A little over 10 years ago, Micah Nelson‘s career took a very unexpected diversion when Neil Young asked him, his brother Lukas, and Lukas’ band Promise of the Real to back him on a series of albums, tours, and even a film that kept everyone busy until the pandemic hit.
Micah was given another life-changing opportunity last year when Young invited him to join Crazy Horse, but their tour was called off at the halfway point due to health problems within the band. Just months later, however, Young formed the Chrome Hearts with Micah, organist Spooner Oldham, Promise of the Real bassist Corey McCormick, and Promise of the Real drummer Anthony LoGerfo.
The new group released Talkin’ to the Trees earlier this year, and spent the summer gigging across Europe and North America. These were truly remarkable concerts that revisited many of the greatest songs in Young’s catalog, including “Ambulance Blues,” “Cowgirl in the Sand, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” “Like a Hurricane,” and “Powderfinger.” The Chrome Hearts were ready for any surprise that Young threw in their direction, like the latter-day CSNY obscurities “Name of Love” and “Looking Forward,” the Greendale cuts “Sun Green” and “Be the Rain,” and even his brand new anti-Trump screed “Big Crime.”
They had so much momentum that they didn’t stop even when 82-year-old Oldham cracked his pelvis on a backstage basketball court hours before a show. They simply placed him in a wheelchair, and created a makeshift nurse’s uniform for Daryl Hannah, Young’s wife, to wear every night as she wheeled him out to his spot behind the organ.
Micah stayed in great health until he got home following the Sept. 20 finale at Farm Aid 40. “When you finally stop, that’s when you get sick,” he tells Rolling Stone via Zoom from his house. “Everything catches up with you. [My wife] Alex and I both got sick. I think it was our bodies finally relaxing and not fighting off everything.”
But he’s feeling better today and ready to chat about the aborted 2024 Crazy Hour tour, the formation of the Chrome Hearts, the inspirations behind some of their surprising setlist choices, his latest EP Evil Weirdness, his new “creator-owned music and social media ecosystem” TheFlow, and the chatter about a 2026 Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts tour.
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Let’s start with the 2024 Crazy Horse tour. What was it like to rehearse with Ralph Molina and Billy Talbot and find your place with two guys who have been playing together for over 60 years?
We had already done the Roxy shows. And we had Nils [Lofgren] with us. Then we did the one-off thing in Canada, which was also really great. I’ve been playing with Neil for 10 years, not as long as those guys, of course.
But I knew all his songs. I knew what Crazy Horse does. I understood the assignment years before Neil even asked me to join the band. We didn’t really have to try to do anything. We just needed to figure out what felt right as far as grooves, and just who was going to play what.
When Nils joined last minute at the Roxy, I had already been learning Nils’ parts because we were doing Tonight’s the Night and Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere. My assignment was to be Nils and Danny Whitten. And then we got Nils, which was awesome. Neil was like, “You’re Ben Keith now.”
I had kind of learned [Keith’s pedal steel] parts, just sort of emulating them as best I could with a Telecaster and a volume pedal and bending the notes because I don’t play pedal steel guitar. Then we finally get to the Roxy, and Bill Asher was Neil’s tech. He’s a great luthier. The day before the show, he goes, “Hey, I have this lap steel I made that’s got palm benders on it, so it sounds more like a pedal steel.” So then I’m relearning everything on that. I just played this thing nonstop, and relearned the whole show as best I could.
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That is amazing.
That’s the nature of our process. If there’s some new stuff that we’ve never done or stuff that we haven’t done in a long time, we might run it for a minute at soundcheck, just to make sure you got it surrounded enough to where we can pull it off. But we don’t want to be so rehearsed that it’s too tight and it doesn’t have any room for happy accidents.
It’s the same thing I’ve ever done with Neil. Crazy Horse had even less rehearsal than the Roxy. Then we go to San Diego to start the tour many months after the Roxy. We had two nights to rehearse. Neil’s like, “I think we’ll come out and do ‘Cortez,’ and then we’ll do some other stuff, and then maybe I’ll do some acoustic stuff, and you then you guys come back out, we’ll do some other stuff.”
I was like, “That’s a great plan.” And that was it. The next night, he didn’t show up to rehearsal. We just jammed a little bit, me and Billy and Ralph. This is just to paint a picture of what rehearsing is. Unless it’s a new formation and we’ve never done these songs before, then we hash things out best we can, but never get to the point of perfection.
I saw the ’24 Crazy Hour tour as a tribute to David Briggs. I wrote about this. Nearly all the songs came from the Briggs era, and during “Scattered” Neil wound repeat his name every night. Was I right about this?
[Softly] Yeah, definitely. Neil talked about Briggs a lot. He’s singing about that guy a lot.
