“WHEN I LEFT CALIFORNIA – IT WAS A TIME OF MY LIFE WHERE I WASN’T PHYSICALLY THAT GREAT, I WASN’T THAT BRIGHT MENTALLY.”
With Neil Young, there’s always work going on. Even during these past 18 months with no new album, he was releasing a succession of Archive series sets, and working on more. Finally emerging in November 2020 was the mammoth 10-CD box set Archives
Volume II, 1972-1976 – 131 songs from a three-and-a-half-year period in Young’s life, 63 of them previously unreleased. “And we’re well into the third volume,” he says. “We’re more than halfway through and it’s the biggest volume year by far.”
Archives Volume III, which he’s planning to release in the first half of 2022, covers a huge sweep of time, from 1976 to 1990. During five of these years, Young was signed to a new record label, Geffen, which frequently rejected the albums he gave them and notoriously sued him for making records which “were not commercial in nature and musically uncharacteristic of Young’s previous records.” Among them were two different versions of Old Ways. Neil re-assembled a third version, which will hopefully make an appearance. All he’ll say for now about III is, “I’m really happy with it. There’s really a lot of cool stuff in there. So I’m having a lot of fun with that, and the fourth one is sitting out there. I’m looking to start on that.”
Separately, there have been rumours of a pending release for Toast, the “murky and dark” Crazy Horse album that Young cut in 2001 but shelved in favour of Are You Passionate?, his album with Booker T & The M.G.’s. Earlier this year, Young blogged about Toast on his Archives page. “Unlike any other,” he wrote, “Toast was so sad that I couldn’t put it out,” going on to explain that “the music of
Toast is about a relationship. There is a time in many relationships that go bad, a time long before the break up, where it dawns on one of the people, maybe both, that it’s over. This was that time.”
Throughout your music career you’ve been about doing something quickly and moving on, no looking back. Why is it so important for you to keep working on music from your past?
I don’t release these records like I expect anything to happen with them. I put them out there because I want them to be done while I’m here to do it. I want to make sure that the music is taken care of and that everything is done in the right way. I don’t want to have other folks finishing my job for me later on. So that’s what I’m trying doing. It’s not hard. It’s a cool thing and it’s so much fun. If only I had the time. It takes a lot of time and a lot of people who are working with me. And I never had the time to do it until the pandemic happened. Even though it’s sad what’s happened to so many people, for me it’s been a gift, an opportunity to take care of a lot of things. It gave me a lot of time to stay focused and finally able to organise the things that I’ve done and get the Archives in the position to where things are getting finished. They’re nice periods of time and music and all kinds of stuff. When you go back and look through it, in some cases put it back together, and the things that were unfinished you complete, it’s a very good feeling.
This year’s Young Shakespeare live album [from 1971] was brilliant. When you go back through all these old concert tapes, do you think, “I really nailed that one!”? Or is it just another to tick off the list?
There’s a lot of happiness when I hear a good performance. I feel great about it, like, “Wow, some people are going to enjoy this” – the people who were there at the time, who thought that they’d heard everything but they didn’t. For them this is going to be a gift, because it’s the same quality as all the stuff that was out there, the hits, and everything. Why didn’t it come out back then? Because there was just was too much of it.
Because songs just kept pouring out of you?
It’s just the way it happens with me. I’m lucky that way. So I’m very happy about it. I had so much stuff. I just recorded everything and kept on going, and I never even stopped to finish it. But yeah, Young Shakespeare is a very, very beautiful record. And if it wasn’t for Elliot we never would have had that [Roberts arranged for a German TV crew to record the gig]. And he was thinking all the time. Elliot is a big part of the Archives. Much of it would not be there without him.
Another excellent recent Archive release is Homegrown – an album you completed, recorded and shelved for decades. At the time you said it was too dark and sad and personal to release – strange, given this was the time of the Doom Trilogy?
Well you know, dark and sad are two different things. But Homegrown – there was a sad period going on, breaking up [with then-partner Carrie Snodgress] and all of that and learning to deal with all of those things. So I made that record and I just kept moving. And the fact is that during that period in the ’70s, most artists only put out at the very most a couple of albums a year and that was a lot, but in ’75 or ’74, I put out three albums. And that album was part of that period but it never came out.
The way it works is there’s no plan. When the music calls, you just have to write the songs and go with it. And as soon as I feel I’m ready I go in the studio and record them and then after that I feel good. Whether I perform them or whether I finish them or not is not nearly as important as that I record it. So that leaves me with a lot of stuff that I have to go back in and finish.
