Days before Donald Trump takes the Oath of Office, Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts have dropped a fiery new song, “Big Change.” “Big change is comin,’” Young sings. “You know what you gotta do/Big change is comin’/Could be bad and it could be good.”
The song is the first preview of Talkin’ To The Trees, the upcoming LP by Young and the Chrome Hearts that was recorded last year at Shangri-La studios in Malibu, California, with producer Lou Adler. It’s the first Young album since 2022’s World Record, and came after a two-year period where he didn’t write any new songs.
In a post on the Neil Young Archives, Young’s longtime engineer John Hanlon wrote that he first heard about the album in mid-October while driving through a remote part of New England near the Canadian border.
“A mile or so from losing all cell reception, the phone rings,” he wrote. “Neil is on the other end. ‘Hey John, how are you? Great. Sounds like a blast. Hey, I want to record with the guys at Shangri-La. I got some new songs. This album is going to be real different.’” Hanlon asked when he wanted to start work. “He answered without skipping a beat,” he wrote. ‘”Well, I was thinking next weekend or starting on Sunday. Oh, by the way, when are you back?’”
Hanlon pulled into a gas station and started making furious phone calls. And once he reached his lake cabin, he mapped out the entire plan. “Neil simply said to be ready for anything and specified that he wanted to record all analog on [a] 16-track tape machine,” he wrote. “No digital! Tape was ordered, outboard gear obtained, studio time booked. I made the final preplanning calls from the airport ahead of my long flights home.”
With Lou Adler behind the board alongside Hanlon, Young and the Chrome Hearts – featuring Spooner Oldham on organ, Micah Nelson on guitar, Anthony Logerfo on drums, and Corey McCormick on bass – cut seven songs in just two days. They came back two-and-a-half weeks later to cut three more tunes, finishing off the album.
“In my humble opinion, this is shaping up to be a completely unique and soulfully introspective album of songs,” Hanlon wrote, “that run the gamut from a palette of beautiful acoustic style pastels to in-your-face loud, irreverent rock ‘n roll paint splatter on the canvas in the vein of a Jackson Pollack painting.”
Young and the Chrome Hearts are playing dates Europe and the U.S. later this year. As of now, the only confirmed stop is a headlining slot at Glastonbury in late June. In typical Young fashion, he announced that he was backing out of Glastonbury before the festival even indicated he was a part of it, labeling it a “corporate turn-off.” He reversed himself two days later.