“Powderfinger” left me stunned every night of that tour. You added such great harmonies, and Neil really stretched out the solos. Did that just evolve organically?
It always happens organically. We didn’t rehearse that song. We know it. Neil decides we’re going to do this, and then whatever happens with it, it’s like that’s that version.
Just when the 2024 Crazy Horse tour was really starting to cook, it was called off. That must have been a real bummer since you guys had so much momentum.
It sucked. It was a huge bummer. One of those things, yeah.
The Chrome Hearts formed just a few months later. What was the spark that led to that?
I knew how bummed out Neil was. He wasn’t feeling like making music. He was really sick. He was trying to get over that, and just get his energy back. And then he was really bummed out about what happened, and how it all went down. And that just kind of drained him a lot, and doused this flame.
I was like, “Is Neil fading away? This is unacceptable.” So I’d call him a lot and check in on him and remind him how he’s not old. I was like, “Do whatever you got to do, man. Take your time. I get it. Recharge. The tank has got to fill back up, and that can take time, but whenever you want to do the thing again, just call me up and I’m ready to go.”
I kept that idea going and reminding him that he didn’t play for four years, and he felt the rust. And then it took a few years once he started again to really, really get back in the groove.
He started with the solo [Coastal] tour, which was great. I think coming out from that hiatus and doing the Crazy Horse tour, we might not have lasted as long as we did even this time. He had to rebuild his energy.
I said to him, “Cory [McCormick] and Anthony [LoGerfo] from the Real, they’re down. I’ve talked to them.” And my brother [Lukas]…when that band went on their hiatus, he had written a letter to Neil just saying, “Hey, just because I’m not playing with these guys anymore, don’t feel weird about taking them out. They’re down to play with you, and they’re ready to go. So whenever you want to do it, don’t even hesitate.”
I told Neil the same thing. I was like, “I know that Ralph isn’t in drumming shape right now, and Crazy Horse has to recharge for a while, but in the meantime, we’re here. We want to play, and we know all your songs.” It was me reminding him that he had a pretty good band for a long time before we did the Crazy Horse thing, and we’re still here.
It took a minute of sort of just micro-dosing with this idea of, “We don’t have to stop. I know you’re not done.” And then the natural organic process of seasons of inspiration, how they come around. But I was just planting those seeds so that when that started coming around, he had something to pick out of the ground and harvest.
That’s what became the Chrome Hearts. And I’m so glad he got Spooner too because Spooner brings such a vibe. He’s like a pillar of that band in so many ways. He rounds everything out, not just his playing, but just his personality. And it just feels right.
I love Crazy Horse, and that was one of the most special experiences of my life playing with those guys. But at a certain point, it’s hard to deal with if your physical body is not cooperating. I mean, you can have all the passion in the world, but it’s like if your car won’t start and run the way you need it to, it’s just challenging. And then instead of feeling super energized each time you play, it can have the opposite effect.
The Chrome Hearts tour got off to a really strong start in Europe. Fans were buzzing from the first show in Switzerland.
Yeah, the audiences really brought a lot of positive supportive energy, and it kind of took us by surprise. We were really energized by the people, and that helped. The Europe tour was challenging in a lot of ways, travel wise and routing and buses breaking down. But the shows were super energizing and the audiences…just cheering at places you’re not even expecting them to. Those kind of things, they really light the way.
The setlist was full of surprises. I never thought I’d hear “Be the Rain” or “Sun Green Again,” let alone “Looking Forward” and “Name of Love” from the CSNY reunion albums.
That’s the other cool thing about the Chrome Hearts that I think keeps Neil energized. He knows he can do anything. Whatever era of Neil or whatever deep cuts, we can learn stuff pretty quick and deliver something. And especially because we have Spooner, it’s like we can do the Harvest Moon stuff in a way that really feels like the albums, and we can go delicate and we can get loud and ragged and do everything in between.
During the first few weeks, Neil was opening the show with acoustic songs like “Sugar Mountain” or “Comes a Time.” And then in the Netherlands, out of nowhere, you opened with “Ambulance Blues” and stuck with it for the rest of the tour. What happened there?
We were in Brussels and we were playing right outside the King’s Palace. I’ll never forget this because I remember we had to push soundcheck back to honor the royal nap. The king was napping and we didn’t want to wake him up. So we’re hanging out before the show in the green room, and I had my little guitar and I was noodling around with Bert Jansch’s “Black Water Side.” And we started talking about Bert, and Neil was like, “I love Bert. He opened for me once and we did a tour together [in 2010] and he was great.”
