“When I wrote this, I knew I was on to something. I could feel the world changing. I knew I was into something cool when I got the two sennheiser vocoders to the studio. They enabled me to be a robot, to sing through anything, present my voice as an envelope to the notes I played with my synclavier keyboard…I saw the factory, the place where replicas and robots were built to order, the rows of old telephones being operated by feminine appearing robots, beautiful, yet mechanical. I started seeing mechanical nurses in a hospital, who came to help me find a way for my child to speak. I saw Trans for the first time…Orders were being taken. I watched the fem-bots answering the requests.” Neil Young, NYA, July 13, 2019
Trans, Neil Young’s 13th studio album, was released on January 10, 1983, and marked the beginning of the strained (and weird) Geffen years, Neil’s new record label. Of the album’s 10 tracks, Young sang through a vocoder on six. “Electronic music is a lot like folk music to me ... it's a new kind of rock and roll—it's so synthetic and anti-feeling that it has a lot of feeling ... Like a person who won't cry. You know that they're crying inside and you look at them, and they have a stone face, they're looking at you, they would never cry. You feel more emotion from that person than you do from the person who is talking all the time. So I think that this new music is emotional—it's very emotional—because it's so cold ... I have my synthesizers and my computers and I'm not lonely.”
When “Sample and Hold/Mr. Soul” was released as a single, that Geffen was underwhelmed with the new record is a laughable understatement. Adding to the perceived insult, Neil loyalists were outraged at the “Mr. Soul” vocoder version and “Sample and Hold” that were, on the surface, simply too weird for many fans. The reality that Young was dealing with a personal crisis (struggling to communicate with his young son) and that Trans was the artist’s attempt to navigate that reality mattered little. The album was a commercial and critical bomb and a major factor leading to the lawsuit and counter lawsuit between Geffen and Young.
Neil loved the album, though. “If you listen to Trans…it has to do with a part of my life that practically no one can relate to. So my music, which is a reflection of my inner self, became something that nobody could relate to. And then I started hiding in styles, just putting little clues in there as to what was really on my mind. I just didn't want to openly share all this stuff in songs that said exactly what I wanted to say in a voice so loud everyone could hear it.”
RustWorks, Vol. 19, Love in Mind is Neil Young singing about sex. Perhaps not the way Prince or Madonna did but with a full range of emotion from tenderness to sly double entendres to semi-graphic imagery. “Sample and Hold” is one of Neil's most suggestive songs (“see your unit come alive...”), but on Trans the sweet, longing melody is overshadowed by the electronics that drive the song. This performance, a live, folksy outtake from his “MTV Unplugged” appearance, is a testament to his songwriting versatility; that beneath the vocoders and synthesizers dominating the original track, there exists a lovely, wistful Neil Young love song.
Listen to the 1993-02-07 performance of “Sample and Hold” here: