VARIOUS ARTISTS: Everybody’s Talking: A Tribute to Fred Neil

Tribute albums are often a mixed bag of unfocused and routine interpretations of the songs of great artists. Too often it’s not a gift worth giving and the songs are better left to the creator.

Everybody’s Talking: A Tribute to Fred Neil manages to leap past any potential pitfalls common to these kinds of projects. It is an album worthy of Fred Neil. That is saying a lot.

The big names are curiously missing from this album, as are many of Neil’s friends from his heyday in Greenwich Village. However, artists like Eric Andersen, Rodney Crowell, Keith Sykes, Charles Pickett, Diane Ward and the 18 Wheelers, among many others, have lovingly and skillfully reinvented many of Neil’s finest songs with clean, lean arrangements and production that are rightfully focused on the song.

Best known for “Everybody’s Talking,” a song that Harry Nilsson took up the charts in 1969, Neil’s only other well-known tune, “The Dolphins,” came to embody his life as have left his music career to found and serve an organization for the preservation of dolphins.

“Dolphins” and “Everybody’s Talking” have eclipsed personality and are finding their way into the treasury of timeless American songs. This is where they belong. Fred Neil, who died in 2001, is a treasure of a human being as well. He wrote songs that reflected passion and commitment to life and lived his life for something better than fame. He heard a calling toward something larger than himself. It was the call of the wild, the call of the good earth in the guise of dolphins. This album reveals songs that are not only timeless but larger than their times. No doubt, if young, future songwriters find Fred Neil’s songs more standards may emerge.

The album opens with a near perfect interpretation of “Dolphins” by fellow Village veteran Eric Andersen. On this recording there is a feeling of connection between the two singer-songwriters as Andersen contemplatively travels through this classic song of beauty and peace. At times it feels like a duet between Andersen and Neil. It’s like his spirit is moving through Andersen’s vocal chords.

The remainder of the album follows suit with Rodney Crowell lending funky country blues to “Candyman.” Keith Sykes breathes new life into “Everybody’s Talking” with a gentle arrangement and vocal. Folk master and legend Vince Martin brings his best country-blues to “Handful of Gimme.” Martin passed away not long after the completion of this session. It is a sweet farewell as he honors an old friend.

The beauty of this project is that the proceeds go to Neil’s own dolphin conservation project. While Fred Neil remains a little-known singer-songwriter, mostly by his own choice, it’s quality tributes like Everybody’s Talking: The Songs of Fred Neil that give hope that music historians will discover the significance, in the American-songwriting-scheme-of-things, of this great overlooked artist.