“At this point, it’s interesting to try and . . . make some sort of a difference because I’ve attained a certain level that I feel a responsibility to use for positive things rather than just getting my name in People magazine.”
– NY, 2015
“I don’t know much about the future. I want to [focus on Pono] and I want to continue playing music. Those two things should keep me pretty busy. I have some film editing and things to do on the side. I’ll probably be writing some more books. I want to keep doing what I do. I’d like to continue doing it for a long time.”
– NY, 2015
In February 2013, Neil found himself in Los Angeles on stage with the Horse playing the Bruce Springsteen MusiCares Person of the Year gala. The Horse stumbled through a wildly off-key version of “Born in the U.S.A.” but no one noticed. This was a night to celebrate, not pick holes.
The band spent the bulk of the spring and summer touring Europe, Australia, and New Zealand before Neil traveled down to Nashville to record a new album with Jack White at the former White Stripes frontman’s Third Man Studios. A Letter Home is about as contrarian and kooky as anything he has ever done.
It is not the songs—a batch of acoustic covers including Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” Springsteen’s “My Hometown,” and Bert Jansch’s “Needle of Death”—that are unconventional; it is the way in which they were recorded, using a 1940s contraption called a Voice-O-Graph, a long-forgotten curio used to send voice postcards to friends and family. In this spirit, Neil opens the album with a touching spoken message to his mother in which he urges her to speak to his father.
NY: It’s gonna be very confusing to people because it is retro-tech. Retro-tech means recorded in a 1940 recording booth. A phone booth. It’s all acoustic with a harmonica inside a closed space, with one mic to vinyl. Directly to vinyl. (2014)
Although undoubtedly a head-scratcher, A Letter Home did resonate with many reviewers. Simon Vozick-Levinson in Rolling Stone described the album “in its perverse way” as “one of the most enjoyable records Young has made this century.”
The year 2014 would be one of Neil’s busiest and most turbulent. An on-and-off solo acoustic tour took up much of the period, including dates at Carnegie Hall in New York City in January. His four-night stay at Carnegie has become legendary: Fans were treated to acoustic sets of his early work, especially from Harvest and After the Gold Rush.
Mark Guerrero: Neil is a real artist playing the acoustic guitar to accompany his singing. He comes up with great guitar parts like the ones on “Tell Me Why,” “Old Man,” and “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Neil usually plays acoustic without a pick which creates a fatter, more organic sound. He often uses D modal tuning on acoustic and electric. Examples of songs using this tuning on electric songs are “Ohio,” Cinnamon Girl,” and “When You Dance.” On acoustic he uses it on “Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” his acoustic version of “Mr. Soul,” and “The Old Laughing Lady.” Bringing the high and low E strings down a step to D gives the guitar a droning sound because they ring through most of the chord changes. (2014)
Immediately after his stint at Carnegie Hall, Neil played four “Honour the Treaties” benefit concerts in Canada in support of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations’ legal fund to defend their land rights against incursions by oil companies and the government.
Sharry Wilson: I was at the show in Toronto where Neil was very vocal in his support of the First Nations people. Some members of the First Nations gathered outside Massey Hall in a drum circle while others danced in a circle on the street. Time was also allotted to their cause at the beginning of the evening, with a drum circle formed on stage. Neil felt so strongly about this issue that, in September 2013, he drove hundreds and hundreds of miles to Fort McMurray, Alberta in LincVolt, his 1959 Lincoln Continental hybrid electric car, to see the damage wrought by the oil companies on Native lands.
He had some strong words to describe what he witnessed and his remarks were reported in the press. He did not endear himself to the local residents of Fort McMurray when he equated what he had seen to the devastation of Hiroshima. (2015)
In another engagement inspired by his strong environmental convictions, Neil also joined award-winning Canadian scientist/environmentalist David Suzuki’s Blue Dot speaking tour of Canada during the fall of 2014 when it stopped in Vancouver.
