{"id":481425,"date":"2019-01-28T08:02:33","date_gmt":"2019-01-28T15:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=784773"},"modified":"2019-01-28T08:02:33","modified_gmt":"2019-01-28T15:02:33","slug":"neil-young-on-his-archives-website-future-releases-and-crazy-horses-return","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/neil-young-on-his-archives-website-future-releases-and-crazy-horses-return\/","title":{"rendered":"Neil Young on His Archives Website, Future Releases and Crazy Horse\u2019s Return"},"content":{"rendered":"<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/neil-young-q-and-a.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\"\/><\/div>\n<p>In November of 1991, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/t\/neil-young\/\" id=\"auto-tag_neil-young\" data-tag=\"neil-young\">Neil Young<\/a> told <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> about his ambitious plans to dig into his archives and release \u201ceighteen to twenty albums\u2019 worth of unreleased material\u201d in some form or another. \u201cWe can\u2019t put it all out,\u201d Young said. \u201cBut it will be like an archive. There will be a lot of detail, things you wouldn\u2019t usually find on a box set. I\u2019m not so much concerned with how or when it comes out but that it\u2019s in order. I want to do that myself. And I only have so much time to do these things.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Well, it took him nearly 30 years, but Young\u2019s vision has finally been realized on the revolutionary <a href=\"https:\/\/www.neilyoungarchives.com\/#\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Neil Young Archives<\/a> interactive website and app. Not only can fans hear every song in his catalog with significantly better sound quality than the offerings on Spotify and Apple Music thanks to the Xstream streaming platform (which utilizes a 192-kHz\/24-bit sample rate), but there\u2019s also an interactive timeline packed with unseen video, photographs and lyric manuscripts from throughout his entire career. There\u2019s also the <em>Times-Contrarian<\/em> newspaper where Young and his team post regular news updates and respond to fan letters.<\/p>\n<p>The Neil Young Archives was initially free and anyone can still browse through it, but late last year he opened it up for paid subscribers ($1.99 a month\/$19.99 a year) that allows complete access to the site and exclusive early access to concert tickets for all of his shows. Subscribers can also watch livestreams of select concerts and watch vintage Neil Young movies in the Hearse Theater, including films like <em>Muddy Track<\/em> and <em>Solo Trans<\/em>\u00a0that are practically impossible to find anywhere else.<\/p>\n<p>Young called up <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> while traveling to Minneapolis to play a series of solo acoustic dates to chat about the Archives, his recent theater shows, the next historic concert recording he plans to release, the upcoming Winnipeg gigs with Crazy Horse and what the future might hold for him.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Let\u2019s start with the history of the Archives. What gave you the idea to turn it into an interactive website?<\/strong><br \/>Well, I tried to do in on Blu-ray, years ago [in 2007]. Blu-ray was the only way that I could get the sound quality that I wanted and it made it possible to do some other stuff, like show the artwork and other information. At the time, you couldn\u2019t have music on a website since it sounded like crap. I didn\u2019t want my music to be preserved like that. And so we decided to develop a music service that could do hi-res and we ended up with the first streaming service in hi-res, which is pretty cool. It\u2019s on equal playing field with Spotify and Apple, whatever all the other ones are. You listen to it through your phone, it\u2019s the same as that, and people automatically are just saying, \u201cHey, wow! This is a lot better!\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>What was the hardest part about turning the website into a reality?<\/strong><br \/>We spent a lot of time developing the interface for the Blu-ray, but we couldn\u2019t use the internet until we developed the hi-res streaming aspect of it. That gave us an open door where we could do what we wanted. I started the Archives when I was making <em>Ragged Glory<\/em> [in 1990]. We worked on it for a long time to get all this stuff together because we keep everything. We kept track of everything. It\u2019s just kind of a nerdy thing that I do.<\/p>\n<p>The technology just kept getting better and better. The future is just incredible for the sound of music. We\u2019ve got 5G coming. But even without 5G, I\u2019ve got it working. You can have high-resolution sound over the internet and people are going, \u201cWell, this really sounds different! It sounds good!\u201d I get all these letters saying that. It\u2019s very gratifying after beating my head against the wall with Pono and trying to make everything happen and knowing that the sound could be better and having to put up with these big-nosed people and their blogs who have absolutely no idea what they\u2019re talking about. I was attacked by everybody for trying to make music sound better.