Writing
While written and recorded for two different projects, in a November 1982 interview with Cameron Crowe, Young links the different songs on Trans as belonging to two different visions of the future of his music: "This album has a split personality ... which I think is interesting. Songs like "Like an Inca", that's the future of my music as seen 15 years ago. "Sample and Hold" is the future of my music as seen today. It's more automatic ... it's trans-music. That's why I want to call the album Trans."
The album was also influenced by the idea that sometimes the emotions that are the most deeply felt are the ones that are not overtly expressed. As Young observed a world becoming more digital and synthetic, and less outwardly emotional, maybe it was holding more intense emotions inside. He explains in a 1982 French interview: "I think human emotion, and selling a sad personal story ... it's valid, but it's been done so much, who cares? It's like Perry Como, it's like Frank Sinatra, it's way back there now. Now people are living on digital time, they need to hear something perfect all the time or they don't feel reassured everything's okay. Like when you get in the elevator and go up and down and all the numbers go by, everyone knows where they're going. And the drumbeats today, the computerized drumbeats? Everyone is right on the money. Everybody feels good. It's reassuring. I like that. Electronic music is a lot like folk music to me ... it's a new kind of rock and roll—it's so synthetic and anti-feeling that it has a lot of feeling ... Like a person who won't cry. You know that they're crying inside and you look at them, and they have a stone face, they're looking at you, they would never cry. You feel more emotion from that person than you do from the person who is talking all the time. So I think that this new music is emotional—it's very emotional—because it's so cold ... I have my synthesizers and my computers and I'm not lonely."
Young embraced the possibilities of the new synth instruments, and their ability to express a world of new technology and changed human interaction. He imagined a futuristic world of humanoid robots that could aid his son in communicating with the outside world: "I could feel the world changing. I knew I was into something cool when I got the two Sennheiser vocoders to the studio. They enabled me to be a robot, to sing through any thing, present my voice as an envelope to the notes I played with my Synclavier keyboard. I saw the factory, the place where replicas and robots were built to order, the rows of old telephones being operated by feminine appearing robots, beautiful, yet mechanical. I started seeing mechanical nurses in a hospital, who came to help me find a way for my child to speak. I saw Trans for the first time." "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 non-oral person."
"Transformer Man" was written about Young's experiences using a Lionel model train set to bond with his son Ben, "hoping that he could learn to communicate through technology". "Ben and I made a big train layout and I developed a remote control system for Lionel that disabled people like Ben could use. The Transformer is the device that powers the tracks so the train goes. Ben had no control of his hands for fine things like grabbing and moving. He used his head to enable a switch connected by wire to the controller I designed with my friend Ron Milner. The controller wirelessly controlled the train layout. Anything I did on the controller, Ben could reproduce with his head switch until I did something else, then he could do that. It opened a door between us. We had a great time."
The lyrics to "Computer Cowboy (AKA Syscrusher)" tell the story of a cattle farmer who lives a double live as a computer hacker. Young explains the concept in his father Scott Young's book Neil and Me: Computer Cowboy is "a guy's alias. Computer Cowboy is just a front; he has a herd of perfect cows, floodlit fields, even coyotes, But late at night he goes into the city and robs computer data banks of memory systems and leaves his alias, Syscrusher, printed over the information he's lifted. He's a 21st-century outlaw. That's where the big crime is going to be. It's going to move out of Las Vegas and into computer perforations. That's what all the talking in the background of the song at the end is. The computers are all talking to each other, reading what's happening; perforation, protection, security, all those words."
"Mr. Soul" is a re-recording of Young's Buffalo Springfield single. He recorded the song using synthesizers at a time he was in talks with the group to reunite. He explains in a 1986 Rockline interview: "Back in about 1980 or 1981 we were thinking about getting the Springfield together, and as a joke, I made an audition tape for myself so that they'd know I was still kicking. I made "Mr. Soul", but I never did play it for them. That's what I started doing. I made that tape at home with the drum machine and all that, as a sort of joke, as an audition to get in the group. But we never did get together again. Maybe I didn't do a good enough job on that one, I don't know."
