Computer Age

By the 1980s, Neil Young had already frustrated - yet fascinated - many fans by reinventing himself for every album. And Trans topped that many times over, completely baffling everybody who thought they knew Neil Young. "Computer Age" is a perfect example of this. Yet if you follow Neil Young's interviews, you find out that there's method to his madness, as always. On an album where the vocoder featured prominently, this song makes especially heavy use of it. The vocoder lends its robotic voice to various parts in the song. This comes together with other instruments such as the synclavier (which also fascinated Frank Zappa towards the end of his career), and electric piano, giving it a highly synthetic sound which would even cause most modern Europop acts to blush.

In Neil Young: Long May You Run: The Illustrated History, Young explains that his son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy and unable to communicate, was the heart and soul of Trans: "Trans was about all these robot-humanoid people working in this hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do was teach this little baby to push a button. That's what the record's about. Read the lyrics, listen to all the mechanical voices, disregard everything but that computerized thing, and it's clear Trans is the beginning of my search for communication with a severely handicapped, nonoral person." While in the hospital, Young's son Ben had shown better response to the vocoder than to human voices, which also explains how Young got so handy with the thing in the first place. Young's older son, Zeke, was also born with the disorder, but Ben's condition was more severe.

Other early appearances of the vocoder in popular music include Styx's "Mr. Roboto," Electric Light Orchestra's "Mr. Blue Sky" and "Sweet Talkin' Woman," and Pink Floyd's Animals album, where a dog's bark is fed through the device.