Trans (album)

Trans is the thirteenth studio album by Canadian and American singer-songwriter Neil Young, released on January 10, 1983. Recorded and released during his Geffen era in the 1980s, its electronic sound baffled many fans upon its initial release—a Sennheiser vocoder VSM201 features prominently in six of the nine tracks.

In 1982, Young left Reprise Records, his record label since his debut album in 1968, to sign with Geffen Records—the label founded and owned by David Geffen, who had worked with Young as manager of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Young's contract guaranteed him $1 million per album, as well as total creative control over his output.

From late 1980 to mid-1982, Young spent much of his waking hours carrying out a therapy program for his young son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. Young disclosed to almost no one at the time that he was doing so, or that the repetitive nature of the songs on both the previous album, Re·ac·tor, and this one related to the exercises he was performing with Ben. Work on Trans began in late 1981 as a continuation of Re·ac·tor, with the usual Crazy Horse lineup. But then Young started playing with two new machines he had acquired, a Synclavier and a vocoder. Crazy Horse guitarist Frank Sampedro recalled, "Next thing we knew, Neil stripped all our music off, overdubbed all this stuff, the vocoder, weird sequencing, and put the synth shit on it."

Young's direction was influenced by the electronic experiments of the German band Kraftwerk, but more importantly he felt that distorting his voice reflected his attempts to communicate with his son. "At that time he was simply trying to find a way to talk, to communicate with other people. That's what Trans is all about. And that's why, on that record, you know I'm saying something but you can't understand what it is. Well, that's exactly the same feeling I was getting from my son." Young explained further in a 1988 interview with James Henke for Rolling Stone:

"If you listen to Trans, if you listen to the words to "Transformer Man" and "Computer Age" and "We R in Control," you'll hear a lot of references to my son and to people trying to live a life by pressing buttons, trying to control the things around them and talking with people who can't talk, using computer voices and things like that. It's a subtle thing, but it's right there. But 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."

Young's first work for Geffen was a group of songs for an entirely different project, Island in the Sun, recorded in May 1982 in Hawaii. According to Young, it was "a tropical thing all about sailing, ancient civilisations, islands and water." Young recalled later, "Geffen thought it was okay, but he didn't think it was good enough."

Instead of recording more new material, Young went back to the synthesizer tracks, actually recorded in the last days of the Reprise contract, and put together an album of songs from the two very different projects, three from Island in the Sun and six of the synthesizer tracks. Young proposed making a video to go with the album that would have clarified what the album was about. "All of the electronic-voice people were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button."

While written and recorded for two different projects, in a November 1982 interview with Cameron Crowe, Young links the different songs on Trans as belonging to two different visions of the future of his music: "This album has a split personality ... which I think is interesting. Songs like "Like an Inca", that's the future of my music as seen 15 years ago. "Sample and Hold" is the future of my music as seen today. It's more automatic ... it's trans-music. That's why I want to call the album Trans."