Neil Young’s “Trans” was a big departure for the artist. As an songwriter and performer, he had alternated between folk-rock and garage rock (with his band Crazy Horse). In the 1980’s, he made a series of albums that were commercial flops but showed that he was willing to task risks.
Trans makes heavy use of a vocoder, a device that takes human voice and gives it an odd, robotic sound. It is based on a technology that was developed during WW II as a way to encode radio transmissions. It was more of a curiousiity during the 50’s and 60’s, used for special effects.
Neil Young ran vocals through one for some of the songs on Trans. In interviews he said it was to make sense of how the world was heard by his autistic son. He imagined that to his child, speech had a kind of alien sense to it.
Along with the vocoder, many of the songs feature synthesizers and digital percussion. Thematically it fits in the subject of some of the songs, about displacement and connectedness in a digital era. He even does a modern take on a song that he had originally written in the 1960’s, Mr. Soul. With the vocoder, synthesizer and digital percussion, the song takes on an irony both in lyrics and context.
Trans understandably confounded Neil Young’s fans, who were waiting for another “After the Gold Rush” or “Rust Never Sleeps”. Instead there were off-kilter songs that in retrospect connected to the rest of Neil Young’s career, where he would take odd directions, but coming back to many of the same themes of relationships, the earth, and identity.