Sharry Wilson: The aim of the speaking series was to engage citizens to demand a change to Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms with the ultimate goal of “having the right to breathe fresh air, drink clean water, and eat healthy food” added to the charter. Neil has long been an environmentalist and has lobbied for many years in support of family farms vs. corporate operations. His participation in Farm Aid since its inception in 1985 demonstrates his strong support and devotion to the cause. “Mother Earth,” his plea to keep the Earth sustainable for future generations, was included on Ragged Glory.
During his most recent tour with Crazy Horse in Europe during the summer of 2014, Neil wore a black T-shirt with the word EARTH in big block letters on the front. A new song, “Who’s Gonna Stand Up (and Save the Earth)?,” was featured prominently at each performance. (2015)
Longtime Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot suffered a mild stroke shortly before the summer tour of Europe and was replaced by Rick Rosas, making him the only musician other than Neil himself to have played with Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, and Crazy Horse. Sadly, this was to be Rosas’s last tour, as he succumbed to lung disease the following November.
During the tour, Neil’s personal life unraveled: In July he filed for divorce from his wife, Pegi, after thirty-six years of marriage. Their long run had come to an end.
But through all this turmoil, current climate navigator Neil Young in 2014 did what he always does: He was recording and working.
“An ideal session for me is when Neil never even comes into the control room. He doesn’t have to. He does live vocals. Delivering the message is what matters.”
– Niko Bolas, 2015
Neil began recording the double album Storytone in early summer. The album, recorded with a big band orchestra, was released in two formats—one with the orchestra and one with stripped-down versions of the tunes. The orchestral version was, typically, a big departure from his previous lo-fi affair, A Letter Home.
Niko Bolas: The Storytone album happened when Neil called me at the beginning of the summer and said “I wrote ten songs and I don’t know what to do with them and I want to get started. And I’m really intrigued by the idea of singing with an orchestra.”
Neil came to Capitol Studios. The idea was to have him stand in a room with a big band and sing these tunes really old school. But we had to get the essence of the song down.
So I got Al Schmitt booked to engineer and Neil showed up. And on the first night, we cut just about everything.
What we did was not let him bring any of his own instruments. I called Lonn Cohen and asked him to build me “Neil Young’s Pawn Shop.” He brought about a dozen old weird instruments from a mandolin, cello, to ukulele to old guitars to a storytelling piano itself. And then Neil wandered around the room and sat down with all the instruments he never played. Banjos, weird instruments. And when he picked one up and it kind of felt like whatever that song was, that’s when we recorded.
Then Neil went on the road with Crazy Horse and I took the recordings to my two arranger buddies Michael Bearden and Chris Walden. And when Neil came back, we then went into Sony Studios and cut everything with the orchestra.
Neil had never stood in the middle of the room and sung live before. And that was the big difference. I put him up in between the piano and the conductor. So he had something for pitch reference facing the orchestra and we basically just picked takes based on the best vocal. (2015)
Jim Beviglia: Often overlooked amidst Young’s different genre forays is his skill as a tunesmith. Storytone features some of his most ingratiating melodies in years, songs that don’t even need the orchestration to reveal their beauty. Rarely do the arrangements get showy, with the possible exception of the one for the environmental plea “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?” (2014)
Neil also found time to publish his second memoir, Special Deluxe, in October 2014.
Sharry Wilson: In Special Deluxe, Neil talks about his Ontario years. I really love the book, more than Waging Heavy Peace. It’s special. I like the way it’s set out. Neil has done tracings and water colors of all of his cars that mean the most to him. So the whole book is framed around these different cars and why they were special to him, what was happening at the time, and what he was thinking of. It was done in chronological order. His childhood, Buffalo Springfield years, and his own solo career.
For each car he also includes a notation about how much carbon fuel the car emitted. Neil is thinking about how much damage he did with his earlier cars. (2015)
Now, the future was beckoning again. Pono, Neil’s own high-resolution digital download player, was launched in January 2015.
NY: We’re going make this technology public. We would like to be more open about it. We want to start a community of music lovers worldwide so future generations will be able to hear today’s classics in a way that’s representative of what music is, instead of having a museum of MP3 files. (2015)
Neil hired engineer and sound consultant Bruce Botnick as VP of Content Acquisitions at Pono. Botnick had worked with Buffalo Springfield decades previously at Sunset Sound in Hollywood.
