Neil Young - Island in the Sun (1982)

Neil Young signed with Geffen Records in 1982, after spending fourteen years under Reprise Records. Dissatisfied with what he considered a lack of promotion for his previous album, Re-ac-tor, Young took on a lucrative deal with Geffen, which guaranteed him a million dollars per album delivered. With that, Neil quickly got to work, putting together his first album of the new deal. He had already recorded the synthesizer Trans material with Crazy Horse in late 1981, and was finally free of the patterning program with his son Ben, which took up most of his time from 1979 to 1981. Now he could finally go back to writing and playing music full-time, and dedicate himself fully to his next project. He went to Hawaii in May 1982 with a few friends and producer Tim Mulligan to record an album, tentatively titled Island in the Sun. A breezy, tropical record about sailing, sunshine, and loving your wife, it featured a band seemingly assembled at random, with Nils Lofgren, Ben Keith, former Buffalo Springfield bassist Bruce Palmer, Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina, and CSNY sideman Joe Lala. Despite that, they gelled pretty quickly and became Neil's band for the rest of 1982, christened as The Royal Pineapples. By the end of the month, Neil and the Pineapples had recorded eight new songs, enough for a brand new studio album. He and Mulligan sequenced the songs, chose an album title, and sent it to label boss David Geffen, expecting the album to be released shortly thereafter.

However, it didn't quite go that way. Once Geffen heard the LP, he was underwhelmed by it, and told Young so. Surprisingly enough, Neil agreed with him and promised to rework it into something else. This wasn't unheard of, as he had already shelved Oceanside/Countryside at the suggestion of Reprise head Mo Ostin, so he simply combined it with the late 1981 recordings to form a different album, titled Trans. Upon release, it confused casual fans, alienated his dedicated fanbase, didn't sell, and was the beginning of his many troubles with Geffen. But what if Neil had managed to release the album he wanted to release? While the actual tracklist of Island in the Sun has sadly never leaked, we finally have all the songs recorded for it, thanks to the release of Archives Vol. III, which means we can at least reconstruct what it might have looked like. We'll be aiming at eight songs and roughly forty minutes, using all Hawaiian songs, as "Like an Inca" is a pretty long song and we need to make space for it. We'll only be including material from the May 1982 sessions in Honolulu, which means no live songs, and no contemporary material recorded at different locations. By doing that, we'll ensure we have a cohesive album recorded all in one go, instead of the random hodge-podge of styles Neil tends to release every now and again. The leftover Vocoder material in turn would simply become a separate release, probably still by Reprise in late 1981. With all of that out of the way, here's what our album looks like:

Little Thing Called Love (Trans)

Raining in Paradise (Archives Vol. III)

Big Pearl (Archives Vol. III)

Silver and Gold (Archives Vol. III)

If You Got Love (Archives Vol. III)

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Hold on to Your Love (Trans)

Island in the Sun (Archives Vol. III)

Like an Inca (Trans)

Download link:
Neil Young - Island in the Sun (1982)

Young performing live with the Royal Pineapples in Europe, September 1982.

When it comes to song selection, we pretty much have our work cut out for us. We simply select all nine of the songs tracked at Commercial Recorders in Honolulu, three of which are on Trans and six on the Johnny's Island disc of Archives Vol. III. Not included are the electronic "Johnny", which despite being recorded immediately before the material on this album would be much more at home in the Trans EP, and "Soul of a Woman", "Love Hotel" and "Berlin", which were all written and recorded during the 1982 tour and never made it into the studio. When it comes to sequencing, we will maintain the placement of the Hawaiian songs on the Trans album and simply expand on it, filling out the sides with the remaining material. That means "Little Thing Called Love" and the nine-minute version of "Like an Inca" still open and close the album, and "If You Got Love" and "Hold on to Your Love" still bookend the two sides. With that, all that's left to do is to place the other four songs where they fit best, replacing one emotional love letter to a family member with another ("Transformer Man" and "Silver and Gold"), one weird track on the theme of the album with another ("We R in Control" and "Big Pearl"), and so on. "Raining in Paradise" becomes the second song on the album, and "Island in the Sun" slots in pretty nicely right in the middle of side two, giving us a coherent, enjoyable album that wouldn't have felt out of place if it had actually come out right before his European tour in August 1982.

Clocking in at 35 minutes with a slightly shorter second side, Island in the Sun would've been easily Neil's softest, mellowest album to date, sounding like a long-lost sequel to his half of the Stills-Young Band's Long May You Run. It's also a pretty good album, and his take on yacht rock really shouldn't work nearly as well as it does during this album. Being their own separate entities really benefits both Island in the Sun and the Trans EP, no longer sounding like the Frankenstein compromise of an album it was, and allowing their best qualities to shine. "Little Thing Called Love" would still be the lead single, but "Silver and Gold" could make for a really good second single, given how great a song it is. Given that this was the first record of a brand new deal Neil undertook a massive tour in support of it in 1982, this album would have actually stood a chance of being commercially successful, given how accessible it sounds. The critics probably wouldn't like it that much, but it would probably sell better than Hawks & Doves. The cover is something I quickly threw together, with the Geffen logo cheekily added to the bottom corner to remind us of the reason it didn't come out. This alternate album opens the door to an entire alternate 1980s for Neil, free from the meddling of David Geffen and free to explore wherever it is that his muse took him, whether it was the distant future or simply Hawaii.

Sources:

- Neil Young - Archives Vol. III (1976-1987)

- Neil Young - Trans

- Jimmy McDonough - Shakey: Neil Young's Biography