Neil Young - The Loner's Permanent Challenge

“Rock’n’roll can never die”: rock'n'roll can never die. Neil Young sang it in 1979, and he keeps shouting it today. A platitude? Perhaps, but not coming from him. No one like this lanky Canadian has embodied rock in all its souls; he's lived it from within: in his nerves, in his gut, in his heart. So much so that today he bears the marks of it: a face lined with wrinkles, a hunched back, a terribly worn-out look. Everything about him shows the traces of a long battle: against alcohol and drugs, against the ghosts of departed friends, against the neuroses and pains of a lifetime.

Up to this point, you might say, this is the portrait of one of the glorious old relics still crowding rock's arena. But that's not the case. Young, in fact, has always carried the seed of modernity within him. There is no other musician who has managed to cross four decades of rock while remaining a beacon for his contemporaries at every turn. One of his masterpieces, Tonight’s The Night (1975), has been judged a punk album ante-litteram; “Out of the blue/ Into the black” (1979) was dedicated to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols; and “Sleeps With Angels” (1994) was a tribute to Kurt Cobain, grunge's burned-out icon. In his farewell note, Cobain quoted the very line of a Young song (“My My, Hey Hey”): “Meglio bruciarsi che svanire”. A year after the death of the Nirvana frontman, the Canadian master movingly returned the favor onstage at the “Rock’n’roll Hall of Fame”: “I want to thank Cobain for renewing my inspiration”. But the Young fever also infected other icons of 90s rock, from Sonic Youth to Nick Cave, from Dinosaur Jr. to Pearl Jam, some of whom took part in “The Bridge”, the tribute album made in his honor.

Perhaps Young's greatness lies in his schizophrenia, in that constant struggle of his between a craving for renewal and nostalgia for the past, between outbursts of rage and moments of purification. From the country sound of his early days to the garage-punk of Rust Never Sleeps, from rock'n'roll to synth-pop, from soul to blues, from hard rock to the heavy metal of Re.ac.tor, there's no musical genre this atypical rocker hasn't explored. But perhaps his towering stature also lies in his ability to represent the neuroses and contradictions of an entire era, suspended between hippie utopia and post-'68 restoration. A prophet of the dream of “changing the world”, but also a chronicler of the depths of individual despair, Young has built a universal songbook, one that joins the hallucinated fervor of rockers with the “moral” message of the noblest folksingers, from Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan.

Buffalo Springfield, and before that the Squires, then repeated returns to the “safe harbor”, as he himself calls the much-awarded outfit Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: the Canadian singer-songwriter has put his energy at the service of major bands. And for thirty years he kept his own band, Crazy Horse, by his side. But deep down, he has always been “The Loner”, as he called himself in one of his earliest songs. Every one of his relationships is always destined for an abrupt end, because of a wandering nature that keeps him from ever fully settling into any context. This would turn out to be the trait d’union running through all of his affairs, musical and otherwise.

Neil Young was born in Toronto, Canada, on November 12, 1945; his father Scott was a sports journalist, his mother Edna a housewife. At four, he moved with his family to Omemee, a village in Ontario where, two years later, he was struck by the polio epidemic that infected thousands of Canadian children, including Joni Mitchell. Music had been his passion since childhood: “My first instrument was a ukulele, then I had a banjo, and then, at 15, my first electric guitar”, he recalled. Young soon suffered his first trauma, his parents' separation, growing into a shy, insecure teenager who sought refuge from his anxieties in music. Having moved with his mother to Winnipeg, he played, as singer and guitarist, in an endless string of high-school bands. After high school, he landed in the Squires, a beat outfit influenced by the sounds of the “British Invasion”. He then began frequenting the Canadian folk circuit and met Rick James as well as Mitchell herself.

But the promised land for every musician of the era was California. So Young left Canada's mountains behind to seek his fortune on the West Coast. In 1966, with Steven Stills and Richie Furay, he founded Buffalo Springfield, who would become one of the defining bands of the country-rock sound in vogue at the time. Though he gave the band his first ballads (“Broken Arrow”, “I Am A Child”, “Mr. Soul”, “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing”), Young always remained on the sidelines (he himself would describe his role in the outfit as that of the “Indian”) and, after two years and three albums, abandoned the project.

The time was ripe for his solo debut, which came in 1968 with the self-titled album Neil Young, released on Reprise, the label that would stay loyal to him throughout his long career. Though raw and uneven, the record already showcases many of the ingredients of Young's art: melancholy country ballads, restless folk sketches, and blazing guitar work. Standouts include the long hallucination of “Last Trip To Tulsa”, an aching blues for voice and acoustic guitar with a stream-of-consciousness, Dylan-esque lyric, and the raw self-portrait of “The Loner” (“He’s a perfect stranger/ like a cross of himself and a fox/ He’s a feeling arranger/ and a changer of the ways he talks”). The folk legacy resurfaces instead in the tender “Sugar Mountain”, which, however, would only ever appear on a 45.

Before setting out on a long tour that would also see him perform alongside Joni Mitchell, Young married Susan Acevedo (December 1, 1968) and settled with her in a house in Topanga Canyon.

In early 1969 came Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, the first album produced by David Briggs and the first fruit of Young's collaboration with Crazy Horse: Danny Whitten (guitar), Billy Talbot (bass) and Ralph Molina (drums). The result is a handful of branding-iron ballads that merge Young's folk sensibility with a more markedly rock approach. The neurotic “Cinnamon Girl”, the draining ten-minute jam “Cowgirl In The Sand”, and the dreamlike electric-folk of “Down By The River” are the three new masterpieces.

1970 was a pivotal year for Neil Young: it saw the release of two landmark records, Deja Vu, the first chapter of his collaboration with David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash in CSN&Y, and his third solo album, After The Gold Rush, which features a seventeen-year-old Nils Lofgren on guitar and marks a return to folk roots.
"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" is a lopsided waltz, seemingly serene but tinged with deep bitterness. The title track is another painful plunge, with Young's wounded voice seeking peace in a dreamlike atmosphere (the piano, the horns). "Birds" is another touching melody, framing a story suspended between "tomorrow" and "today".
The rock soul of Crazy Horse resurfaces on "When You Dance You Can Really Love", amid abrasive guitars and an impetuous rhythm section. But the true nugget of the "gold rush" is the anti-racist anthem "Southern Man": a dazzling electric charge, in which Young's invective, propped up by a choir, is accompanied by acid guitar and dark piano tolls. A legendary track, destined for endless live triumphs.

The political side of the Canadian singer-songwriter was also starting to emerge. In the spring of '70, America was protesting against Nixon and the Vietnam War. At Kent State University in Ohio, police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators and killed four students. Riding that emotional wave, Young wrote "Ohio" ("Four dead in Ohio/ how many more?"). The record label turned it into an instant record, managing to release it within a single week!