Are there any other albums in the archive you’ve been conflicted about releasing? Or at this stage are you OK with putting everything out there? Toast, for example…
That’s a great record. It was recorded for Surroundsound – a big sound coming out of many speakers – and today they have this new thing called [Dolby] Atmos, which is a new kind of mixing that has a spatial quality to it and so we’ll see what happens with Toast. It is a very unique and great record. It may come out next year. It’s just that there are so many things, there’s really a lot of stuff and the new stuff always takes precedence over the old stuff. That’s the way I do it. So I’m just moving along here, I’ve got a song or two going for the next one, and we’ll see what happens. But Toast is finished and it’s ready to go.
You recently turned down a big offer to tour another old album, Harvest. Given you spend so much time working with new technology on old material, wouldn’t you find it interesting to revisit a 50-year-old album in a new musical environment?
No. I’d rather do a new album with new musicians and not try to play old parts by other musicians that aren’t here any more. You can’t recreate the past. If the past is preserved, you don’t have to recreate it. Those are just promoters’ things. As far as my world, it’s not what I’m interested in.
The digital world comes with built-in obsolescence. What’s your take on that?
We don’t know what the future holds, but the focus of the tech companies like Apple, they want to sell technology, they want things that are new and different. But they’re not so much concerned with the original quality of music, of capturing the original great quality of the masters in the history of recorded sound, which is what they could be doing. New technologies that are
built on lower resolution will never be as good as the original analogue recordings of all the classics – all of the Frank Sinatra records and everything. All of them should be transferred to the greatest resolution in digital and be made available that way for people. I’m a little concerned about the future of my records because I think that the quality that’s there may not be taken care of in the way I would have liked it. But there’s something I can do about that, which is why I’m making sure my old records are all there in the way that I want them to be remembered.
There’s a song on your new album called Human Race. Do you have hope for the future of the species? Are you worried your old nemesis Trump might make a comeback?
I have hope for the future, always. I’m not worried about Trump. Trump is basically meaningless now, because what matters now is the environment and taking care of the planet. I think that music and politics and everything is going to be around the climate and what’s happening. You don’t have to look very far to see it’s getting worse and worse. If we don’t immediately turn around and start going the other way, we’re screwed. That’s the truth, the scientific truth. We’ve never been in a place like this in the history of the world. This is a monumental problem, and very few people actually grasp it. But I think more and more will.
And that’s why when you ask me about Trump, I feel like it’s meaningless, it’s not going to make any difference. People are going to have to react to the situation that we’re in, whoever they are.
You’ve been writing a novel, Canary. Is it dystopian?
It’s a science fiction novel about people and stuff that happens in the future. It’s another place. It’s not dystopian though. And it’s finished. Now they’re just waiting for me to do some illustrations, which I haven’t found the right moment for yet. I can see them in my mind, but when it comes to trying to create them they don’t look right. So I’m just waiting until that happens. Because it will. And if I can’t do it someone else will do it and that will be OK, because the main thing is the story. But I do want to do these illustrations. As soon as my mind opens up some more, I’ll be painting.
I talked with Crosby, Stills and Nash earlier this year about the archive version of Déjà Vu. Will you ever play with CSNY again?
I can’t answer the question. Because I don’t know the answer to it. It’s in the future. Things could evolve to that point. I don’t see it in this moment but I’m not saying it will never happen. Why would I say it would never happen? That just doesn’t make sense. But I’m focused right now on what’s going on on the planet, what’s going on in the world, and trying to listen to my musical sense of what my soul wants to do, and create and continue this part of me that is out of control and wants to do what it does. So I just have to take care of that and keep on going while at the same time be aware of the world and what is happening. And if Crosby, Stills and Nash fit into that, we’ll see what happens. I wish them all the best. But musically, I’m not interested in reliving the past.
It used to be that new music or bands would catch your ear and inspire new directions. Has that happened lately?
There’s so much music now, it’s so available to everybody, but you’re not hearing the top songs of the day on the radio any more. Now you have people’s playlists from all time that they put together that you’re hearing in the background. It’s a different world. So I really am not hearing the new things that are happening and thinking, “I’d like to do something like this or that.” I’m just waiting for the muse, and for the moment when I know what I’m going to do. It’ll happen. I’m just waiting for it. I’ve just got to keep my eyes open.
Final question. In your song Shape Of You, on Barn, you sing: “I’m old now but I’m still dreaming.” What are you dreaming of?
Well it depends what day it is. Today? (Laughs) Well today I’m dreaming about writing some more songs, hanging out with Daryl – and going and getting some granola.