Neil Young
Neil Young’s Music Pulled From Spotify Following His Joe Rogan Ultimatum
Two days after vowing that Spotify would have to choose between him and podcaster Joe Rogan, Neil Young has yanked his music from the platform. On Monday, in an open letter posted then removed from his Neil Young Archives website, the veteran rocker expressed his dismay at the outspoken podcaster spreading “disinformation” about COVID-19. In the now-deleted letter, he wrote, “Rogan or Young. Not both.” Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the streaming giant is in the process of removing Young’s music from its platform. “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users,” a rep for Spotify told SPIN. “With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve r...
Neil Young Unearths Previously Lost 1987 Album Summer Songs
Here’s a good Christmas surprise for you. Neil Young, in a statement published on his Neil Young Archives site, has unearthed a previously lost album. Titled Summer Songs, the album was recorded in 1987. Described by Young himself as “lost for years, but not forgotten,” Summer Songs consists of eight songs that were recorded at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch. The album features Young on all instruments. It was produced by Young and Niko Bolas, aka the Volume Dealers. “They’re pipin’ music in…yer getting it…someday,” Young wrote in a statement. “Remember the old songs? This ones for you!” Last week, Young and Crazy Horse released Barn, their first album since Colorado, which was released two years ago. Prior to that, we caught up with Nils Lofgren who looked back at hi...
Neil Young and Crazy Horse Unveil ‘Welcome Back’
Alongside his ongoing, recently unarchived record releases, Neil Young and Crazy Horse are up to release their newest record Barn, and they released one of its tracks, “Welcome Back,” today. “Welcome Back” opens with Young’s signature gritty riffing, and admits right off the bat: “I’ve been singing this way for so long / Riding through the storm / Might remind me of who we are / And why we walk so lowly.” The country rock legends previously released “Song Of The Seasons” and “Heading West,” and the new release of the nearly eight and a half minute “Welcome Back” also came with Young’s sharing of the band performing the song. It was recorded in the same Colorado barn where Neil and Crazy Horse record Barn. [embedded content][embedded content] Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Barn is o...
Neil Young to Unearth 1987 Lost Recordings Summer Songs
Over the weekend, Neil Young announced the existence of a lost record from his vaults, 1987’s Summer Songs. The tracks are set to be included on his next archival volume. Though, there’s a chance they may be released before then. “We are not sure of the exact original dates of these recordings yet,” Young wrote in a post on his website. “They were all given the same date in the NYA Vault’s records, but they all have a very similar unique sound. To give you an idea of place and time, Farm Aid and the Bridge School concerts had just begun their long runs.” The to-be-released collection follows Young’s January detailing of another lost record, his 1982 Johnny’s Island. The unearthed collection includes “The Last Of His Kind,” “For The Love Of Man,” “American Dream,” “Name Of Love,” “Some...
Not Fade Away: Our 1995 Neil Young Cover Story
This article originally appeared in the September 1995 issue of SPIN. It’s getting harder and harder to remember that, for much of his career, Neil Young has been regarded—if loved—as a self-destructive oddball. Even in his most celebrated decade, the 1970s, he shelved entire albums; others, such as Time Fades Away and On the Beach, were so determinedly marginal that they’ve never been reissued on CD. Then, in the ’80s, he released a notorious series of rockabilly, synth-pop, and country experiments so off-putting that his label, Geffen, eventually sued him for not sounding like himself. But starting with “Rockin in the Free World,” the anthem that bookends 1989’s Freedom, he went back to being Neil Young. Ragged Glory was a typically sprawling Crazy Horse album; Harvest Moon revisite...
Neil Young and Crazy Horse Announce New Album Barn
In June, Neil Young wrote on his website that he was heading back to the barn with Crazy Horse and had a bunch of songs ready to go. He sure wasn’t kidding. This morning, in a tweet through his official Neil Young Archives account, Young announced that the aptly titled Barn, his first album since 2019’s Colorado, will be out on December 10 through Reprise Records. It was recorded, as he said in the June post, in a barn “high in the mountains of Colorado!” hey nowthere’s a special treat for all you NYA members up on the Archives now … enjoy ☮️ pic.twitter.com/0yQ1TeZfzO — Neil Young Archives (@NeilYoungNYA) October 13, 2021 In addition to the new album, Young also has promised a slew of archival releases, beginning with the unearthing of a show in New York City ...