It's the prelude to worldwide success, which arrived in 1972 with Harvest. Recorded in Nashville in 1971 with the Stray Gators (Ben Keith, Tim Drummond, Kenny Buttrey, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor), the album was released a year later so that Young, who in the meantime had separated from his wife, could undergo back surgery.
A bucolic songbook of great lyrical charm, Harvest marks Young's return to his country roots and brings out his most tender and human side. “Canto questa canzone perché amo l’uomo/ So che qualcuno di voi non lo capisce…/ Ho visto l’ago e il danno compiuto/ Un po’ di questo è in ognuno/ Ma ogni drogato è come un sole che tramonta”, he sings on "The Needle And The Damage Done", trying to save his friend Danny Whitten, leader of Crazy Horse. But Whitten would die of a heroin overdose a few months later. Harvest is a psycho-trip through the hippie era, a succession of radiant openings and retreats into shadow.
The rural scenes, the settings of an almost cinematic American heartland, always conceal great emotional tension. The opening "Out On The Weekend" probes the depths of loneliness ("See the lonely boy out on the weekend") and melancholy. The sadness eases for a moment amid the softer country sounds of the title track, but the pathos surges back on "A Man Needs A Maid", inspired by Carrie Snodgrass, the actress from "Diary of a Mad Housewife", with whom Young had his son Zeke: the orchestration adds further emphasis, but it's the Canadian's trembling falsetto, poised on the edge of emotion, that melts the heart. Burying timpani, harps and cellos, Young then dons the clothes of the romantic country singer for the ballad "Heart Of Gold", a perfect melody accompanied by Ben Keith's pedal steel, harmonica and acoustic guitar.
After closing side one with the divertissement of "Are You Ready For The Country?", it's up to "Old Man" to pick up the thread, with a banjo, the quintessential country instrument, calling the shots. And while Jack Nitzsche's orchestral arrangements weigh down "There's A World", "Alabama" lays bare the bleeding heart of the record: another anti-racist invective that, after "Southern Man", again accuses the "Southerners": "Alabama, you've got a weight on the shoulder that's breaking your back/ your cadillac has got a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track". Lynyrd Skynyrd would fire back with patriotic fervor on the equally famous "Sweet Home Alabama". The album closes with another electric flash: "Words (Between The Lines Of Age)", with sweeping guitars, gripping tempo changes and Young's quivering falsetto up front.

Having reached the peak of success (Harvest would hit n.1 in both the US and the UK), the Toronto singer-songwriter entered a dark phase, in which his alienation and his existential malaise intensified sharply, also due to the overdose deaths of Whitten and his friend and roadie Bruce Berry.
The soundtrack to Journey Through The Past (1972) and Time Fades Away (1973) inevitably reflect this crisis, amid stories of drugs and the ghosts of people who are gone. The latter album, recorded live with the usual contributions from Nitzsche, Crosby and Nash, reflects in its nine unreleased compositions the Canadian's growing unease, where he begins that process of "baring his soul" that would find full expression in his later work up to Zuma. An unjustly overlooked record (likely due to its being hard to find), Time Fades Away offers notable moments such as the autobiographical "Don't Be Denied" and the classic closing Young-style charge "Last Dance", alongside brief, deeply introspective episodes like "The Bridge" and "Love In Mind" that hark back to the glorious work that immediately preceded it.

The journey into darkness continues with On The Beach (1974), an album that would only be remastered on CD thirty years later — further proof of how pain could provide Young with a livid creative vein. Everything is desolate, starting with the cover, with a murky sea, a deserted beach umbrella, a Cadillac sunk in the sand and a Neil Young shown from behind, almost embodying solitude itself. The initial rock flashes of "Walk On", with Ben Keith's flickers of slide guitar, soon dissolve into the murmur of "See The Sky About To Rain", a moving ballad furrowed by Wurlitzer piano and melancholy steel guitar arpeggios, with Levon Helm's mournful drumming supporting Young's whisper. "Revolution Blues" is livelier, vibrating with guest David Crosby's guitar and Rick Danko's funky bass, before Young takes over with a hallucinated solo and a lament held together only by sheer nerve, a prelude to the final chaos. Two blues numbers follow: "For The Turnstiles", a postcard from rural 1930s America with Ben Keith on dobro and Young on banjo, and the poignant "Vampire Blues", with Young's raspy vocal, Tim Drummond's agonized bass throb and a "mystical" organ that briefly dissolves the tension. After the psychedelic requiem of the title track (with Graham Nash on Wurlitzer) and the nocturnal ballad "Motion Pictures (For Carrie)", the eight minutes of "Ambulance Blues" sum up the content of the whole work: an indictment of American moral decay, marked by Molina's bare-handed beat and cradled amid the sighs of Rusty Kershaw's violin and the hiss of Young's harmonica.

Meanwhile, the material for the next album, Tonight's The Night, was already ready, and the Canadian "Crazy Horse" performed it in agonizing live shows, on the verge of nervous collapse. During one of these concerts, he buys drinks for 8,000 people. By the end of the tour, many had written him off as finished, including Reprise itself, which waited two years before releasing the record. If On The Beach was an essay on individual pain, Tonight's The Night (1975) is the funeral lament of an entire generation: the epitaph of the hippie era, with its dreams sunk into the depths of drugs and violence. A "dark night of the soul" rendered graphically too by the cover, black as pitch. A meditation on rock'n'roll, drugs and death, a distillation of music's point of no return into self-destructive madness. All of this is Tonight's The Night. And so, the drunken lament of the title track opens the funeral, with the lines "Bruce Barry was a working man/ he used to load that Encoline van", dedicated to the friend who died of a heroin overdose. It's said that the Canadian forced his musicians to play at night, on just a few hours' sleep, and the aching blues of "Speakin' Out" betrays that sense of exhaustion and nervous tension. In the poignant "Mellow My Mind", by contrast, the Canadian, accompanied by harmonica, seems to shed tears rather than sing. Even the more driving rock'n'roll numbers are streaked with pain, like the hallucinated boogie of "World On A String", where Young shows off his nervy guitar playing over a metronomic, pounding drumbeat. But the real funeral resumes with "Borrowed Tune", piano, harmonica and a thin voice still suffering and nostalgic. The electric guitar clatters back to life on the blues of "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown", recorded live at a Fillmore East concert with Whitten still on vocals. The country of "Roll Another Number" instead harks back to the rural ballads of Harvest, thanks to Ben Keith's steel guitar and Molina and Whitten's backing vocals. "Albuquerque" is a proto-slowcore track with a martial gait, its guitars in dialogue (Young's acidic, Keith's desert-dry) oozing psychedelia. The album closes with the dragging, funereal talking blues of "Tired Eyes", in which Young tries to bring peace to those tired eyes that have watched rock devastate the lives of loved ones; piano and guitar accompany Young's viscerally pained vocal, while the harmonica paints an extremely sad melody. Tonight's The Night is perhaps the first concept album about pain in the history of rock. Young manages to capture the excesses of an ideal, shifting everything into the context of his own lived experience and entering into cognitive dissonance with what he had once believed in (a similar operation was carried out by David Crosby on "If I Could Only Remember My Name").

After undergoing throat surgery, Young changed course with Zuma (1975). Entirely dedicated to Native American cultures, the album is more "sun-drenched" and unleashes another political invective: the legendary "Cortez The Killer", which denounces the violence of the Spanish conquistadores in an exhausting tour de force of guitars. "Looking For A Love", "Danger Bird" and "Pardon My Heart" mark a return to the electric ballads of his early days, while "Through My Sails" documents a brief reappearance of the CSNY quartet.

In 1977, on the advice of his friend Linda Ronstadt, Young brought young singer Nicolette Larson into his entourage, with whom he also had a brief relationship. They were turbulent months, due to one too many benders. American Stars'n'Bars offers a saloon-country side one, with throwaway, drunken lyrics, and a thrilling side two, with tracks like "Star Of Bethlehem", "Homegrown", "Will To Love" and, above all, "Like A Hurricane": one of the most magical and compelling of Young's anthems, with its immediate, moving lyrics (“I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream…/ You are like a hurricane/ There’s calm in your eye/ And I’m gettin’ blown away/ To somewhere safer where the feeling stays/ I want to love you but I’m getting blown away”).

In the fall, Young performed a moving live rendition of "Alabama", blending it with "Sweet Home Alabama", in memory of the tragedy that had struck Lynyrd Skynyrd a few months earlier (three members of the band died in a plane crash).

1978 brought a new album, Comes A Time (a title chosen at the last minute in place of "Gone With The Wind"). The record returns to the acoustic dimension of Harvest with a handful of country/mid-tempo songs, such as "Four Strong Winds" and "Already One", and a sweet ballad like "Lotta Love".