Bruce Botnick: I went to go see a [reunited] Buffalo Springfield concert three years ago and I went backstage. Neil then showed me Pono. At that time it was in LincVolt, his Lincoln convertible, but it was an astonishingly great speaker system and amplifiers, and he had a prototype—not the one we hold in our hands today, but electronically, the concept—in place, and he was able to demonstrate it. Neil Young, in his own way, is a visionary. (2015)
Neil Young’s career clearly does have its highs and lows. But the highs and lows are there because he has consistently shown a pattern of wanting to experiment and wanting to try new things and wanting to remain in a state of becoming. Rather than a state of being.
Graham Nash: I don’t know what goes on in Neil’s head. I’m not even sure Neil knows half the time. When Neil’s heart moves, he has to move. Will there be any more CSNY? Right now it looks pretty bleak. Neil is a little upset with me because of my book, Wild Tales. Neil’s packed every second. We’re getting older, how long can this go on? Rick Rosas has died. It is very sad. But I’m never surprised by anything Neil does. He’s been very dedicated to his music, he has always thought to explore new ways of doing it and God bless him. (2015)
By remaining a very active and innovative recording artist, he avoids the nostalgia label that is pinned to many of his contemporaries.
Gary Stewart: At Rhino/Warner Music Group, we were involved only peripherally with the release of the Buffalo Springfield box set and rarely were able to use his tracks on our other compilations, but Neil Young was somebody we always talked about as the gold standard for how to be a veteran artist without falling into the “classic rock coffin” that engulfed so many of his peers.
I remember when The Bridge came out in 1989. It was one of the first serious tribute albums, before they became a predictable trend. That in itself was an indication of both how much he mattered and how long he had mattered for (just over two decades at that point).
Then I noticed the lineup, which didn’t consist of legacy acts, or sensitive singer-songwriter types, but of the then-cream of post punk and indie rock: the Pixies, Nick Cave, Sonic Youth—the kind of artists you’d expect to see on a Velvet Underground tribute. But then I realized that the punks got him because he always got the punks. That was made explicit on Rust Never Sleeps, but you can even hear it on some of the earliest edgier Springfield recordings.
If you look at that elite group, the veteran artists who started in the rock ’n’ roll idiom, but who are still making diverse music that matters by looking forward and telling the truth—Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Tom Waits chief among them—it’s hard not to think of Neil as the first person to set the example for having perspective and legacy without losing his edge. He was built for speed and distance. (2015)
The late, great songwriter, record producer, author, and maverick music man Kim Fowley, in one of his last interviews, also recognized Neil’s longevity.
Kim Fowley: I give Neil Young kudos for having a lifetime career like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Good for him. He worked hard and deserves all the good things that happened. He started in Hollywood with Greene and Stone. They were like Hy Weiss, founder of Old Town Records, minus the humility. They had connections. Neil was then fortunate to work with record men like Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic and Mo Ostin at Reprise. (2014)
Peter Lewis was a member of the influential West Coast band Moby Grape, which shared a residency with Buffalo Springfield at the Ark in Sausalito (near San Francisco) in November 1966.
Peter Lewis: Maybe the person who Neil reminds me of is Gregory Peck. The Guns of Navarone. He had a remoteness about him. An unreachable quality. I mean the guy who can survive that way. When I talk about Gregory Peck and Neil Young in the same breath, I see a lot of control. I think that is their religion and that is what they are selling.
Neil is one year older than me. Away from Buffalo Springfield and Moby Grape, what we wanted to do was change the script. If we could do that it would be a great example to people. That’s what people in show business are supposed to do. That’s what they are getting paid for. To not get overwhelmed by people’s preconception of them. What people really like about Neil would be the idea that he’s isolated what it means to be free. Being free means you are free to do anything you want. Whether anyone likes it or not.
In 2015, Neil is still doing it. That’s the point. I think Neil understands that life is a metaphor. Kind of like surfing. If you are at Maverick’s and the Pacific Ocean waves are big, you got three choices. You can get stuck inside and die. Or you can paddle like crazy and try to get over that next one. Or, if you’re at the right place in the lineup, you can get a ride. That’s life.