<\/p>\n<p>It felt really great to be able to develop the technology now where you don\u2019t need anything special. You don\u2019t need a Blu-ray player. You don\u2019t need anything. You can hear this right off your iPhone and eventually off your Android product as well.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/4RKBUG9VLFU?version=3&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;autohide=2&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\">[embedded content]<\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Are you tempted to remove your music from Spotify and Apple so people are forced to hear it in high quality on the Archives?<\/strong><br \/>I already did that, and then I put it back on. That\u2019s where people get music. I want people to hear music music no matter what they have to get through to do it. I\u2019m just trying to make it so they hear a lot more and enjoy it a lot more, but sell it for the same price because music is music. It\u2019s not like hi-res should cost twice as much as the crap we listen to now. It should cost the same amount. It should be a choice of the people. What do you want? If MP3s are great, keep the MP3. Fine.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you ever get frustrated that most people don\u2019t care about the sound quality of their music and they\u2019re happy with Spotify or even YouTube?<\/strong><br \/>You know, I\u2019m definitely not frustrated with those people. What I\u2019m frustrated with is a situation where the music got downgraded in quality, starting with the CD and going down further from there to the MP3 and streaming. It got downgraded so far that what you\u2019re listening to is like Fisher-Price quality. You\u2019re listening to a toy. It didn\u2019t used to be that way. When I started making music, records sounded like God. It was great to give somebody a record, because it sounded great. It\u2019s something that got right into your soul. Hi-res is the digital version of a good vinyl record. It\u2019s better for the art.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not upset about people who don\u2019t seem to care, because why would they care? Tell me. What would they be comparing it to? They\u2019ve never heard the other thing. That\u2019s the way I look at it.<\/p>\n<p>The people at the music services today have a responsibility to the arts. Apple has a responsibility to the world to make sure that that all of the things that made Apple great are not just stomped on and forgotten like sound quality. These things are very important to the enjoyment of the art. It\u2019s like having a Picasso show and finding out they\u2019re all Xeroxes. That\u2019s what Spotify is. You can recognize that it\u2019s maybe the Picasso that you like, but then you\u2019re like, \u201cOK, next.\u201d You\u2019re not lost in it. You\u2019ve got to feel the music.<\/p>\n<p>This whole thing is about feeling the music. That\u2019s what the technology is doing. That\u2019s what our technology does and what people are hearing. It\u2019s got to be the 21st century. You shouldn\u2019t have worse sound than in the 20th century.<\/p>\n<p><strong>How will the Archives grow and expand in the coming months and years?<\/strong><br \/>Probably based on me just never wanting to give up. We\u2019re going to do everything we can to make quality available to people who want it. We have a lot of things in there. You\u2019ve probably been around it, but it\u2019s not a normal situation. You\u2019re really walking around a museum or an archive, and you\u2019re really walking around inside file cabinets and seeing things and finding things and discovering the interrelationships of things. There are handwritten lyrics and video that didn\u2019t get released. They are portions of things that were great, but weren\u2019t long enough to be released. It\u2019s the history around each one of the creations. It\u2019s the ambience of the times, of the music. It\u2019s a project and I really wanted people to hear it.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the real reason I\u2019m still here. It\u2019s because I made songs that peopled liked hearing. I want to make it so today\u2019s artists can get heard the way I got heard. There are some great singer-songwriters. There\u2019s great artists of all kinds, no matter what kind of music you like. They\u2019re all there. Great-sounding music sound is going to make them all able to stretch out more and really live the dream and then give it to everybody. It\u2019s a no-brainer. If a hippie from the Sixties can invent something that plays hi-res like a streaming service over your phone, and you really can tell the different between that and what you\u2019re getting at these other things, then why not do it? It\u2019s the 21st century. Look at all the other stuff we\u2019ve done. You think we could do something like that. It would be nice. The entire world would be listening to better sound. Can you imagine that?<\/p>\n<p><strong>In the Archives timeline I see placeholders for <em>Chrome Dreams,<\/em>\u00a0<em>Homegrown<\/em>, <em>Boarding House<\/em>, <em>Toast<\/em> and a bunch of other unreleased albums. Are those all eventually going to be made available there?