After ending his relationship with Larson, Young married his longtime friend and ranch neighbor Pegi (August 2, 1978). Shortly after, he set off on the "Rust Never Sleeps Tour", which marked his great resurgence on the world stage. The tour would yield a memorable live album, Rust Never Sleeps: the "rust that never sleeps" is Neil Young's own energy, hunched over his guitar, shouting his rage and his loneliness to the world. Split, as all his live albums are, between a solo acoustic section and an electric charge with Crazy Horse, the record opens with the poignant defiance of time of "My My Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)": "Rock and roll can never die", sings his small voice, nearly breaking; "the King is gone but is not forgotten", that is, Elvis Presley, a symbol of rock and roll. Young is aware that an era has ended, as he sings on "The Thrasher", but just as determined to defend old-school rock and roll, "like dinosaurs in the shrine".
Young is a dinosaur of rock, but his eye on the new is plain to see, as he hails Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols) in that same "My My Hey Hey". The Canadian dives into the past with classic pro-Native American songs like "Ride My Llama" and "Pocahontas", not forgetting the sweet "Sail Away", with Nicolette Larson on backing vocals. The rage over burned teepees and the deaths of so many "pocahontases" explodes in the album's masterpiece, "Powderfinger". It's the story of an invasion and a boy who pleads for help in vain ("shelter me from the powder and the finger"). A fired-up Crazy Horse backs Young's roaring guitar in an electric apotheosis. "Welfare Mothers" and "Sedan Delivery" call out dark sides of society (the former extols divorce, the latter depicts urban decay), while the closing track is the electric version of "Hey Hey My My (Into The Black)", with the Fender amps now spent and Young hammering at his guitar, urging everyone to live life to the fullest, "cause rust never sleeps". But just as he begins to catch his breath again, Young is struck to the heart by a new tragedy. His second son Ben (his first with Pegi) is diagnosed with a severe form of cerebral palsy, and only then does Young discover that his firstborn Zeke also suffers from a mild form of the same condition. Over the years, Ben undergoes modern rehabilitation therapies. These techniques would also influence Young's artistic career, leading him to experiment for a time with the vocoder, the device that turns the voice into a computerized sound. "Ben is my assistant, my test pilot", he would affectionately say in an interview with "Mojo". And Young himself, together with his wife Pegi, would found the Bridge School in 1986, a special school for children with brain injuries.

Meanwhile, two essential records come out for anyone wanting a concise overview of his body of work: the triple anthology Decade (1977) and the album Live Rust (1979), the ideal compendium of his incendiary live performances.

But the Young who entered the new decade had lost much of the ideas and drive that had guided him through his remarkable seventies.

The murky Hawks And Doves (1980) fails to leave a mark. And neither the heavy-metal fervor of Re-ac-tor (1981) nor the (admittedly curious and interesting) technological jolt of Trans (1982) are enough to reverse course.

Devoid of the certainties of the past and unsure of the future direction of his sound, Young seems to have plunged into a dead end. Landing On Water (1986) marks a further step in his move toward synthesizers and drum machines, but with few ideas left to spend.

Even this unlikely robotic cowboy suffers from nostalgia for a now-vanished past. But the revivalist excursions of Everybody's Rockin' (1983), Old Ways (1985), This Note's For You (1988) and Life (1987) — suspended between rock'n'roll, country and blues — are merely the nemesis of a musician in crisis. In a 1992 interview with the New York Times, Young would explain that his "hermetic" music of the Eighties had represented his frustration at being unable to communicate with his son Ben.

Just when he seems finished for good, Young recovers his edge and energy with Freedom (1989), the first record in years to boast a track worthy of his Seventies output: the devastating build of "Rockin' In The Free World" (in both acoustic and live electric versions), in which the rocker's pride returns, reclaiming his free, solitary spirit. The sly "Crime In The City", meanwhile, is his new parable on urban desolation.

Confirmation of this recovery comes with Ragged Glory (1990), which also introduces him to the grunge generation, who hail him as the godfather of the Seattle sound. Across more than an hour of music, Young churns out a dozen or so tracks of white noise, thick with distortion and feedback. "Love to Burn" and "Over and Over", in particular, resurrect the emotions of his roaring years.

As proof of his new rapport with contemporary alternative rock, Young invited Sonic Youth, noise-rock luminaries, to open shows on the "Spook The Horse Tour". Those performances would also spawn the thunderous live albums Weld and Arc (1991).

But Young always loves to wrong-foot everyone. And so the following year he turns the page, plunging back into the past with the "nocturnal" sequel to Harvest, Harvest Moon (1992), a collection of tender acoustic ballads that, save for a few rare exceptions ("Harvest Moon", "Such A Woman"), only make you miss the ones from twenty years earlier.

Sleeps With Angels (1994), with its moving tribute to Kurt Cobain, and Mirror Ball (1995), recorded with Pearl Jam, essentially serve to celebrate Young's "moral" primacy over the generations that followed him. "I've always stayed open to outside stimuli and ready to turn them into a song," Young explains. "I'm not someone who puts things off, who if he's got a song in his head goes to the movies or does something else instead. Respecting the creative process, the inspiration, the commitment: those are my secrets." An instinctive artist, then. One who follows his own imagination. As in 1995, when he picked up his guitar and composed, live, in front of the film's frames, the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's metaphysical western Dead Man. Having gone almost unnoticed, it's one of his finest achievements of the decade, marked by an ambient, visionary psychedelia.

Rascally nostalgia, however, gets the better of him again on Silver & Gold (2000), a collection of ten soul-country-rock ballads, mostly acoustic, built around a handful of simple chords. Some are previously unreleased, others had long been ready. Still others were meant to be included but ended up instead on the record marking the unexpected reunion with Crosby, Stills and Nash the previous year ("Looking Forward"). All of them are damnably musty, as if they'd emerged from a reunion of nostalgic West Coast hippies. "Buffalo Springfield Again" recalls the band where Young began his career: "There was a little radio tuned to a country station," Young recounted, "and I heard the voice of the same DJ who worked at that station thirty years ago, when I was in Buffalo. And it really was him. I wrote the song in one go, but without regret: I'm not a nostalgic person." And who knows whether he thought back to those days in February 1966, that mad chase along the roads of California aboard a hearse, searching for Stephen Stills and Richie Furay to form the band.

On the following Are You Passionate? (2002), he instead celebrates the myth of soul rock, as he had already done some fifteen years earlier with the very different This Note's For You. It's a soft, relaxed record, with many falsetto vocals and the meticulous backing of Booker T. Jones on keyboards, Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass, Frank "Poncho" Sampedro on guitars and Steve Potts on drums. The dragging "My Disappointment", the intense "Two Old Friends" and the touching "Let's Roll" (a song already performed live, based on the true story of Todd Beamer, the man who led the revolt on the plane on the day of the Twin Towers attack) provide the best moments.

In 2003, a new adventure with Crazy Horse on the concept album Greendale, the story of the unsolved murder of a policeman in a rural village. The ten minutes of "Carmichael" test the listener's patience, but tracks like the beguiling opener "Falling From Above" or the eco-conscious ballad "Be The Rain" occasionally recapture the spirit of his golden years. Meanwhile, Young had found his own balance: "I live on my ranch in California and I'm a family man, but that's no brake on my art. My wife and children encourage me to keep going. I go against the grain: nowadays marriages are celebrated and burn out within a few months; artists sell 20 million records in a year and then vanish. But it's the things that last that keep the world turning..." A prickly, laconic figure — he's been known to get through entire concerts without saying a single word — Young doesn't lend himself to easy categorisation. Devoted to major social causes (Live Aid, Farm Aid), he wrong-footed everyone in 1984 by praising Ronald Reagan, and a few years later by declaring he would vote for billionaire Ross Perot. He flew into a rage when Clinton skipped a Farm Aid date. In recent years, he's paired a rediscovered patriotism with a systematic attack on the establishment (Greendale, for instance, is fiercely anti-Bush).