Then Neil is like, “I totally ripped off the first part of the melody of his song, ‘The Needle of Death’ for my song ‘Ambulance Blues.’” Then I started playing “Ambulance Blues,” just kind of winging it. And we’re smoking a joint and getting loose before the show. We just started going, “Maybe we should open with that tonight.” Because it felt really good when we were in the green room, high as fuck, just jamming on it, singing it. Neil’s like, “Well, let’s just go out there and see what happens.” And I’m like, “Oh fuck” because we don’t actually know it. Thankfully he didn’t do it. We decided we’ll do it at the next show, which was Groningen.
This time we had listened to it and we’re like, “We know how to play it now.” Randy Kershaw is on fiddle on the album. I emulated his fiddle melody, and we had it down enough backstage, just kind of figuring out the arrangement and everything. We’re like, “We could pull it off.”
There’s a lot of political songs in the set, and “Ambulance Blues” sets them up since it ends with the line “I never knew a man could tell so many lies/He had a different story for every set of eyes,” referring to Nixon.
Everyone would cheer after that line. It still resonates, obviously. But there’s also the opening line of the song, “Back in the old folky days.” It’s talking about the Riverboat, the club in Toronto where he started out. It sets the tone for this rock & roll history museum of this show. And then by the end of the show we’re singing “Hey Hey, My My,” and it’s like a story.
Going right from “Ambulance Blues” into “Cowgirl in the Sand” starts the show off strong. That’s usually a song played near the end of the set.
Once we got on that, it was like, “OK, let’s just keep doing that.” And not just for the feeling of the show for the audience, but “Ambulance Blues” always put us in this kind of dream state, especially because we’d always take a hit or two of a joint right before the show. Sometimes one toke too many, and we’d go out there and you really flow. We’d always listen back and be like, “Oh, it wasn’t that slow, but it felt that slow.”
But then just for us getting into the mindset of the show, the combination of that, and then going into a song like “Cowgirl in the Sand,” which is such a trance. It helped us break on through to the other side, so to speak.
You played on the Budweiser Stage in Toronto, which caused Neil to break out “This Note’s for You” for the first time since 1997. Walk me through how that happened.
That was my idea. I had played there a few times with Neil, and every time I’m like, “What the fuck is this giant Budweiser sign?” I am so sick of playing places where there’s fuckin’ logos everywhere. It’s so gross, and just tacky.
I remember at soundcheck there was this big, big sign, “This Bud’s for You.” It was right under the Love Earth [backdrop]. I’m like, this should say, “This earth’s for you.” And Neil’s like, “Yeah, totally.” And then he made that happen. I don’t know how, but we were backstage looking out the window and… there’s water and there’s ducks and there’s people rolling around. And Neil decided this place is called the Freshwater Amphitheater. We’re like, “That’s such a better name. Let’s just call it that.”
We went out on stage and made the announcement, “Thanks everyone for coming to the Freshwater Amphitheater. We decided that’s the name of this place. It’s a great name for such a beautiful place.” It was almost like a press release as if he was the guy who owns the building and was just announcing that we’re changing the name. I think the actual guy, the promoter or whatever, was there side stage standing next to Daryl and he loved it.
It must have been surreal to stand onstage at Bethel Woods and play “Roll Another Number (For the Road).”
I remember the first time we played that place with Neil. He was talking a lot about Woodstock and how he was in a helicopter with Jimi Hendrix. I think he even said that onstage. He sang, “I’m a million miles away from the helicopter day,” and he added “with Jimi Hendrix.”
Tell me about Spooner deciding to play basketball in New Hampshire, and what happened as a result.
I guess he played in eighth grade. The backstage of this place is amazing, but the basketball hoop is on this asphalt. It’s not flat, it’s kind of rounded, and there’s cracks. I was with [my wife] Alex, we were riding bikes around, and I saw someone just swishing from the three point line and crushing it. I was like, “That’s Spooner!”
I turn around as he’s doing this spinning alley-oop, jump-shot thing, and he just came down at an angle because the road was kind of bumpy and he tripped. I saw it happen. He came down right on his hip. Thank God he didn’t hit his head. We helped him up and we made him go get an X-ray. Turns out he had cracked his pelvis in two places, and still played the show that night. I don’t know what they put him on. He said he was on an aspirin high. But he played every night. And he was in a wheelchair the rest of the tour.
There was never any talk of him leaving to recover?
No. He’d have to fly ahead sometimes because he couldn’t be on the bus. Our assistant tour manager, Corey Carlson, really stepped up and drove him in a van to the next place, and made it happen. Then at some point [Oldham’s] daughter Roxanne was there and helping too. He wasn’t going to go. He was not talking about leaving at all.
Tell me how Neil’s new anti-Trump song “Big Crime” came about.
Neil showed up at soundcheck in Chicago. He’s like, “I got this new song.” And he just starts playing it, and we join in, we play it four or five times. After soundcheck, like 10 minutes later, someone texts me, “I just heard the new song, ‘Big Crime.’ This is awesome.” I was like, “What are you talking about?” “Neil posted it. He put it out, take five from soundcheck.”