<\/strong><br \/>We\u2019re actively completing and going through the post-production stages of mastering several of those right now. Each one takes time, because it\u2019s a special thing, and we\u2019ve taken real care to make sure that we\u2019ve got our original tracks that were on it and the highest quality before we put it together. We\u2019ve got all the artwork that was created for it back then. Our goal is to be able to put out three or four of them a year because we have so many of them. We want to give each one its due. It has to have a moment for itself, because that\u2019s the way it was created.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Will <em>Archives II<\/em> ever come out as a physical set or will the whole thing be digital?<\/strong><br \/><em>Archives II<\/em> is just a regular set of CDs that you can listen to and it will have a book with it that is very cool. It\u2019s got a lot of great pictures. It\u2019s a beautiful book. If you like owning your music and taking it with you on CD, it\u2019s good. I really, myself, like the files now. The files, you\u2019re not limited to the electronics of the CD player. You can play back the whole file, really hear what we heard in the studio. That\u2019s what I want.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s weird. The deluxe part of this thing used to be the Blu-ray, [and] we all know that those box sets can be fantastic, but they\u2019re really a relic. They\u2019re from another time. Hello. Goodbye! This is what we\u2019re doing now. It\u2019s the highest res sound. It\u2019s got all of this interactive stuff. The timeline goes for 50 years. On the Blu-ray, you have to stop every 10 years or so and put in another disc. It was really primitive. This is much, much better.<\/p>\n<p>When you play our files streamed by NYA through Bluetooth into speakers, it definitely sounds much better than what you\u2019re used to hearing with Bluetooth. The reason is that we\u2019re giving people the real file. We\u2019re not giving them some dummied down version that\u2019s five percent or 10 percent of what we originally made so that people can save space on their devices. We\u2019re giving you the whole thing because memory is not a problem. Streaming made that a non-issue. We\u2019re just going forward.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/9xCJLH7d6WQ?version=3&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;autohide=2&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\">[embedded content]<\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>You\u2019ve been playing a lot of concerts recently for your Archives subscribers. What have those been like for you?<\/strong><br \/>They\u2019re great. I\u2019m on the road going to the theater tour now. The theater tour is just a little twist on what I [normally] do. I just want to play the theaters and forget about the towns. It\u2019s great to be in town, but I don\u2019t \u2026 In Minneapolis there are four incredible theaters. So, I\u2019m playing every one of them. I just go from one theater to the next. And these theaters are beautiful. They\u2019re the stars of the show. They\u2019re, like, built in the Twenties and Thirties. These place are almost 100 years old. This is like history. These are palaces for art. This is a creation. It\u2019s vaudeville. It\u2019s early movies.<\/p>\n<p>If you go to these places and share the experience with NYA, people who love the hi-res music and love the archives and love picking up this stuff, it\u2019s my way of giving them this. It\u2019s a gesture toward them for supporting me, in some cases, 50 years. I can\u2019t help that I\u2019m 73. That\u2019s the way it rolls. I still like what I\u2019m doing and I wanted to do it better. I don\u2019t want to leave behind going, \u201cI didn\u2019t try to make it better.\u201d The art form right now is being stifled by the technology. We are living with a blindness for technology when it comes to audio. It\u2019s a disgrace that a company as big as Apple would relegate their entire audience to listen to this kind of quality like it was good.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Do you think your days of going out and playing arenas and being on the road for months on end are over? Do you just want to keep doing these little theater runs and the occasional festival?<\/strong><br \/>I don\u2019t know anything. I just feel what I\u2019m doing here. These tours are great for me. It\u2019s a moving target. Everything changes all the time. The only box I can put myself in is if I say, \u201cWell, I don\u2019t want to do that\u201d or \u201cI don\u2019t want to do that.\u201d I want to do whatever I feel like doing. Because I\u2019ve got the songs, I can go out and rock and I can have a good time. If people want to hear me, they can come out and hear me. I like doing those big shows every once in a while, but if we\u2019re doing a big show we also do five or six supporting shows before. When we get there, we\u2019ve been playing, we\u2019re on fire. We walk onstage, we\u2019re loose. That\u2019s what everyone deserves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Are you looking forward to these Crazy Horse shows in Winnipeg coming up?<\/strong><br \/>Yeah. That\u2019ll be fun. I was just conversing with Ralph [Molina] about some of the songs that we\u2019re going to do, and I\u2019m looking forward to it. There\u2019s nothing like being able to get together and play.