Neil Young Is Preparing His Legacy With A Stack Of Archive Releases This Year

Neil Young is at full tilt preparing new editions from his archive series because he says he doesn’t want to leave it to someone else after he is gone.

So the pandemic has given me the rare gift of focus – a strange gift for me -the opportunity to focus on what I have done and organize it for the music lovers out there who deserve to hear it my way. Not done by someone else after I’m gone. For this I am truly thankful.

Neil Young fans will have Volume III of the archives box delivered in the first half of 2022, just one year after the release of Volume II which came 12 years after Volume 1.

Volume III will be mastered more like Volume 1 with a Blu-Ray version included. The disappointing Volume II came as audio only and with a completely different flimsy and cheap looking package the Volume 1 box set.

Volume 3 will cover Young’s 1976 to 1990 period covering Comes A Time, Rust Never Sleeps through to the Old Ways, Trans and Everybody’s Rocking albums and finishing off around Freedom.

Over this time Young recorded the unreleased ‘Toast’ with Crazy Horse, ‘Johnny’s Island’, ‘Oceanside-Countryside’, ‘Give It To The Wind Orchestra’ and ‘The Boarding House’.

He also says he has rebuilt the ‘Old Ways’ album “better than the released one by a lifetime. With the time to listen to all the takes from everywhere during the period, we made a great and soulful record which hardly resembled the released one. I’m so glad we did that”.

Volume III may also include a Trans Animated Movie and a live album from the ‘Freedom’ era.

New Neil Young films from the archives include:

‘CRAZY HORSE WORLD TOUR 1976’ Tokyo Budokan and London Odeon Hammersmith,
BOARDING HOUSE by Bernard Shakey, 1978
RUST NEVER SLEEPS by Bernard Shakey, 1979
HUMAN HIGHWAY by Bernard Shakey and Dean Stockwell, 1982
TRANS ANIMATED MOVIE by Micah Nelson and Neil Young, current
BERLIN by Michael Lindsay Hogg, 1982
SOLO TRANS by Hal Ashby, 1984
IN A RUSTED OUT GARAGE by LA JOHNSON and B SHAKEY, 1986
MUDDY TRACK 1987 B Shakey

Young says Volume III may be 12 CDs and 10 DVDs. ‘Toast’ will be released ahead of time as a single album and ‘Noise and Flowers’ recorded with Promise of the Real will be out before the end of 2021.