Bluenote Café is a live album by Canadian / American singer-songwriter Neil Young, released on November 13, 2015, on Reprise. The album is volume eleven in Young's Archives Performance Series, and features performances from Young's 1987–88 American tours with his then-backing band, The Bluenotes (renamed here as Bluenote Café for legal reasons)[citation needed], with whom he recorded his seventeenth studio album, This Note's for You.
Aside from live versions of This Note's for You songs, the album features a number of songs that were not released at the time; "Welcome to the Big Room", "Bad News Comes to Town", "Crime of the Heart" and "Doghouse" make their first appearances on any official Neil Young release ("Doghouse" was covered in 2011 by Young's then-wife Pegi on her album Bracing for Impact). Two of the album's tracks, "This Note's for You" and "Ain't It the Truth," previously appeared on the compilation album Lucky Thirteen.
The album received positive reviews, and holds a score of 75 out of 100 on Metacritic, indicating "generally favourable reviews".[1] Chris Gerard of PopMatters gave the album nine stars out of ten, stating: "Bluenote Café is essential Neil Young, further evidence that Young's 80s work has more value than many would expect or admit."[7] Conversely, in a brief negative review, Daniel Sylvester of Exclaim! wrote that "even die-hard fans will find this as nothing more than a masochistic curiosity."[2] In a three-star review, Will Hermes of Rolling Stone said that "[these] live recordings from the late Eighties illuminate and (partly) redeem one of Neil Young's stranger eras".[3] In a highly positive four-and-a-half-star review, Hal Horowitz of American Songwriter wrote that "even diehard Neil Young fans may not fully appreciate this offshoot in his bulging catalog. But this remarkably vibrant and immediate live compilation shows that Young took this side road very seriously and it was more than just a forgettable, momentary quirk in his diverse and winding career."[6]
Track listing[]
Disc 1
"Welcome to the Big Room" (Recorded on location at Mountain View Theater, Mountain View, California – 1987-11-07) – 7:31