Prairie Wind (2005) can be considered the completion of the "acoustic" trilogy begun with Harvest and continued with Harvest Moon. The one-two punch of disasters that struck Young could have floored anyone: in spring he was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm requiring emergency surgery; in June his beloved father Scott passed away, plunging Neil further into emotional prostration. Everything seemed dark, pointless, meaningless. Then, as always, Music arrived and saved the day. Neil began composing, slowly, before, during and after his stay in a New York hospital. What results is a record that needs the quiet of the countryside, the relaxed skies of the Nashville prairies. It opens quietly, with the languid pace of the single "The Painter", rich in vocal harmonies, acoustic guitars and pedal-steel flourishes. It gradually builds with the apocalyptic "No Wonder" and female choirs soaring skyward as violin and guitar coil around each other like snakes. The tender, feather-light "Falling Off The Face Of The Earth" is both a thank-you note and a condemned man's letter, played with a breezy pop-country touch. The journey continues with the album's finest moments: "Far From Home", an up-tempo country-rocker with a horn section. "It's A Dream" is the peak of the record's dreamlike pessimism, a spell woven from strings, piano, organ and pedal steel. The title track is the flip side of the coin: a piece of infernal outlaw western, all dust and mud — seven minutes of refrains repeated by the female voices, with insistent, circling acoustic guitar and harmony. The clouds part with "Here For You", a tender dedication from a father to his now-independent, far-off children. There's even room for tributes: "This Old Guitar" is an ode to Hank Williams's old six-string, played and narrated by Neil with all due reverence. His voice roughens and drops in pitch, while the guitar sketches mini quotations from the basic riff of "Harvest Moon". The second tribute, "He Was The King", is of course for Elvis Presley, a mythological figure and a metaphor for rock's lost innocence. "When God Made Me" closes the record's pages with an unexpected turn toward soul-gospel.

Living With War (2006) arrives at the end of another stage of Young's ordeal (he'd suffered a brain aneurysm in 2005) and is entirely focused on the current state of US foreign policy, bent as it was on the Bush-Rice administration's warmongering resolve. Young dispenses with Crazy Horse and instead enlists a trumpeter, a rhythm section, and even a choir of a hundred voices. From the decisive opening attack of "After The Garden", a warm, dirty riff, a folk-southern-fuzz that folds the drums in on the second beat with the chorus's refrain handled lightly at the end of the verse, to the touching closing spiritual "America The Beautiful", what matters most here is a strict instrumental hierarchy. First and foremost comes Young's guitar, the engine driving these very personal protest arrangements. It's the guitar that delivers tracks like the aforementioned "After The Garden", or the embittered dialogue between Young and the choir on "The Restless Consumer", or "Lookin' For A Leader", or the anthemic "Shock And Awe" — all with minimal digressions, instead sticking to providing a vibrant chordal backbone. On the almost Dylan-esque "Roger And Out", that same guitar manages to calm the drums' fury and let yet another reincarnation of the activist folksinger emerge. The choir, in any case, plays no minor role. "America The Beautiful" marks the point of maximum hierarchical reversal (everyone else falls silent, Young included), where the hundred singers seem to sketch out the American national anthem with pastoral breath. Before that come "Families", a knowing, moved gospel-tinged ride through Young's gaze, and "Flags Of Freedom", its logical continuation and ideal circle of moral kinship with the other two great American voices: Dylan and Springsteen. Tommy Bray's trumpet, besides reinforcing these heartfelt moments, also emerges above all in heroic, civic-anthem registers. Such is the case with "Shock And Awe" and the most publicised (if also least interesting) song, "Let's Impeach The President", with Young, choir and trumpet in unison. The criticism is often muddled, but the exasperation and spontaneity remain genuine. Neil Young is alive, and fighting alongside his people. In his own way, as always.

At 62, amid reissues of old concerts ("At Fillmore East" with Crazy Horse and the evocative solo "Live At Massey Hall, 1971"), Young releases Chrome Dreams II, its title a nod to the "Chrome Dreams" project he planned after Zuma but never released, whose songs (a fantastic tracklist, incidentally) ended up scattered across later albums. The first three tracks are things his younger successors would pay to be able to write and perform like this. Take "Beautiful Bluebird", a ballad for harmonica and lap steel, one of those songs for which this writer would trade a good chunk of today's folk revival; painted in wheat and sunlight, lonely roads and innocent love. An ideal soundtrack for Richard Farnsworth's journey in the Lynchian The Straight Story, pride and inner peace made of simple things. More recent (though not by much) memories stir up dust and banjo on "Boxcar", still rural America, a western of losers and labourers; then "Ordinary People", the unexpected energy of this old crazy horse giving us eighteen minutes of electricity reminiscent of his glory days with Crazy Horse: this time it's the BlueNotes providing informal support with sax, cornet and assorted horns, but it's that unmistakable guitar reminding you exactly who you're listening to. Eighteen minutes of flourishes and solos with Neil singing like in the old days — populist, perhaps, rambling, maybe, but so be it. Then, unfortunately, the man from Toronto reverts to his recent-years self and hands us "Shining Light" and "The Believer", two syrupy ballads crossed with pop and soul that nearly erase the fresh memory of the opening triptych. It's not over yet, though, because the old lion still has a few roars left in him: he picks himself back up with "Spirit Road" and "Dirty Old Man", all grit, then, between the harmless country of "Even After" and the negligible closing piano ballad with childlike chorus "The Way", he launches into one last charge. "No Hidden Path", a sibling to "Ordinary People" but less varied, is another nearly fifteen-minute piece in which the electric guitar soars into improvisational flights recalling yet another chapter of the Canadian loner's career.

Faintly Obama-leaning, Fork In The Road (2009) is devoted to ecological and environmental issues, and to alternative energy sources. The vantage point is that of cars — one of the Canadian loner's passions — and of "Lincolns" in particular. Aside from the bland Southern rock of "Johnny Magic", the record fleshes out the leader's guitar — once again without Crazy Horse — with hippie choruses on "Just Singing a Song", Motown soul on "Fuel Line", and an almost West Coast rap cadence on "Cough Up The Bucks". Young also carves out space for a slow number with gospel organ ("Hit The Road") and an old-fashioned folkish ballad, but returns to powerful tones on "Get Behind The Wheel", in which he even dusts off the honky-tonk of "Everybody's Rockin'" (this time infusing it with proper pedigree-rocker spirit), and on "Off The Road", the macho answer to "Hit The Road". The ten tracks have a brazenly airy mood, in keeping with their support for the conversion from gasoline consumption to electric power in the "Lincvolt", patented by Jon Goodwin. Nonetheless, they've absorbed the modus operandi of the old man's recent years: writing in one go, avoiding looking back, favouring instinct instead. The record serves as a prelude to the long-rumoured release of the first volume of the legendary Archives.

When the first volume of the Archives (Neil Young Archives, Vol. 1: 1963-1972) finally saw the light of day in July 2009, it appeared as one of the most biographical anthologies of all time, infinitely closer to the vogue for complete editions than to Dylan's bootleg series. The eight CDs, spanning the period from his very earliest recordings with the Squires, through his first acoustic sessions (including an embryonic studio version of "Sugar Mountain"), the masterpieces of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, up to the classic country-rock of After The Goldrush and Harvest (complete with outtakes and unreleased material from the period), together form a first minute-by-minute slice of the Young opus's catalogue. The set is rounded out by complete live recordings (already released) from Massey Hall and the Fillmore East, and — should one opt for the 10-DVD edition — a wealth of filmed gems, behind-the-scenes footage and live clips of even historical interest. Its colossal scale and its price, out of reach for many (it also includes a lavish colour book and assorted memorabilia), keeps it at arm's length from anyone approaching the Canadian singer-songwriter for the first time, and perhaps even from die-hard fans, appealing instead more to chroniclers, documentarians and uncompromising completists.

