Back in April, Neil Young revealed that his upcoming album Second Song will feature new recordings of at least a couple of songs he wrote as a teenager in the mid-Sixties, while still gigging around Canada with his high-school band the Squires. But he didn’t share their titles until a Zoom Q&A on July 8 with Patron-level subscribers of the Neil Young Archives.
The first one is “I’ll Love You Forever,” which he recorded with the Squires at the radio station CJLX in Fort William, Ontario, on Nov. 23, 1964. “A DJ on the radio station there was looking to get me a record, and get a record on the air since I never had a record,” Young said on the Zoom. “So we recorded it, and we finished it.”
The tender love ballad, featuring Ken Koblun on bass and Bill Edmondson on drums, was unreleased until 2009 when it appeared on the first disc of the Neil Young Archives Vol. 1: 1963–1972 box set. “I redid it, I sang it again,” Young said on the Zoom, referring to the recent Second Song recording sessions with the Chrome Hearts. “We used the original recording, played it for the guys once, so they heard the song, and then we put that one down. It felt really good. The Chrome Hearts sounded great playing it.”
Next up was “Casting Me Away From You,” which was recorded Oct. 15, 1965, in the Toronto home of Young’s close friend Comrie Smith, just as the Squires were coming to an end. “Comrie Smith was a high-school buddy of mine,” Young said on the Zoom.” We did it in his attic. I had some kind of recording of that. I never forgot the song. It was already in my head.”
“Casting Me Away From You” was ringing around Young’s head in 1968 when he recorded the instrumental track “The Emperor of Wyoming,” which kicks off his self-titled debut LP. The two songs share a melody. He also used the line “we found things to do in stormy weather” on 1976’s “Long May You Run.” The original recording of “Casting Me Away From You” wasn’t heard by the public until Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 was released in 2009.
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Earlier in the Zoom, Young said that many of the new songs on Second Song are “quite long” because they have several verses, not because of extended instrumental passages. “They’re just a rambling set of songs that all came to me while I was in Colorado around the turn of the year,” he said. “Then I came back here to Malibu and recorded them all, and it went great. I had five songs. It went so fast that we finished recording four of them the first day. Then we recorded one more song the next day. And then we didn’t have any more songs. There we are two days into it, and we’ve got seven days ready to go. I said to the guys, ‘Well, let me think, and I’ll see if there’s any other songs that come to me, just from anywhere, and that I haven’t recorded, and we’ll see what happens.’ And so I went looking in the archives, way back in the Sixties.”
“Those two old songs, they just seemed to fit with the new ones,” Young continued. “There was no concept. [The album] is a couple of old songs, and lot of new ones. With the length of the new songs, we could have knocked out the old songs and still had an album, for length. But we went ahead and added the two old songs. That’s what this album is about. It’s about the new songs vs the old songs. The old songs offer some sort of reflection and juxtaposition or something. They all seem to fit together.”
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Young originally planned on touring Europe this summer with special guest Elvis Costello, but he pulled the dates in February. “Everything is OK,” he told fans. “Just needed a break. Listening to my body.”
His only live appearance of the year took place May 22 when he played a surprise four-song acoustic set at David Suzuki’s 90th birthday concert in Vancouver. He’s scheduled to perform at Farm Aid on Sept. 26 at the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater in Virginia Beach, Virginia. “I’m probably going to play a show or so, maybe in front of Farm Aid to warm up, Young said on the Zoom, “and that’ll be enough.”