He records everything. I thought it sounded pretty good. Then we played it that night for the first time. And everybody in the crowd already knew it. They’re singing along. It’s the most Neil thing ever.
A lot of fans followed the tour around. Did you see the same faces on the rail most every night?
Oh yeah. You start to recognize all the Rusties that are at every show. Some of them were in their twenties. It wasn’t just a bunch of old dudes in flannel shirts. We love those guys, of course, they’re fantastic. But especially in Europe, you had such a mix of different types of people, different age groups, and they’d be at every show.
What happened in Bend, Oregon, when the setlist got totally scrambled?
We were all kind of scrambled that day. The Charlie Kirk thing happened that morning and we were all like, “What the fuck?”… It just put this weird, surreal kind of thing on everything.
We never just play the set because that’s the set. It’s like, “Well, if we don’t feel like doing that, it’s not going to be very good if we’re just forcing it.” That happened a bunch. We were in Norway in Bergen, and usually the encore would be “Rockin’ in the Free World,” but … it wasn’t the feeling right then to do that. It would’ve felt forced. Neil looks at me: “What else can we do?” And I was like, “Let’s do ‘Cortez.’” And he was like, “Yes.” Because that was the feeling of the moment.
So it was the same thing with Bend. I remember walking onto the stage and Neil was like, “I have no idea what’s going to happen tonight. I have no idea what we’re going to do.”
Do you think there will be a live album or movie from the tour?
Everything’s taped and filmed. So if Neil wanted to put out a movie, he could do that.
How did your new EP Evil Weirdness come about?
I was stuck in this record contract with somebody I didn’t like, and I owed them a third album. I made a bunch of songs that were for no reason other than to just finish. And the funny thing is, usually when I’m making an album for nobody, I inadvertently make an album that people really like or that I like.
I tried to make a bunch of songs that just made me laugh, that I felt were silly: “OK, here’s the album, now leave me the fuck alone.” And I was able to, thanks to the Crazy Horse gig, actually end up buying back my music from this entity.
So then I had this record of all these songs and some were actually pretty good and not just stupid joke songs or half-baked ideas. “Cockblocked by the Universe” is one of them. I had the Flaming Lips play on it with me, Steven Drozd. He played some synths and stuff. But I honestly made this record like three years ago. I haven’t put anything out for a couple of reasons: I was dealing with all that bullshit with the old label, ex-manager and everything. But also because I’ve been building a new platform with my business partner, Mike Hanuschik, who’s really the architect of it.
It’s called TheFlow, and it’s a creator-owned ecosystem that integrates music, streaming, social media, and commerce all in one platform. We’re going to be launching it on 11/11, and I’m going to put out the Evil Weirdness EP exclusively on TheFlow.
That’s a really big idea.
I think it’ll change some things. It’s at last a place for everyone who’s an independent creator who doesn’t need all of the middlemen and the extractive models of the old system that’s been dead for a while. The independent creators have become over the last couple of decades the most powerful collective on earth. And now we will have a platform that we can bring our ecosystem of fans to, and they can support us and we can support them directly, and we don’t have to deal with all the other crap.
Are you booking any solo shows?
No, I’ve been pretty busy working on TheFlow and working with Neil, and that’s taken up most of my time. I’m always writing songs and recording stuff. I made a whole new record as well with Daniel Lanois. We’re figuring out how we want to show up with that record, and with these kind of changing industry dynamics, seeing what makes the most sense.
As far as shows, Neil says he wants to work next year. Planning on doing the Luck Reunion, probably with Lanois again. That was really fun last year, and maybe our record will be out by then and we’ll do some shows together.
Do you think Neil will play in the States again next year? Overseas?
It’s really hard to say. We’ve talked about Japan. We’ve talked about we could do Europe again, and do places that we didn’t even hit last time, all new places. Same with the States. We’ve talked about a Gulf of Mexico tour. That would be fun. We didn’t really hit that region last time. There’s a lot of fans down there.
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Do you think Crazy Horse is ever going to play again or is Ralph just not up for it?
It’s hard to say. I didn’t realize how unhealthy he was when we were on tour. I know that drums are probably the least forgiving instrument when you’re getting older to keep up a certain level of power behind your playing. So I don’t know how much of it was that, and how much of it was just the fact that he was not well. But he’s a tough dude. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came back and was healthy and feeling like he could do it again. I can’t really say for sure. It’s really up to those guys and up to Neil.
I really hope another Chrome Hearts tour happens next year. This one was really special.
My feeling is, barring disaster… Neil’s in the zone, he’s riding the wave and he wants to keep riding it. So yeah, look out for us.
