Iowa City last night. You can read a full review on CorridorBUZZ.com here.

Neil Young’s long-promised boxed set, Archives, seems to have been pushed back yet again, but there is hope for those of us with specific needs from such a set. Live shows? Sure, bring ’em on. Alternate versions of well-known tracks? OK, I’m game. Unreleased songs and rumored studio sessions? Now we’re talking.

According to Young’s web site, an unreleased Crazy Horse session from 2000 is forthcoming. The songs were recorded “in San Francisco, south of Market Street, at an old studio called ‘Toast.’ Coltrane had recorded there, among many other jazz greats, known and unknown. The dot-com boom was happening and buildings were being bought and turned into lofts or torn down completely and rebuilt. New money was everywhere. Toast was a target. The place was a little run down and sort of on its last legs.”

The sessions didn’t go well, according to the report. Only one song was finished, while many of the others eventually saw release on the tepid Are You Passionate? album. However, the original material is being revisited, and Young has now deemed at least some of it worthy of release. “Many songs share a bluesy, jazz-tinged vibe as a common thread. Three solid rockers are interspersed in the mix. Other songs are long with extensive explorations between verses, a Crazy Horse trademark, kind of like a down-played Tonight's the Night, except these songs deal directly with love and loss, not drugs,” the site reports.

The result? Something the report calls “perhaps one of the most under-estimated and deceptive Crazy Horse records of all time.” We’ll see. If these were the songs rejected in favor of the underwhelming, largely uninspiring Are You Passionate? – an album that cries out for one of J.D. Considine’s patented short reviews: “No. And neither, it seems, were you.” – then I shudder to think of what the disc might hold in store. An artist isn’t always the best judge of his own work, however, so perhaps Toast will be just what it promises, a dark classic. If nothing else, it’s heartening to see Young throwing open the door to his vault for a series of unreleased albums.

Joe Pernice, meanwhile, is working on two projects. The first is a novel for Riverhead/Penguin Books. “There's isn't much I can say, except that it's written in the first person, is set in the mid 1990s on Cape Cod in the off-season” he writes. “And my narrator doesn't have a name. I might name him Joe just to beat to the punch anyone who thinks (incorrectly) he's me. Or I might name him Bob and let my brother mop up for once.”

As for the album, it sounds like it won’t be a Pernice Brothers album. He writes that he was asked often about why he used the names Chappaquiddick Skyline and Big Tobacco for two earlier albums, and says, “I'm going to think long and hard before I put a band name on this little honey.”

He reports that vocals and some mixing are all that is left to complete it. The disc was largely played by Pernice, Ric Menck and James Walbourne, with recording by his brother, the aforementioned Bob. “It's my most spare album since Chappaquiddick. I like the songs a lot, especially: ‘I Can't be around People,’ ‘Easy to Leave,’ ‘She Should of Came’ and ‘The Adulterer's Moustache.’ I'm sure you can tell by the titles, we're shooting for stardom with this one. I'm tired of making a living releasing my own records and being respected by a coterie of people I respect. I want to be adored.”

Labels: music, Neil Young