Old folkie that he is, Neil Young harbors a soft spot for songs as protest, and The Monsanto Years is full of them. Where he often railed against war, here the purported target is the agricultural company Monsanto, a firm that, among other things, specializes in genetically modified crops, but Young uses that as a pivot to rage against all manner of modern outrages. Apathy among the populace, avarice among corporations, and cultural homogenization provide the throughline on The Monsanto Years, and while the weathered hippie takes some time to lay down his electric guitar and breathe, this isn't a mournful album like Living with War, his W-era missive. This is a raging record and to that end, Young hired the Promise of the Real, a ragtag outfit led by Willie Nelson's guitarist son Lukas, to approximate Crazy Horse's lop-legged lumber…
Neil Young embarked on a 2019 European tour with Promise of the Real only two weeks after the passing of Elliot Roberts, his life-long friend and manager. Young viewed this tour as a living tribute to Roberts, claiming in the liner notes to Noise & Flowers – a 2022 document of the 2019 trek – that "Playing in his memory (made it) one of the most special tours ever. We hit the road and took his great spirit with us into every song." Noise & Flowers does indeed have a unique vibe, one that's far removed from the weird, fevered protest of Earth, the previous live album Young recorded with Promise of the Real. Here, he amiably wanders through his back pages, selecting a few standards ("Mr. Soul," "Everybody Know This Is Nowhere," "Helpless," "Rockin' in the Free World") but spending more time playing songs that don't always make their way onto set lists.
In the '70s, Neil Young got in the habit of creating some of his best work and keeping it to himself. In addition to projects like the long-shelved country-rock album Homegrown (recorded between 1974 and 1975 but not officially released until 2020) and the sublime 1976 solo sessions that were ultimately packaged as 2017 album The Hitchhiker, Young also tracked an album titled Chrome Dreams that would have a highly uncommon trajectory for the next 40-odd years. Made up of 12 songs recorded between 1974 and 1977, many of which became some of the most loved in Young's repertoire, Chrome Dreams was considered for release in 1977, but was instead reconfigured with different versions of some of the same tunes and many others for Young's eighth proper solo effort American Stars 'n Bars. The flow, atmosphere, and overall impact of Chrome Dreams was different, however, intimate and personally derived but still mysterious.
The old conventional wisdom on Neil Young used to be that he alternated between acoustic folk and full-on guitar skronk with every other album, but 2010’s Le Noise – the French affection in its title a tongue-in-cheek tip of the beret to his producer Daniel Lanois – melds the two extremes…
Capturing a performance given at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut just three days after the celebrated concert documented on Live at Massey Hall 1971 – a show popular for years among bootleggers but released officially as part of Neil Young's Archives Performance Series in March 2007 – Young Shakespeare is very similar in tone and feel to its cousin. The set list is similar, too…
During the 2014 promo campaign for Pono, his high-end digital audio device, Neil Young called his forthcoming album A Letter Home "an art project," which is an appropriate term for this curious collection of covers from his contemporaries. It's not so much that the choice of songs is unusual - nearly all of them are from the '60s and '70s, years when Young was also active, but a handful ("Crazy," "Since I Met You Baby," "I Wonder If I Care as Much") date from the late '50s or early '60s - but the recording method. Young headed down to Jack White's Third Man Records in Nashville where Jack installed a refurbished Voice-O-Graph booth, a device designed to allow a user to "Make Your Own Record" by cutting a song or message directly to vinyl…
Neil Young's second solo album, released only four months after his first, was nearly a total rejection of that polished effort. Though a couple of songs, "Round Round (It Won't Be Long)" and "The Losing End (When You're On)," shared that album's country-folk style, they were altogether livelier and more assured. The difference was that, while Neil Young was a solo effort, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere marked the beginning of Young's recording association with Crazy Horse, the trio of Danny Whitten (guitar), Ralph Molina (drums), and Billy Talbot (bass) that Young had drawn from the struggling local Los Angeles group the Rockets.