Neil Young's 50th album Second Song pairs new songs with 1960s tapes

Neil Young's fiftieth studio album arrives on 18 September, and it opens a door onto a recording he made in a friend's attic in Toronto around 1964. Second Song puts five new songs next to two he wrote as a teenager, drawn from the archive he has kept meticulously for six decades.

One of the old songs is Casting Me Away from You, cut with Comrie Smith in that attic and later reworked into the instrumental The Emperor of Wyoming, which opened his 1969 debut. The other is I'll Love You Forever, recorded in 1964 for his high school girlfriend, who he told NPR was his first real love. He says the band copied the original arrangement rather than modernising it.

The method was simple. Young told NPR he mostly writes what is on his mind first thing, getting the melody down on a cassette recorder the first time he plays it, mistakes included, then writing words connected to whatever happened in the previous day. He describes himself as a vehicle for the material rather than its author, which is how he explains the darker turns on a song like Soon I Might Be Going.

The record was made on tape. Sessions ran at Rick Rubin's Shangri-La studio in Malibu with Young's band the Chrome Hearts, produced by Lou Adler alongside the Volume Dealers, the pairing of engineer Niko Bolas and Young himself. He is blunt about why analog matters to him: he calls it museum-quality sound and says what is made now is a simulation built from waveform analysis rather than a recording.

That argument runs straight into his views on artificial intelligence and streaming, both of which he dismisses on the same grounds. He told NPR that AI has no soul in it, and that the biggest gift of his career is that all his work was done before it arrived. Asked about streaming, he answered that the quality is his main objection and that the convenience mostly benefits the people presenting the music rather than the people who made it.

For an album about the passage of time, the structure does the arguing. Young sings on the title track about walking slowly through the smokey leaves of time, and the sequence puts a song written at eighteen beside one written at eighty without flagging which is which. He says he has spent six decades experimenting without a plan, and that he does not know how anyone could do it by following a playbook.

Second Song joins the rest of the autumn schedule on the release calendar. Our earlier rock coverage includes the album announcement with the Chrome Hearts and the teenage-era song he revived for it.