International Harvesters with Neil Young: A Treasure

Subtitle: Might Finally Have to Buy a Blu-ray Player

Back in the mid-80s it seems Neil Young went on tour around America with a band he referred to as the International Harvesters. According to this article (here) by Greg Kot in the Chicago Tribune this was during the deep country rock phase in Young’s musical timeline.

Young has had the tapes from these tours cleaned up and some ‘minor’ digital enhancing done and used them put together an album covering the tour. The album is titled “A Treasure” and is due for release in the USA on the 14th June, which is RSN (real soon now).

From what I understand of the packaging for this album the package comes as a CD and a Blu-ray disk (in the one shrink-wrapped package). The CD, obviously, just has the music on it stereophonically encoded. The Blu-ray contains video and, to paraphrase Neil Young, “much better sound than is on the CD”—most likely using enhanced 5.1 coding technics.

I am a HUGE fan of Neil Young. There are very few Neil Young tracks I don’t like (but there are a few). I think that the section in my will where it tells people what to play at my funeral will probably only list Neil Young tracks; okay, maybe a Beatles track as well. But the problem here is that I don’t own a Blu-ray player. Up until now I have not seen any need to get one and if I am going to get this album, which I one-hundred-percent will be, then I am going to want to hear the “much better sound” version of the tracks.

Neil does point out that the video accompanying the Blu-ray tracks is not the best. In many cases there is no video available and they just put up the album cover. In other cases they have chased down amateur video shot by people who went to the concerts and took some video.

Should you be the least bit interested in this album then you might want to watch this video (here on YouTube) called “Tech Notes” in which Neil Young himself takes you through the technical notes relating to this album.

One of the tracks on the album is Amber Jean. I you want to listen to this track there is a YouTube version of it here.