Neil Young, a famous musician and singer/songwriter, is someone who I’ve always respected for years. He is a huge inspiration for my own music and he is one of my musical heroes. I have 13 of his albums in my collection and counting. I’m trying to collect his entire album collection as much as possible. In this memoir, “Waging Heavy Peace”, he wants to give fans a closer look at his personal life and musical career. One thing to keep in mind though, that this book wasn’t written as an autobiography. It was written like a diary. When you read this book, you’ll immediately feel like that Neil Young is sitting right there, talking to you. That’s what I felt like. I felt like I was in a long conversation with Neil Young. The book really doesn’t start from his childhood to now like most memoirs are. This memoir is different.

Neil talked about his family life, his children and how he met his wife, Pegi. He talked about being sick with Polio back when he was a child and how hard it was to go through all that. Of course, what interested me the most was all the music stuff. He talked about all the stuff with one of his first bands, The Squires. He talked about Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and of course, he talked a lot about his solo career. Yes, he talked a lot about  his rock band, Crazy Horse too.

While all that stuff was good, the main focus of the book, was how Neil is about to change the world with digital music. With the likes of Ipod, and Itunes, he talked about how today’s sound in mp3 is horrible. He explains when music from the master recording is converted into mp3 or Compact Disc, the sound quality loses quite a bit of sound from it’s original recording. Neil is not bashing or hating today’s music industry, just the sound quality. I totally agree with him! The sound quality of digital music with Ipods and online streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody, IHeartRadio, etc. have bad sound quality. The main focus of the book, is that Neil is about ready to go to war with Itunes about all of this. Soon he will launch a special mp3 player called, Pono, (which was first introduced on David Letterman). Pono, is supposed to have the best sound quality of music, where it won’t lose the sound from the original recording. You know how vinyl’s have the best sound quality? Well, that’s how Neil wants today’s digital music to sound. Neil wants to change the sound quality of today’s music to make everyone happy. I like Itunes and online streaming services myself, I agree we could use a change in digital sound.

Not only that Neil wants to change the world with digital sound, he wants to change the car industry around too. Other than music, Neil has a strong passion and love for cars. He collected a lot of them over the years. He’s been working on a car project, called LincVolt. In 2010, the car was destroyed by fire, and the car is currently being rebuilt, to make it even better.

Neil’s other passion besides music and cars, is making movies. Neil has made quite a bit of films over the years. He has made all those music videos himself, most of ’em.

This was a very interesting book. Probably, the most honest one I’ve ever read. Neil is a pretty honest and a real guy. Although, he is very friendly and has a good sense of humor. He did talk about Jimmy Fallon pretending to be him on his late night show, and talked a lot about the huge “Conan O’ Brien vs. Jay Leno” feud. Neil was a big part of that drama, since he played on the last episode that Conan was on NBC.

If you like Neil Young or if you’re just a music fan, you should read this. Pretty insightful read. I’m a big Neil Young fanatic and proud of it!

Kev