I think Neil Young has been smart enough to either get outside or get a ride. It’s about the choices you make and what you want to do. And it’s not about being perfect. I know he’s not perfect. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about survival. And I think Neil is a survivor. You gotta stay ahead of the curve so you’ll survive. (2015)
Still other collaborators, chroniclers, tour veterans, poets, and pundits give their thoughts on this unique and enduring talent.
Dickie Davis: Neil’s longevity? This comes from way outside, but Neil plays well with others. You know, he connected with bands, had a lot of younger bands open for him in the nineties. Did shows and collaborated in a studio with them. Neil remained an important guitar player to a bunch of people who were coming along. And they buoyed him up, in terms of reputation. (2014)
Peter Goddard: I think to understand Neil Young you have to think of him as a performance artist, like Lady Gaga. No one has ever applied this term to him. That’s the kind of space he occupies. The fringe. John Lennon, after meeting Yoko Ono understood this about himself. John and I talked a lot about this. It freed him up enormously. From being the commercial guy that he thought he was.
The real thing about Neil Young is he’s very quirky, very idiosyncratic. You see this with artists who, right from the get go, sort of take a vision and the vision, of course, creates its own complications, its own needs and demands. So you have to follow them. And I think that’s what Neil did. (2014)
“Neil is a truly authentic poet in the classic sense of the word. Think Shakespeare. He writes stories set to music, takes them from town to town to share them, the tales delight and move us, and we can’t wait for the next time he passes through. But Neil’s got a slight edge on William S.—that wicked guitar.”
– Jonathan Demme, 2005
In MOJO magazine’s March 2002 “Hero” spotlight issue, Oasis co-founder Noel Gallagher picked Neil Young to writer Jon Bennett. “’Cause he’s still relevant, still got his voice, and he’s still got his enthusiasm, and he still looks like he means it.”
Before drummer Clem Burke joined Blondie, as a teenager he saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse opening for Deep Purple at the Felt Forum in New York in 1969. More than forty years on, Burke has some observations about Neil Young’s influence on today’s recording artists.
Clem Burke: The whole sound of Oasis, to my mind, I would go as far as to say, besides the Beatles, it’s kind of based on Neil Young and Crazy Horse. I mean, the guitars are really loud, the bass playing and the drumming is very minimal. I saw Oasis in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock and for an encore they did “Hey Hey My My.” Brilliant. I particularly really rate Noel Gallagher as a writer, performer, guitar player, and singer. And it was just phenomenal when they came out. With Noel singing it. Not Liam.
Aside from Neil’s songwriting and solo career, CSNY, you hear his tremendous influence on rock bands. The sound of Crazy Horse, the guitar playing have a big influence on contemporary rock music. Pearl Jam, Oasis. Neil kind of goes on both sides of the street: He’s a phenomenal folk singer and a phenomenal rocker. (2014)
Stuart Henderson: To borrow from Paul Williams, Neil Young has always understood that “slick is sloppy.” His live shows have never, in my quarter century of seeing them, followed any specific path.
They may follow a set list, and they may involve some scripted elements night after night, but it has always seemed to me that Neil Young couldn’t fake it if he tried. He isn’t a professional in the classic sense. He’s ornery, he’s self-centered, he’s loquacious, he’s aloof, he’s on, he’s off . . . you’re going to get what he gives. No bullshit, no showboating, just the songs. When he plays with Crazy Horse, he gets a band that has the same basic live profile: Play the songs, see what happens. Let’s try this, now that.
“You want to stay relevant onstage after fifty years, even as your material waxes and wanes in terms of quality? Be real. If that means shambling your way through some off nights every once in a while, or taking a ten-minute guitar solo just to see where it goes, or playing acoustic ballads to a restless arena, or staging a quixotic rock opera . . . just trust yourself that it’ll be good if it’s real. Resist the temptation to paint it in some slick gloss. Slick is sloppy.”
– Stuart Henderson, 2015
Glen Boyd: Why do people still go to his shows? Because it’s such great shit. I mean, that’s the best way I can put it. I think there is a percentage of his audience who are like I am and they buy everything.