30 Overlooked 1991 Albums Turning 30 This Year
1991 was a transformative year for rock music, a time when alternative rock and heavy metal entered a new era of commercial dominance. Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden ushered in the explosion of Seattle grunge alongside blockbuster albums by Metallica, R.E.M. and Red Hot Chili Peppers, to say nothing of influential indie classics by My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream and Slint, or SPIN’s album of the year, Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque. But while 1991’s hits set the agenda for alternative rock for the rest of the decade, the year was brimming over with fascinating career footnotes and debuts from other promising new bands. In England, the music press was excitedly hyping up genres like shoegaze, baggy, and whatever “grebo” was, while American indie bands like fIREHOSE, the Meat Puppe...
The 100 Greatest Rock Stars Since That Was A Thing
Three of the 100 are in this picture! The Rolling Stones, in 1964, from left to right: Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Brian Jones. The problem with lists like this is they are invariably bullshit. So our prime objective was to make sure we didn’t do a bullshit list. I’m not saying we did a scientific one either. Because that isn’t possible — actually, it is, if you wanted some compilation of who sold the most records/concert tickets/has the most fans/got the most death threats, etc., and someone could come up with a bunch of very empirical metrics and create a “heat index” or something, and could deliver an actual scientific ranking! But we, um, didn’t do that. In fact we didn’t even, technically, do the “we...
The 50 Best Live Albums of the 1970s
The concert industry exploded in the 1970s, and the live album, a stopgap project once reserved for only the biggest artists, became a compulsory ritual and a pivotal moment for many artists. Live albums captured legendarily loud bands like The Who and The Ramones in their natural element. Once obscure regional acts like Bob Seger, KISS and Cheap Trick exploded into the mainstream with live albums. The Band, The Stooges, and Velvet Underground put their final gigs on vinyl. Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young (as his ongoing archive series shows), and Jackson Browne recorded entire sets of new songs onstage. The Grateful Dead released several official live albums (and continue to do so) that only made fans want to bootleg shows on their own more. With the 50th anniversary of a landmark live album, Th...
Crazy Horse Guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro Goes Inside Neil Young’s Latest Archival Release
By the time 1990 hit, Neil Young and Crazy Horse were in the midst of a resurgence, even if they didn’t realize it at the time. On the heels of the success of 1989’s Freedom, which introduced Young to a younger, harder rockin’ crowd with “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he once again joined forces with the mighty Crazy Horse to kick off the 1990s in style. In this case, the style was a heavier, harder sound. Frank “Poncho” Sampedro had been playing guitar with Young since the mid-’70s, but he knew when it came time to record and play what would become Ragged Glory that they were onto something. So much so that when the group played the first shows of that album cycle in November 1990 at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz, Sampedro can still marvel at the raw intensity and powe...
Neil Young to Release 1971 Live Album and Film
For the better part of the past few years, Neil Young has been actively tapped into his archives. Now, Young is looking back at his prime singer-songwriter years by unearthing Young Shakespeare, a set that took place at the Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Connecticut on Jan. 22, 1971. The show took place two months after the release of After the Gold Rush. The collection is billed as some of the earliest live performance footage of Young to exist. As for the set, it features very early versions of classic cuts like “Old Man,” “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “A Man Needs a Maid” and “Heart Of Gold” “Young Shakespeare is a very special event,” Young said in a statement. “[It’s] a more calm performance, without the celebratory atmosphere of Massey Hall, captured l...
Neil Young to Release Lost 1982 Album Johnny’s Island
Neil Young has been sorting through his extensive catalog over the past year, sharing archival compilations of unreleased tracks from the ’70s and albums that never saw the light of day. The prolific songwriter plans to drop a collection of ’80s material called Road of Plenty sometime this year, and most recently announced another “lost” album, Johnny’s Island. The album was recorded in 1982 at Commercial Recorders in Honolulu, Hawaii with the same team that made Trans. “‘Johnny’s Island’ a complete album now being prepared for release at NYA, includes a majority of unreleased tracks including ‘Big Pearl,’ ‘Island In The Sun,’ and ‘Love Hotel,’ plus others you may have heard before,” Young wrote on his website. “it’s a beautiful record coming to you soon.” As&...
