Neil Young

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Zuma (1975/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 36:31 minutes | 1,27 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Zuma is the seventh studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released on Reprise Records in 1975. Co-credited to Crazy Horse, it includes “Cortez the Killer,” one of Young’s best-known songs. It peaked at #25 on the Billboard 200, and has been certified a gold record by the RIAA.

(more…)

Neil Young – Way Down In The Rust Bucket (Live) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 02:24:14 minutes | 5,26 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Between vintage concert albums and recent ones excavated from archival tapes, it’s become easier than ever to track the onstage history of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. We can now hear Young and the band in its early, funky, Danny Whitten days (Live at the Fillmore East), breaking in Whitten replacement Frank “Poncho” Sampedro (the often breathtaking Japanese 1976 show included on last year’s Archives Volume II), thundering in arenas not long after that (Live Rust), flexing their newly revitalized muscles in the early Nineties (Weld), and showing the flannel-shirt crowd a thing or two about endurance and longevity in the mid Nineties (Year of the Horse).

Next to those projects, Way Down in the Rust Bucket isn’t especially revelatory, nor does it shed new rays of gleaming light on an under-documented part of the saga. To warm up for the 1991 arena tour heard on Weld and its noise-mayhem sibling Arc, the band played two club shows in Northern California, and this long-bootlegged tape, from the 800-seat Catalyst in the fall of 1990, documents one of them. (Young must have a fondness for that venue, since he had also played there, somewhat incognito with the Ducks, over a decade before.)

(more…)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Rust Never Sleeps (1979/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 38:24 minutes | 1,37 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Rust Never Sleeps is an album by Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young and American band Crazy Horse. Most of the album was recorded live, then overdubbed in the studio. Young used the title “rust never sleeps” as a concept for his tour with Crazy Horse to avoid artistic complacency and try more progressive, theatrical approaches to performing live.

(more…)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Psychedelic Pill (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:27:57 minutes | 1,76 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Psychedelic Pill is the 32nd studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young, released on October 30, 2012. It is the second collaboration between Young and Crazy Horse released in 2012 (the first being Americana) and their first original work together since the Greendale album and tour in 2003 and 2004. The album was streamed on Young’s website on October 24, 2012, and leaked onto the Internet the same day.

(more…)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Live Rust (1979/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:15:53 minutes | 2,70 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

All the kudos Neil Young earned for Rust Never Sleeps he lost for Live Rust, the double-LP live album released four months later. Live Rust was the soundtrack to Young’s concert film Rust Never Sleeps (he had wanted to give it that title, but Reprise vetoed the idea, fearing confusion with the earlier album), and likewise was recorded October 22, 1978, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. But much of the Rust Never Sleeps album had been recorded on the same tour, and Live Rust repeated four songs from that disc; besides, since Young had released the career retrospective Decade in 1977, critics felt he was unfairly recycling his older material and repeating his new material. In retrospect, however, Live Rust, now a single 74-minute CD, comes off as an excellent Neil Young live album and career summary, starting with the early song “Sugar Mountain” and running through then-new songs like “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and “Powderfinger.” Young is effective in both his acoustic folksinger and hard-rocking Crazy Horse bandleader modes. The various distractions of the concert itself and the film, such as the pretentious props and cowled roadies, are absent, and what’s left is a terrific Neil Young concert recording. –William Ruhlmann

(more…)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Live at the Fillmore East 1970 (2006/2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 43:17 minutes | 924 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

The first release from Neil Young’s long awaited Archive Performance series is Live At The Fillmore East. In 2006, Neil Young delivered another hit album, Living With War, and toured with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Thirty-six years earlier, in 1970, Young toured with CSN&Y and released his platinum album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, after which he performed a series of shows at New York City’s then-new Fillmore East with his band Crazy Horse. That concert finally made its official debut in the annals of rock history with Live At The Fillmore East, and the circle is unbroken for one of rock’s greatest singer-songwriters. The original release charted Top 15 and three Grammy® nominations, including for Best Rock Album.

(more…)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Greendale (Remastered) (2003/2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:18:11 minutes | 2,70 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Greendale, a concept album focusing on a small town family’s troubles has received much attention. The common theme throughout provides a flow and a unique song unity. The sound and fresh approach to this album has made it a great comeback for Young.

(more…)

Neil Young with Crazy Horse – Barn (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 42:51 minutes | 1,62 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