At every Neil show you get the hardcore “Rusties” there. They’re always the guys out on the rail. They gather before the show in the parking lot and do their own tailgate parties. They’re not celebrated as Dead heads and Springsteen fans. But they’re every bit as dedicated.
But, there’s this larger group of people that are divided right down the middle. There are the guys who go to an acoustic show and they will sit in the fifth row and yell out “Rockin’ in the Free World.” They can’t really separate the acoustic Neil from the electric Neil.
And then, you’ve got the other group of people who are more the Starbucks sort of crowd who, you know, love Harvest Moon, but when Neil comes out and does something like the Alchemy tour for Psychedelic Pill, they don’t understand that. Neil’s fan base is really strange, but the one thing that is common between all of these different camps is that they are very loyal to him. (2015)
Don Randi: Neil was smart enough to know what he wanted and knew how to get it. And he had Ahmet Ertegun in his corner.
Jack Nitzsche and I never judged artists by their voices. To me it didn’t matter ’cause I loved the music so much. And Neil was able to sell it. There are some people you can’t stand them on record until you see them live. And once you see them live you can understand their records. That doesn’t happen a lot. But it does happen. (2014)
James Cushing: I marvel at Neil Young’s career. His songs are so powerfully and simply constructed. They seem to have been discovered rather than written. Neil’s guitar playing has that marvelously rough-hewn rock-out quality that nothing else quite has. His voice is unique. Even though he’s not a blues guy, the interiority and the momentum of his best music is everything that rock was designed to deliver. And his calm and beautiful folk songs are emotionally affecting on an almost pre-verbally deep level. Neil is just like Bob Dylan and nothing like Bob Dylan. (2014)
The sheer range of Neil Young’s activities has always been astounding, and if anything is becoming increasingly diverse as he approaches the start of his eighth decade. Just since the turn of the century, he has given us twelve studio albums, including a concept rock opera, a journey into the supernatural world of Daniel Lanois, and recently his first foray into the big band sound. But in between these releases, he has also managed to write two memoirs, turn a 1959 Lincoln Continental into an hybrid electric car, direct one movie and collaborate on another three with Jonathan Demme, develop his Pono device, win multiple Grammys, execute an improbable Buffalo Springfield reunion, and compile dozens and dozens of hours from deep inside the Youngville vaults. (Volume two of The Neil Young Archives is being readied, with release date currently unconfirmed.)
And presiding over each of these quixotic moves is Neil’s long-serving, and sometimes long-suffering, manager, Elliot Roberts.
Bryan Bell: Neil said, “I’m a musician. And I would be a musician whether I could eat or not. The reason I’m a professional musician is because of Elliot Roberts. He’s the one who has learned how to monetize me.” (2015)
Brian Stone: I saw Neil with CSNY earlier this century. As far as the career Neil Young has created, I am not surprised at all. Neil is a genius and Elliott is a sensational manager. There aren’t many people who can sustain a career this long. I think Neil is a goddamn genius and always tries to keep himself fresh. He’s brilliant. I feel proud that I contributed in some way. (2014)
Andrew Loog Oldham: I think for a suburbanite from Toronto who lived next door to a chicken farm, Neil Young did remarkably well. Neil Young knows how it all works. OK. And people like me or people like Charlie Greene and Brian Stone only get to Mount Etna when the chariot we’re driving knows as much as people like Neil Young know.
Because Neil Young also had adversity in his life. Polio and epilepsy. Adversity either buries you, like it did Brian Jones and so many others, or like Roman Polanski and others, drives you on and gives you a common touch with the public that your talent can seize upon and multiply.
The Neil Young and Elliot Roberts team. It’s a gift to still stay engaged. But what you really have to say is thank God for the songs. (2014)
The Neil Young 2015 model seems to be a very happy person. I’ve seen him a couple of times cruising around Mulholland Drive near Malibu State Park in LincVolt.
But don’t look for Neil to participate in any toppingoff ceremonies just yet. So what could be next? Well, anything. Especially in Neil Young’s down to the wire universe.