Categories
GUEST EDITOR

From The Desk Of Bird Streets’ John Brodeur: “Waging Heavy Peace”

Omnivore just released the self-titled debut album from Brooklyn’s Bird Streets (a.k.a. John Brodeur). In addition to self-releasing records over the past two decades, Brodeur also worked as a music journalist (poor guy). For Bird Streets’ debut, Brodeur enlisted Jason Falkner (Beck, Air, Paul McCartney, Jellyfish, etc.) as co-writer, co-player and producer, while Miranda Lee Richards and Luther Russell contribute to a few tracks as well. Brodeur will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Check out the Bird Streets track we premiered in June.

Brodeur: Wanna spend some time inside Neil Young’s brain? Take a walk with this, the ultimate for-fans-only autobiography. Little about its presentation could appeal to someone unfamiliar with Young’s work or personality, and that personality flows from every page. Uncle Neil drifts from stories about his childhood and family to long, colorful descriptions of favorite cars and model trains, dispenses anecdotes about longtime producer David Briggs and the formation of Buffalo Springfield, and occasionally takes a full chapter to plug his ultra-high-fidelity PureTone music device (later known as Pono) or his LincVolt electric car. I say “occasionally” because PureTone/Pono and LincVolt earned several chapters in this rambling, endearing 500-pager. The tone ranges from “Can you believe they asked me to write a book?” to “Well, I guess I’d better write this dang book,” and it’s littered with these strange commercial interjections. The prose is awkward, the storytelling scatterbrained—there’s a lot of you-had-to-be-there in here. I’m not even sure this is a very good book. But I love Neil to death—I think of him as my spirit animal—and Waging Heavy Peace made me love him even more. He took no effort to structure his writing chronologically or topically, just wandered in the direction of whatever interested him at the time. Much the same way he’s conducted his career.

That said, I could have used a few more words on his bizarre 1982 apocalypse comedy film Human Highway. Perhaps there’s a shoot diary lurking in those Archives of his?