All One Song :: Steve Gunn on "Will To Love"

Welcome to the very first episode of All One Song: A Neil Young podcast, presented by Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions. Join liner notes author, musician, and Shakey historian Tyler Wilcox and an array of great musicians and writers discussing their favorite Neil Young song, diving deep into Shakey lore and getting personal about this amazing body of work. It’s a series for Neil heads by Neil heads.

Our first guest on All One Song should need no introduction for long time Aquarium Drunkard readers. But let’s give him one anyway! For the past 15 years or so, Steve Gunn has built up one of the strongest, most wide-ranging catalogs in independent music. He’s released classic albums on such labels as Three Lobed, Paradise of Bachelors, Matador and more.

Steve is a singer-songwriter-guitarist triple threat with a powerful sense of adventure and imagination that’s always worth paying attention to, whether he’s collaborating with drummer John Truscinski in the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, creating beautiful soundscapes with David Moore, or playing all on his own.

Steve’s latest album, Music For Writers, falls into the latter category. Coming out on August 15 on Three Lobed, this is his first completely solo instrumental record — he played all the instruments, building luminous, hypnotic pieces that encourage the listener to slow down and really listen. The songs here aren’t just ambient background sounds. They’re sonic meditations that take you to some other place.  

The solo aspect of Music For Writers dovetails nicely with the Neil Young song that Steve chose for us to discuss: “Will To Love.” This is a unique one in Neil’s catalog and a song that’s prized by die-hard Shakey fans. Accompanied only by a crackling fire, Neil recorded the basic track at his ranch in the spring of 1976, somewhere in between his European tour with Crazy Horse and the ill-fated Stills-Young Band trip that summer.

Then he put it aside, for a few months, only returning to it in December of 76, when he went into Indigo Studios in Malibu to overdub vocals, keyboards, guitars, drums, even vibes, aided and abetted by producer David Briggs. By the time it was released on American Stars n Bars in 1977, “Will To Love” was a ghostly, seven-minute piece of music that’s unlike almost anything else he’d done before or anything he’s done since. Let's dive in.

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