The following year brings a new album of original material, Le Noise, one of his most "loner" records ever. Although the heart of the work is essentially Neil Young through and through (depressive ballads hinting at a wound in his vital connection to life), Lanois frequently steals the show. The Rolling Stones-esque anthem "Walk With Me" is gradually stripped down by abstract, otherworldly interjections and by a coda that dismantles its features to a boogie-woogie beat. His voice is used as a hazy rhythmic glue on the other, more simplistic anthem "Angry World", a reworking of his own "Hey Hey My My", just as distorted, before the production takes over in a chaotic flood. His iconoclastic programme continues in the fractured-fuzz phantasmagoria, crystallised in reverb, of "Someone's Gonna Rescue You", and even more hypnotically on "Rumblin'", where the voice almost wrestles against full-volume distortion spasms, scraps of wandering solos and vocal cut-ups. "Sign Of Love" boasts one of his finest thunderous riffs, surrounded by electronic echoes, while the alien-sounding vocal leaves trails of sound all around it. The process becomes disruptive and a touch overemphatic on the acoustic songs, especially on "Peaceful Valley Boulevard", which otherwise stands as a desolate 2000s-era "Thrasher". Having confirmed his habitual mania for scraping the bottom of the barrel ("Hitchhiker" breathes new life into the wordy, parlour-room "Like An Inca"), Neil Young and his never-abandoned experimental streak play the card of reworking, of obsessive reprocessing, in order to finally ward off self-imitation once and for all.

After this eccentric collaboration, Neil Young returns to normality by once again rounding up his Crazy Horse to record Americana, a collection of traditionals, his first ever covers album, at almost seventy years of age. A deceptively tricky undertaking, in which the Canadian loner instead shows off a new, surprising display of vitality, injecting spasmodic tension into peaceful evergreens like "Oh Susannah" or "Clementine" and reaching exhilarating heights in the fantastic tour de force of "Tom Dula", over eight minutes of obsessive chants and scorching guitars, confirming a rediscovered chemistry between Young and his longtime band, which, we hope, can also be renewed on stage.

The ageing but hyperactive Canadian never stops surprising us. Just months after his first covers album, Neil Young releases Psychedelic Pill, his first double album. Armed once again with Crazy Horse, the record contains the elements that made him legendary, the long electrified jams, now grown even more colossal. Monoliths like "Driftin' Back" (27 minutes) let his most typical sound triumph: the happiest pairing with his singing, cleverly darkened, the majestic chords, the perpetual pulse of the rhythm section that occasionally rises up like a swell, the solo that stitches the journey together according to mood and reflection.
But the likely new gem in his long catalog, alongside "Ramada Inn" and "She's Always Dancing", is the tour de force of "Walk Like A Giant", over 16 minutes of incandescent guitar dissonance backing his aching vocals, a thin, magical thread of a voice that seems incredibly unchanged from forty years ago.
The album is rounded out by the short, good-natured "Twisted Road" and "Born in Ontario", which nonetheless know how to dose the right ingredients here and there (the band's vocal harmonies, the country-rock strumming, the drum breaks).
An album that's certainly notable for its length (his longest ever) and its free form, far from the verbosity of Greendale. A record-as-container of memories (the sonic counterpart to his first autobiography, released at the same time, "Waging Heavy Peace"), which, setting aside a few excesses of self-indulgence, boasts gloriously triumphant moments once again. As if time had never passed.
There's nothing extraordinarily new here, and yet seeing his lanky silhouette riding again through the prairies of the Seventies, rediscovering after so long those visceral, acidic, draining sounds, can't help but move anyone who has followed him from then until now. It's as if the spirits of "Cowgirl In The Sand", "Like A Hurricane", "Southern Man", "Cortez The Killer" and a thousand other bits of magic from that memorable decade had suddenly come back to life to bid one last farewell to the audience. Spine-tingling stuff.

In 2013 Neil Young finally releases a music playback device of his own design, which is meant to outclass both CDs and mp3s, and bring listeners back closer to the sound of vinyl, which has always been the Canadian's favorite. The player, called Pono, is in every respect a digital player much like the iPod and similar devices, but it proves useless both because of its high cost to the end user and its underlying technology, which falls completely outside market standards.

After the marathon electric binge of the previous double album, Neil Young returns more solo and acoustic than ever for a new covers album, A Letter Home (2014), recorded directly onto vinyl to capture an aged, pre-phonograph sound.

But even more surprising is the undertaking carried out the same year for the follow-up, Storytone. For the occasion, in fact, the Loner almost entirely sets aside his instruments to be accompanied by a 92-piece orchestra and a choir. With a wholly unprecedented approach: everything was first recorded in a purely acoustic version (included in the Deluxe Edition), and the same songs were subsequently enriched with an orchestra and a big band. Young thus attempts a new, daring gamble: giving his fragile harmonies a symphonic twist, charging them with an almost pompous grandeur, a precedent for which can perhaps only be traced to the most orchestral moments of Harvest ("A Man Needs A Maid" and "There's A World", recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in Nitzsche's arrangement). But Young had certainly never gone as far as the edge of Broadway musical territory before, as happens for instance in the big-band "Say Hello To Chicago", which will surely scandalize the hardcore purist fans.
But this isn't a glossy or quasi-Christmas-album operation, because the roaring spirit of the great Canadian elder is still alive and pulses with desperate hope in the ode to beloved "Mother Nature" in "Plastic Flowers"; or it's reborn, wrapped in precious symphonic trappings, in episodes like "Tumbleweed" and "I'm Glad I Found You", which renew the melodic delicacy of a lifetime's worth of "My My, Hey Hey" moments; or it's further distilled in the bluesy haze of "I Want To Drive My Car" and "Like You Used To Do", so classic they could pass for timeless standards. Though weighed down by choirs and strings, "Who's Gonna Stand Up" finally stands as yet another Young-ian instant classic.
Not everything works perfectly, there's some (inevitable?) excess redundancy here and there and the performances show more than a few wrinkles, but the Loner's heart still beats, even within such an elaborately orchestrated package.
The Deluxe Edition, on the other hand, brings Young back onto the path of minimalism, among banjo strings and acoustic guitar, revealing the bare bones of compositions that, stripped down like this, nonetheless lose a bit of their punch.

At the same time his second autobiography is released, "Special Deluxe: A Memoir Of Life & Cars", the follow-up to "Waging Heavy Peace" (2012).

Young then returns to his clumsy way of tackling current affairs with Monsanto Years (2015), dedicated to the controversial Monsanto Company, the world's leading agrochemical biotech firm. Despite an irrelevant and risky concept, lyrics that are vehement but also overwrought, and an invective that takes up a good part of the record's spectrum, it's the most impeccably Neil Young album, not just Neil-Young-esque, of his recent years. Replacing Crazy Horse are the young Promise Of The Real (whose guitarists are the sons of the legendary Willie Nelson, Lukas and Micah), yet his most typical sound, sleepy and intense at once, still resounds gloriously. In fact, in the two longest tracks, "Big Box" and "Monsanto Years", psychedelic touches foreign to the artist's usual aesthetic surface quite naturally. There's also the obligatory country-rock gem, "Wolf Moon".

This environmentalist crusade of his, in the company of his new band of youngsters, continues and raises the stakes with the double live album Earth (2016), his first since Road Rock (2000), not counting archival releases. Only a sprawling 28-minute version of "Love And Only Love" continues the legendary tradition of revisiting his classics on live albums from his most roaring past. The rest, whether classics ("Vampire Blues") or tracks taken from the previous Monsanto album (though the unreleased "Seed Justice" stands out more here), remains little more than decent background music, further undermined by animal sounds and nature noises added in post-production. Truly a preachy sermon that doesn't justify the record's existence.

