Connie Lovatt on Neil Young’s ‘Hitchhiker’

Connie Lovatt: OK, I’m going to fully gush about an album. It’s impossible to pick a favorite album of all time and wouldn’t trust myself if I did. But this record came out at just the right time and each song was a professor and a friend: Neil Young’s Hitchhiker. I was working hard for a couple years writing songs, doing my best at being a-girl-with-guitar songwriter. Then this nonpareil of a-boy-with-guitar album came out. I love the versions of these songs that are on other recordings but this first recorded pass at them all had me like a mouse, tucked into a quilted walnut, listening to a lion. Dreaming of what it must be like to be a lion. It’s such a wonderful dream.

These songs are referred to as stripped down. They are anything but that. The pine tree is not stripped down without the foil angels and garlands, popcorn string and red bulbs. It’s out there filled with the air and the light and the sounds that surround it. What’s bigger than that? Which is truly more beautiful?

The energy in the seat of each song is so consistent I don’t understand it. Unless each song was recorded at exactly the same time in 10 parallel universes. It’s often commented on that the amount of substances Mr. Young consumed that night are what’s behind so much of the feel. But that doesn’t explain the sitting-right-in-front-of-you consistency to me. So it must be magic.

I think about him often on that night. What he was wearing or what his hair was like. How he must have moved about the rooms. I hope everything felt and tasted great that night. That there were no hangnails to snag on clothes or strings. That no toes were stubbed on piano benches. That the strings felt just right to him beneath his fingers and that Briggs never uttered an annoying word or sound. There’s no way that night was as perfect for him as it was for me. All I can do is hope that it was.

When you listen to a new record it’s like going fishing. You hope to catch some beauties that you can then catch and release, catch and release. When I got in my boat to listen to Hitchhiker the fish leapt out of the water and into the boat like a rainfall and I was only afraid I would sink with the weight of it all. And I KNOW that the fish will leap in and out and all around for the rest of my life. What a record.

Connie Lovatt’s Coconut Mirror album is out now.