Christopher Neil Young

It ain’t hard to stumble and land in some funny lagoon, when your morning’s first stride is from backseat to the parking lot pavement, your girlfriend’s dry cough breaks her yawn and she rubs the kink in her neck. The parking stripes outreach dawn’s freshest rays as industrious students slowly fill the university’s lot. Your sunken eyes embarrassingly meet hers during the morning’s stretching ritual. A parking lot should never be a home, you both acknowledge with sighs and silence. Read more on Last.fm …read full bio

It ain’t hard to stumble and land in some funny lagoon, when your morning’s first stride is from backseat to the parking lot pavement, your girlfriend’s dry cough breaks her yawn and she rubs the kink in her neck. The parking stripes outreach dawn’s freshest rays as industrious students slowly fill the university’s lot. Your sunken eyes embarrassingly meet hers during the morning’s stretching ritual. A parking lot should never be a home, you both acknowledge with sighs and silence. But where has home ever been? Not the broken one back ‘home’. Not the juvenile prison after that. Or the tent in your Aunt’s backyard after that.. But certainly not this university parking lot. Christopher Neil Young’s newest collection of songs, Birthwrites, is charged with this energy of urgent impatience battling disorientation. The tracks fluidly reason through a rejection of one’s world to a reinvention of one’s self. Birthwrites is a record of how one determined singer-songwriter inverted a sense of directionless into a purpose of personal revival. A self-taught multi-instrumentalist, Christopher Neil Young has composed, recorded, engineered, and performed Birthwrites entirely by himself, minus four drum tracks by his touring drummer, Matt Hazelrig. Coming from Portland, he has lived (often briefly and in transit) all over the Willamette Valley and San Francisco, creating and performing music in every place he has stayed. Aside from his music projects he has published a book of poetry, Important Thoughts, is editing a memoir of his one-year internment at a notorious Mexican juvenile detention center, and has recently completed a short film to accompany Birthwrites. Rising from very humbling situations, Christopher Neil Young has endeavored a creative career that illustrates the centrality of self-reflection and reinvention in producing ambitious, urgent work. And Birthwrites narrates this process of reinvention through 13 tracks. Having culled his musical tastes from Ani DiFranco, Jim Morrison and blues rock, Christopher Neil Young seamlessly interprets his lyrical colors with a percussive, snaking sound. The vocals soar from percussive peak to peak, and often crescendo or crumble with earnest inflections of exhilaration or exhaustion. Not a single track withdraws without a making a demand of its creator, and the album gradually fosters a growing awareness of one’s vast potential for happiness. The album moves from the driving “Truth of My Birth,” that first realizes “nothing good comes easy, and nothing easy comes free,” to “Prayers of Deliverance,” a song that believes the power of prayer is as much an assertion for oneself as it is an appeal to God. “With the Lack of Our Trying” stands out as an ode to ambition that refuses to accept broken homes, backseat homes, and co-dependence, in love and in hate. The pangs of sadness pass as the senses rise, and Birthwrites stomps and strums its way through the skid row of city and soul. -Kris Standish Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.

…shrink me down again