The mission continues and broadens into an all-out deep dive with Peace Trail (2016), this time recorded with only two rhythm-section session men. For a while the album plays its cards well, becoming one of his most rough-and-ready protest records (crisis, the dispossessed, the fate of the planet), especially through the title track, a solid addition to his typical anxious anthems, and to a lesser extent through the repetitive stomp of "Indian Givers". At times it sounds like a duet between his faint voice and crashing percussion, a method that germinates into the standout gem here, the polyrhythmic vaudeville of "Texas Rangers". Alongside sharp weapons (an ultra-cacophonous harmonica), there's no shortage of his typical naiveties either (the rediscovery of the electronic vocal filter, dating back to "Trans"), limp songs and a closer best forgotten ("My New Robot").

The patriotic "Children Of Destiny", written for the 4th of July 2017 again alongside the young Promise Of The Real, is probably the most embarrassing song of his career.

In the second box set of the Original Release Series (2017), Time Fades Away appears on CD for the first time.

Hitchhiker (2017) is an archival release, a solo acoustic session dating back to his dark year of 1976. Marketed as an official album, it actually works more like a notebook of sketches for albums yet to come (early versions of "Pocahontas" and "Powderfinger", the lesser "Captain Kennedy", the title track, etc.), along with a couple of skippable unreleased tracks.

Young brings back the young Promise Of The Real for The Visitor (2017), effectively the sequel to Monsanto Years, but this time expanding the message from environmentalism to anti-Trump patriotism. The results are mixed to say the least: "Children Of Destiny" has a lethal combination: a bombastic gait, fanfares, paternalistic lyrics, even a verse in children's-musical style; the sprawling "Forever" sits halfway between a moved vision and a parody of his own "Ambulance Blues"; "Carnival" is a strange hybrid between Santana and Tom Waits, but a sharp one. A certainly clumsy mishmash, but one that sticks in the memory, especially in its final stretch, for its larger-than-life tone and a certain touch of delirium. With a Promise Of The Real on the rise, Young tries, in his own way, to replicate Springsteen's Born In The USA.

On the same day The Visitor was released, the loner also launched the "Neil Young Archives", a massive official site that makes his entire musical output available via streaming (though the long-awaited lost albums are still nowhere to be found).

The collaboration between the Canadian and the Nelson brothers' band continues for a film project, Daryl Hannah's second feature, Paradox (2018), a musical western in which the leader and his bandmates appear both as actors and, predictably, as the authors of the soundtrack. The music is just one of many self-celebrations of Young past and present (though the pump-organ version of the underrated "Pocahontas" is well worth hearing), which fittingly also draws on self-references to that other feat of scoring, for the other metaphysical western of twenty years earlier, Dead Man (the series of six short sketches titled "Paradox", complete with all the requisite echoes and reverbs).

Just like Hitchhiker, Songs For Judy (2018) is also an archival release of acoustic songs dating back to 1976 (this time drawn from a live tour).

A hardened "primitivist," Neil Young proves that simplicity isn't always simple. But above all he's the hero of rock as an expression of an individual's pain, paranoia and neuroses. "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day today (…)/ I went to the radio interview, but I ended up alone at the microphone," he sang in "On The Beach".
The Loner, then. A solitary cowboy along rock's most treacherous trails.

When Colorado came out in 2019, old Neil hadn't been heard running with those ramshackle old Crazy Horse boys since Psychedelic Pill in 2012. Needless to say, when Molina, Sanpedro, Talbot and, this time around, even Lofgren are on board, the event deserves extra attention. At least for anyone who's always been fond of the sound grainy, aching of a band not exactly made up of virtuosos on their respective instruments, but one that unwittingly shaped tons of alternative music to come; from grunge to J Mascis and hundreds of other offspring of those long, scorching, ragged jams. One of these excursions turns up here too, in slot number two of the tracklist. "She Showed Me Love": two grumbling guitar mutters, Molina drumming like an old tractor that misses a stroke here and there but remains more dependable than any new model, and suddenly it's 1969 and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" all over again. The harmonica of "Think Of Me" and the whispered, bowed-head ending of "I Do" instead recall the more rarefied, gentle tones — no less incisive for that — of the "Harvest" era. The heavy, inescapable riff of "Help Me Lose My Mind", along with the snappier one of the furious "Shut It Down", are practically grunge. No need to bother with the prefix proto, given that the genre is fully acknowledged here by its own godfathers, who make the guitars bleed as though they were the Pearl Jam of "Vs". "There is a rainbow of colors in the whole U.S.A./no one is gonna white wash those colors away", Young and the Horse sing together in the heart-in-throat ballad "Rainbow Of Colors". After brotherhood and the rejection of every form of racism and xenophobic ideology, Neil Young's other great obsession, environmentalism, surfaces in the bridge of "She Showed Me Love": "I saw old white guys trying to kill mother nature". A broken record. Maybe so. It might skip, like those old vinyls bought at a flea market, but dusty and worn as it is, it's a pleasure to hear old Neil. Complaining and groaning ("Milky Way") as if this old, battered planet could, or should, still serve as his home for much longer. And anyway: repetita iuvant in these reckless, out-of-control times. It lacks a few of the peaks, the pure flashes of genius that popped up here and there on Psychedelic Pill (think of the devilish whistling on the gigantic "Walk Like A Giant"), but Colorado, even though there's nothing unfamiliar left to discover in it, is a thoroughly enjoyable record. Like visiting those old mountain relatives; it could be one of the last times, and so the warmth of their fireplace, the smell of chestnuts and the rustle of yellow leaves lifted by the wind carry a deeper meaning and flavor. Oxygen and melancholy to breathe in with full lungs.

At last the loner decides to release his most famous lost album, Homegrown (2020), recorded the same year as Tonight's The Night but kept hidden for decades, except for a few songs that found their way onto later albums or anthologies ("Love Is A Rose", "Little Wing", "Star Of Bethlehem"), or re-recorded with Crazy Horse and here heard in their original form ("Homegrown", "White Line"). The unreleased tracks have mixed results: "Separate Ways" captures a transition between the lyrical-rural mood of Harvest and an almost parisienne spirit, "Try" instead sounds more conventionally country-folk, and "Mexico" is one of his typical embryonic intimate piano ballads, while the electrified moments are perhaps the best: first and foremost "Vacancy", but also "We Don't Smoke It No More". Caught then between Harvest and Tonight's, this concept album about the breakup with Carrie Snodgress actually shares more with the latter, in its tormented tone and mixed collage of arrangements, the wide spectrum used to probe pain — this time an extremely private one — from multiple angles. It also turns out to be the Canadian's own "The Band" record (Robbie Robertson, Stan Szelest and Levon Helm all appear).

During the quarantine caused by the spread of Covid-19, Young improvised a series of "Fireside Sessions" (2020), filmed both indoors and in the garden of his Colorado home and available as videoclips on his new official website, in which he dusts off old and new classics in acoustic form. From these sessions comes the acoustic EP The Times (2020), where he specifically selects some politically themed songs from his catalog.

At last, eleven years after the first volume, come the ten CDs of Archives Vol. 2: 1972-1976 (2020), devoted to the Canadian's most intense and important period. It includes the very same Homegrown released shortly before.

More archival releases follow, from various eras but all live: Return To Greendale (2020), celebrating his 2003 rock opera, Way Down In The Rust Bucket (2021), a return to the fiery Crazy Horse days of Weld, and Young Shakespeare (2021), also a film, this time solo and acoustic, dating back to the early '70s.

In 2021 Neil Young shuts himself inside an old barn under the sky of Colorado's Rocky Mountains alongside Crazy Horse's rhythm section, bassist Billy Talbot plus drummer Ralph Molina, and Nils Lofgren, who has collaborated with the Canadian songwriter since the days of After The Gold Rush.