It’s amazing how Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s collaborations can seem like a lost moment in time, captured in amber. You feel it right away on their 19th studio album with opener “Song of the Seasons”: that evocative harmonica, Nils Lofgren’s sentimental accordion, Young’s voice wavering on the last half of the line “We’re so together in the way that we feel/ That we could wind up anywhere;” it’s as easy as a worn suede glove and nostalgic for a moment you don’t even know. Then again, that moment might just be the classic Harvest Moon, on which this sweet song (all about connection, a running theme on Barn) would have been right at home. It helps that Young goes all in. He has played with two-thirds of the band since 1968, and the album was recorded in circumstances about as romantic as you can get: “under a full moon, in a restored off-grid 19th century barn high up in the Rockies,” the press release details. Goosed by ragged guitar, “Heading West” gets dreamy about childhood and how your parents’ decisions change you. “Shape of You” is an out-and-out love song (“You changed my life for the better/ Wore my love like your favorite sweater”), an inspired blues roll warmed up by Billy Talbot’s lumbering bass and Young’s right-hand piano shimmy. Ditto “Tumblin’ Thru the Years,” which sounds more like it’s about the band’s connection than any romantic love, and is just about as pretty as anything Young’s ever written. It’s not all mellow and cozy, though. “Human Race” is a spitfire stomp, complete with searing guitar solo, and you can feel the frustration of Young, who has been warning of climate change for decades: “Today no one cares/ Tomorrow no one shares/ Because they all will be gone but the children.” (A ghostly chorus drifts in to chant the line “Children of the fires and floods.”) The band adopts a blues rag to chronicle Western dependence on petroleum for “Change Ain’t Never Gonna.” As Young looks both backward and forward at the same time, he’s aware it sounds familiar—but hopeful it might finally sink in. “I been singin’ this way for so long/ Riding through this storm,” he reminds us on “Welcome Back,” later warning: “Before the world has closed us in/ We might still allow for changes to be made … Before your computer turns on you.” “Don’t Forget Love” closes the album on a note of genuine hope, Young reassuringly singing, “When you’re takin’ and you could be givin’/ When you’re dyin’ and you could be livin’/ Don’t forget love.” – Shelly Ridenour

(more…)

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Americana (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 56:54 minutes | 1,89 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Americana is the 31st studio album by Canadian / American musician Neil Young, released on June 5, 2012. The album was Young’s first collaboration with backing band Crazy Horse since their 2003 album, Greendale, and its associated tour.

(more…)

Neil Young – Young Shakespeare (Live) (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 50:30 minutes | 1,54 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Young Shakespeare is a live album and concert film from American-Canadian folk rock musician Neil Young recorded in 1971, and released on March 26, 2021. Recorded three days after Live at Massey Hall 1971, during the Journey Through the Past Solo Tour.

(more…)

Neil Young – Who’s Gonna Stand Up? (2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 16:56 minutes | 630 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

During Neil Young‘s recent tour, the rocker and Crazy Horse have been road-testing a new track titled “Who’s Gonna Stand Up?,” an environmental activism anthem that Young has since used to lend support to the anti-lobbyist documentary Under the Influence, Farm Aid and the People’s Climate March in New York.

(more…)

Neil Young – Where The Buffalo Roam (Remastered) (1980/2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 09:31 minutes | 198 MB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Geffen

Young’s next foray into the world of the soundtrack was an even scrappier affair. He provided the incidental music to Where The Buffalo Roam, the 1980 flick in which Bill Murray played the gun-totin’, drug-poppin’ gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. Its soundtrack features classic tracks by Hendrix, Dylan and others but, in true gonzo spirit, Young’s seven contributions add up to less than 10 minutes of music and mainly consist of him playing creaky variations of “Home On The Range.”

(more…)

Neil Young – Trans (1983/2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 40:06 minutes | 1,38 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Geffen

When it was released, Trans was Neil Young’s most baffling album. He had employed a vocoder to synthesize his voice on five of the album’s nine tracks, resulting in disembodied singing, the lyrics nearly impossible to decipher without the lyric sheet. And even when you read the words, “Computer Age,” “We R in Control,” “Transformer Man,” “Computer Cowboy,” and “Sample and Hold” seemed like a vague mishmash of high-tech jargon. Later, Young would reveal that some of the songs expressed a theme of attempted communication with his disabled son, and in that context, lines like “I stand by you” and “So many things still left to do/But we haven’t made it yet” seemed clearer. But the vocoder, which robbed Young’s voice of its dynamics and phrasing, still kept the songs from being as moving as they were intended to be. And despite the crisp dance beats and synthesizers, the music sounded less like new Kraftwerk than like old Devo. A few more conventional Young songs (left over from an earlier rejected album) seemed out of place. Trans had a few good songs, notably “Sample and Hold” (which seemed to be about a computer dating service for robots), a remake of “Mr. Soul,” and “Like an Inca” (an intended cross between “Like a Hurricane” and “Cortez the Killer”?), but on the whole it was an idea that just didn’t work. – William Ruhlmann

(more…)

Neil Young – Tonight’s The Night (1975/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 44:53 minutes | 1,51 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Recorded: August–September 1973 at Studio Instrument Rentals, Hollywood, CA (except “Come On Baby”: Fillmore East, NYC, March 1970; “Lookout Joe”: Broken Arrow Ranch, December 1972 and “Borrowed Tune”: Broken Arrow Ranch, December 1973)

Tonight’s the Night is the sixth studio album by Canadian musician Neil Young, released in 1975 on Reprise Records, catalogue MS 2221. It was recorded in 1973 (most of it on a single day, August 26), its release delayed for two years. It peaked at #25 on the Billboard 200. In 2003, the album was ranked number 331 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

(more…)

Neil Young – Time Fades Away (1973/2014)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 34:16 minutes | 1,18 GB | Genre: Rock
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Reprise

Time Fades Away is a 1973 live album by Neil Young, consisting of previously unreleased material. It was Young’s first live album, and was recorded with The Stray Gators on the tour following 1972’s highly successful Harvest and has not been reissued on CD due to Young’s dissatisfaction with that particular series of concerts.

(more…)