The new album is called Barn (2021), and all the material worked out in the barn is freshly produced, no archives or old recordings resurrected from the past — everything was written within a year, so it's all same-day stuff, a sort of temporal zero-km approach, staying true to the environmentalist theme so dear to good old Neil and his wife Daryl. You can't expect a musically revolutionary album here, nor a flawlessly executed one, because the priority is to take snapshots of today's contradictions, of nostalgia for the past and the alarming sensations of the present, all seen through the fish-eye lens of his tireless creative pen.
Barn, despite being an album of ups and downs, highlights the astonishing essentiality of his songwriting and his ability to use simple structures and words while still always finding the key to stir emotion, to make you reflect, mixing naivety and wisdom. There are acoustic moments in the style of Harvest, with harmonica and accordion propping up the quavering voice, like on the environmentalist track "Song Of The Season", or the rough, clattering blues-rock of the electric turn of "Zuma", like the autobiographical "Heading West", and there's no shortage of the roaring '90s sounds of the Freedom and Ragged Glory era either, as in the well-aimed endorsement of Mother Nature, "Human Race", or "Canamerican", a proud anthem to Mr. Young's two nationalities, obtained just in time to vote for Biden in the last election.
The album's standout track, the troubled "They Might Be Lost", shakes things up a bit, its "Nebraska"-style harmonica breathing out the anxiety and desolation for the many fellow travelers lost along the way. But Neil also knows how to be romantic without being saccharine, with his declaration of love to his other half Daryl Hannah in "Shape Of You", with its lopsided refrain and lurching gait. Young is always at ease with the blues, as in the honky-tonk of "Change Ain't Gonna" or in the low-key, nostalgic piano ballads like "Tumblin' Thru The Years" and in the soothing final warning "Don't Forget Love".
With "Welcome Back" we're back in the '70s, drifting for 8 minutes through expansive atmospheres reminiscent of "Cortez The Killer", with Young's Gibson weaving finely intertwined melodies over Nils Lofgren's soft chords and Crazy Horse's rhythmic textures left to amble along at a gentle trot. On this track, as on the whole album, Neil shows once again that he's still a hippie walking the rainbow who nonetheless knows how to look closely at the lives of us humans, with an attentive, lively and above all engaged eye, and even though every song probably has some similar reference point somewhere in his vast discography, in the end it always gets you anyway.

From the archives comes another of his lost albums, Toast (2022), recorded in the early 2000s with Crazy Horse.

Royce Hall 1971 (2022) documents the entire concert from which the original version of "The Needle And The Damage Done", later included on Harvest, was taken.

In November 2022, good old Neil steps out of the barn where he recorded his previous album Barn, takes off his shoes before venturing into the woods, and as he walks barefoot he whistles the melodies that will go on to make up the new album World Record.
To turn the melodies recorded on his phone out in nature into actual songs, the Canadian hippie calls on production guru Rick Rubin, who happens to have a free slot at his legendary Shangri-La Studios in Malibu at the time, so the 77-year-old Neil takes the first flight from Colorado to California and summons his trusty Crazy Horse, minus Frank "Poncho" Sampedro, now retired, but permanently replaced by Nils Lofgren, on leave from the E-Street Band.
Rubin doesn't upend the Canadian songwriter's sound, but the producer's hand is felt in the way the sounds are captured, which come across very natural, rich in ambience, and with a certain care taken to smooth out the rough edges and imperfections of Young's usually tolerant approach.
The first thing you notice is that Neil neglects the guitar to spend almost the entire time behind a keyboard, be it piano or pump organ. Hearing Young's voice over a piano immediately recalls After The Gold Rush, but unfortunately we're no longer in 1970. Here the songs have simple structures and clear messages, aiming to convey the climate emergency, a concept around which the whole of "World Record" revolves, a programmatic title for a theme that has long been a priority in Neil Young's thinking.
"Love Earth" seems to be written with the same lightness you feel walking through the woods, admiring the scenery with a breeze through your hair; it has a slightly retro charm with its light piano, hazy backing vocals and brushed drums. It fits well with the black-and-white cover photo of Neil Young's father. The saloon piano of "Overhead", embellished by Nils Lofgren's harmonica, keeps the same lightness going. "I Walk with You (Earth Ringtone)" also holds up, with Neil's voice floating softly over a bed of distortion. But then the album starts to show its age with patterns already heard too many times, in the country ballad "This Old Planet (Changing Days)" and in the dark, dirty blues of "The World (Is In Trouble Now)". Also very dirty is the return of the beloved Gibson on "Break the Chain", so clattering it almost feels like you've got chains on your feet, which nonetheless proves effective in setting up the by-now canonical guitar ride; with "Chevrolet" you climb aboard for a 15-minute journey with the windows down and your hands on the ivory wheel, tinged with nostalgia for giving up such an unecological pastime.
As always, Neil breaks down, transforms and stretches out the melodic theme across the long digressions of "Chevrolet", a trick we're used to, but hearing it again is no bother at all. Nor is it any bother to hear the slightly naive chorus of "Walkin' On The Road (To The Future)", which repeats "No more war/ Only love" with a sincerity that moves you through sheer conviction and persistence, and surely old Neil will keep singing it, and sooner or later someone will listen to him. Maybe.
Neil Young surprises with his vitality and energy; World Record surprises less, but sits at the same level as Barn.

Among the archival digs, the legendary lost Chrome Dreams (2023), dating back to 1976, finally makes an appearance.

2023 brings Before And After, the result of the Coastal tour, in which Neil appeared on stage in complete solitude, stripping every song of its arrangement to present them unplugged, alternating between guitar and piano, plus his inseparable harmonica. Certainly nothing new in his endless discography, and indeed the record's strength lies above all in the choice of songs, drawing on hidden or forgotten gems that time had failed to immortalize.
The seventy-eight-year-old Canadian songwriter, his voice growing ever more grainy, tries to make peace with his misunderstood children, while also throwing in a few classics to indulge the nostalgia factor and widen the audience.
The Toronto loner's entire career is genuinely covered here, from 1966 with Buffalo Springfield on "Burned", to his time in CSN&Y with the opening track of the historic live album "On The Way Home", through a touching "Birds" from "After The Gold Rush" to the '90s with "Ragged Glory" and "Sleeps With Angels", landing on "Don't Forget Love" taken from "Barn" from 2021.
The Before And After treatment wraps these rediscovered songs in an unusual light. Some benefit from it, like the opening "I'm the Ocean", originally recorded on "Mirror Ball", which without Pearl Jam's propulsion sounds more aching and direct, or "When I Hold You In My Arms", which finds new warmth thanks to Young's gently aged voice. And while the absence of distorted guitars works against tracks like "Mother Heart", it's the stripped-down version of "Mr. Soul" that delivers the album's most solemn moment.
To the delight of collectors, there's also an unreleased track. It's "If You Got Love", written during the gestation of "Trans", the contradictory 1982 album marking his electronic turn, performed here strictly with pump organ and harmonica.
The tracks of Before And After flow in an unbroken stream in which Neil plays as if in a kind of reflection on his long career, and perhaps a touch of bitterness shows through from someone who wanted to push the world toward change and, after shouting himself hoarse his whole life — even if handsomely paid for it — realizes that things have actually gotten worse. The image that sticks in the mind is that of a former young man singing with a trembling voice, hunched over his acoustic guitar or turned away at the piano, making his masterpieces shine, stripped of every arrangement, a moment that feels like quiet reflection and a reckoning, and one that can't leave you indifferent.

The loner's proverbial yin-yang between acoustic and electric comes true once again, as this acoustic excursion gives way to a new long tour-de-force with his Crazy Horse, Fuckin' Up (2024), a double live album with which he revisits Ragged Glory decades on. The result, while respectable, doesn't match the glory of Weld.

The 17 CDs (and a few films) of Archives Vol. III (2024) cover a period running from the late 70s through almost the entirety of his most controversial phase in the 80s.

Among the resurfaced lost albums, worth noting is Oceanside Countryside (2025), which gathers a series of songs recorded between May and December 1977. That record, like others from the same period ("Homegrown", "Hitchhiker", "Chrome Dreams" etc.), stayed unreleased for over four decades, even though most of the songs later resurfaced in other versions on works like Rust Never Sleeps, Hawks And Doves and Comes A Time. The current edition of the album – officially filed in the Neil Young Archives, within the Analog Original series – restores the format originally planned back in 1977.
The structure is split in two: the first half, "Oceanside", contains solo acoustic tracks, just voice and guitar, recorded along the coasts of Florida and Malibu, while the second, "Countryside", collects tracks cut in Nashville with the help of trusted musicians (Joe Osborne on bass, Rufus Thibodeaux on fiddle, Ben Keith on dobro and Karl Himmel on drums), for a sound closer to the folk-rock of the masterpiece Harvest (1972).
The curtain on the Ocean opens on the dreamy arpeggios of "Sail Away", a delicate ballad cradled by soft melodies and evocative lyrics, later to appear on Rust Never Sleeps. And that harmonica solo, let's be honest, is a gut punch. Immersed in a timeless, bucolic setting, we come across the bare intimacy of "Lost in Space" and the brackish country of "Captain Kennedy" (two tracks later reclaimed on 1980's Hawks And Doves).
The magical "Goin' Back" – here in an even frailer, more hushed version – is instead the famous opener of Comes A Time, which also reclaims "Human Highway", the missing title track of another album that never saw the light of day, this time credited to the supergroup Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, which was meant to follow their epic "Déjà Vu" from 1970: many years have gone by, but that aching lament of Young's, asking himself (and us) in a thin voice "how could people get so unkind?", remains dramatically alive and relevant.
Flip the side, and we find ourselves wandering the fields of Tennessee (quoting) amid the country-rock fragrances, fiddle-driven, of the playful "Field Of Opportunity" (without the vocal harmonies of the sweet Nicolette Larson added for "Comes A Time") and of a sweeping version of "Dance Dance Dance", which Young had first recorded in 1969 with Crazy Horse for yet another album that was never released, before the band included it on their self-titled 1971 debut.
Other tracks are more reflective, like the contrite "The Old Homestead", with its (self-)prophetic line "Why do you ride that crazy horse?", and the melancholy ballad "It Might Have Been", pared down to the bare essentials, in service of the fragile – and always damnably emotional – voice of the singer-songwriter from Toronto.
The album closes with "Pocahontas" – a song already familiar to fans but presented here in a sparer, more intimate guise – offering a poetic reflection on historical injustices, built on a surreal and evocative narrative.

On the verge of turning eighty, Neil Young reinvents himself once again. He retires Crazy Horse's battered Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot, replacing them with a brand-new band: Chrome Hearts. It's a varied lineup that includes Micah Nelson (son of the legendary Willie) on guitar and vocals, Corey McCormick (bass and vocals) and Anthony LoGerfo (drums) – already part of the Canadian Loner's brief stint with Promise Of The Real – plus the charismatic, eighty-one-year-old Spooner Oldham (Farfisa organ), with whom Young had already worked back in the days of "Comes A Time" (1978), and who can boast prestigious credits on soul classics by Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett and Aretha Franklin.

Talkin To The Trees (2025), the 48th chapter of a sprawling discography, is a testament that is sincere, intimate and cutting all at once. Recorded with the help of producer Lou Adler, John Hanlon and Young himself, the album opens with "Family Life", a manifesto-track that embodies the album's bare-bones poetics: a raspy voice, a wobbly harmonica, jagged drums and the clear statement of a man who still has something to say, even if it's not always pleasant to hear. Young lists his own family like an emotional inventory, acknowledging the tension with his daughter Amber and his absolute love for his new partner Daryl Hannah ("the best wife ever, the best cook in the world"), with no apologies to poor Pegi, who passed away in 2019.
The whole record swings between confession and denunciation, between domestic ballads and electric flashes. "Let's Roll Again" is the centerpiece, a pseudo-sequel to the post-9/11 anthem "Let's Roll" from 2001, but this time the gaze is turned not toward terrorism but toward environmental degradation and the damage done by the American auto industry. Carried by a melody reminiscent of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land", Young cries out: "Build something that doesn't kill the children." Then comes that already-famous line – "If you're a fascist, get a Tesla" – while the band launches into low-flying guitar runs and an unrestrained harmonica solo. And Elon Musk says nothing. The billionaire ex-ally of Trump and the tycoon himself are also targeted in "Big Change", an invective that sounds more like a warning than an accusation. And yet, amid the roar of feedback, there's room for tenderness: while the title track clearly evokes Dylan, "Bottle Of Love" and "First Fire Of Winter" dust off Young's more fragile side. Nor is romantic autobiography absent, as in "Silver Eagle", an ode to the tour bus that has accompanied him for a lifetime, the wandering refuge of an eternal outsider's existence. And if "Dark Mirage" and "Movin' Ahead" offer more abrasive moments, with garage fuzz and distortion threatening to derail the balance, Young puts up no resistance: he accepts the chaos as part of the journey.
Talkin To The Trees is not a perfect record. It's a crooked diary that alternates nostalgia and invective, tenderness and lashings. As in "Thankful", which closes the album with a secular prayer and a gratitude that is not reconciliation but awareness: thankful, yes, but never at peace. Those looking for formal polish or stylistic consistency will be thrown off. But anyone who knows Neil Young knows that his art has always lived in the cracks, the rough edges, in his broken voice that keeps stubbornly singing. "Talkin To The Trees" is yet another example of this unyielding resistance. "It could be short or it could be long, but I'll sing my new song," he declares, fittingly, in "Family Life". And there's nothing to do but be glad of it.

Preceded by the double live album As Time Explodes, the new record with Chrome Hearts is a very different affair from Talkin To The Trees. Where on the previous studio album Young had pushed a situationist attitude to the extreme – sacrificing formal elegance on the altar of spontaneity and integrity – on Second Song (2026) that same expressive urgency turns into pure carpe diem charm. Neil remains the hardheaded idealist fighting the streaming giants like Spotify and Amazon and calling out ecological collapse, but here he comes across as a musician newly aware of the fleeting, magical nature of a song. What makes the difference this time is the quality of the writing. The album houses some of the most inspired tracks of the last decade, starting with the splendid, epic title track: an acoustic ballad with an indolent, almost lazy charm that holds its own effortlessly against his past work, touched by that same naive magic that made the Canadian's name in history. That Young is in a state of grace is confirmed precisely by the most recent passages. The pained melancholy of "Day After Day" evokes absolute classics like "Helpless" or "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)", with organ and piano polishing off a fine melodic idea. On the opposite end, the fierce anti-Trump invective of "Soon I Might Be Going" unfolds over electric guitar chords that seem to melt on contact with the scorching lines of the lyrics.
It's a sonic saga that shows writing decidedly more dynamic and focused than on Talkin To The Trees, which, for all its grit, often came across as messy and slapdash. On Second Song that flaw resurfaces only on the naive country of "Casting Me Away From You" and the limping "Earth Girl". It hardly matters that the closing slot goes to "I'll Love You Forever", a minor track already salvaged for the Archives series. Of artists as honest and urgent as Neil Young, we are still in desperate need.

Contributions by Antonio Puglia ("Time Fades Away"), Antonio Ciarletta ("Tonight's The Night"), Angelo Pierantoni ("Rust Never Sleeps"), Ariel Bertoldo ("Prairie Wind"), Michele Saran ("Living With War", "Fork In The Road", "Archives Vol. 1", "Le Noise", "A Letter Home", "Monsanto Years", "Earth", "Peace Trail", "Hitchhiker", "The Visitor", "Homegrown"), Gianni Candellari ("Chrome Dreams II"), Michele Corrado ("Colorado"), Lorenzo Montefreddo ("Barn", "World Record", "Before And After"), Marmoro Gianfranco ("Second Song")

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