<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/DcduHSAaYWc?version=3&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;autohide=2&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\">[embedded content]<\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Will Nils Lofgren be on guitar again?<\/strong><br \/>He\u2019ll be on guitar, yeah. Nils played all over <em>After the Gold Rush<\/em> and he played all over those early albums that I did. It just gives me a whole wealth of material to draw from when I have the original players.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Are you working on a new album at the moment?<\/strong><br \/>No, I\u2019m not. I really can\u2019t put my finger on it. I\u2019m writing songs and I\u2019ve written some really interesting songs, I think, for me. I don\u2019t know where I\u2019m going. I\u2019m just going. Then when I arrive I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll identify it, but I don\u2019t know where that is right now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What\u2019s the next Archives release? Is it <em>Odeon\/Budokan<\/em> from the 1976 Crazy Horse tour?<\/strong><br \/>That\u2019s ready to go. It was supposed to be coming in about six weeks, but I found something else that I wanted to put out first. <em>Odeon\/Budokan<\/em> is ready to go, but <em>Tuscaloosa<\/em> is next.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What\u2019s that?<\/strong><br \/>It\u2019s [a concert] from the period right around <em>Harvest<\/em> and <em>Tonight\u2019s the Night.<\/em> For me, it\u2019s edgy. It\u2019s like those mellow songs with an edge. It\u2019s really trippy to be down in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and singing those songs from <em>Harvest<\/em> and the songs that we were doing for <em>Time Fades Away<\/em> before it came out. I found this thing and it had such a great attitude to it. I just loved the whole night, so I put that together with [engineer] John Hanlon. That will be our next album. Then we\u2019ll do the other one and the other ones after that. There\u2019s just so many that I keep changing my mind all the time. It\u2019s good. It\u2019s good to be able to change your mind. [Note: The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sugarmtn.org\/show.php?show=197302050\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">February 5th, 1973, Tuscaloosa, Alabama<\/a> show has never circulated in bootleg circles and fans have never even reconstructed the complete set list.]<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"embed-youtube\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" type=\"text\/html\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/YBE5BRZSfs0?version=3&amp;enablejsapi=1&amp;origin=https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com&amp;rel=1&amp;fs=1&amp;autohide=2&amp;showsearch=0&amp;showinfo=1&amp;iv_load_policy=1&amp;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\">[embedded content]<\/iframe><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Tell me what it\u2019s like for you to write for the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.neilyoungarchives.com\/#\/news\/1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Times Contrarian<\/a><\/em> as much as you are. I imagine you\u2019re utilizing a lot of lessons you learned from your father.<\/strong><br \/>When I write for the newspaper I enjoy it because my dad was a newspaper man. We have a lot of freedom. We don\u2019t have deadlines. We don\u2019t have story counts. We check type, but we don\u2019t say that you have to have a headline that\u2019s sensational. We try to make do with what we have in the way of what\u2019s going on. We can write about anything we want and there\u2019s no pressure. What you write shows up in your column and it just stays there until you write something else. We\u2019re just doing it our way. I\u2019m having a lot of fun doing it.<\/p>\n<p><strong>And there\u2019s no filter now between you and your fans. You talk right to them and they talk right back to you.<\/strong><br \/>None at all. We have letters to the editor. They don\u2019t have to be on some blog by somebody who has a grudge against somebody. It\u2019s old-fashioned. You write a letter and if the letter is stimulating to me, I\u2019ll answer it. Even if it doesn\u2019t and it\u2019s just someone saying something they care about, I\u2019ll put it in there and comment on it. Sometimes somebody gets under my skin and I can talk to them about that, why I think think they\u2019re missing something and why we\u2019re different. It\u2019s a good thing. It\u2019s a direct conversation with the people who love the music and are able to take part.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Finally, they\u2019re doing a Woodstock 50 concert. Do you want to play at that?<\/strong><br \/>I didn\u2019t know about that. Andy, you are on the cutting edge!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/music\/music-news\/neil-young-interview-archives-crazy-horse-upcoming-albums-784773\/\" target=\"_blank\">via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In November of 1991, Neil Young told Rolling Stone about his ambitious plans to dig into his archives and release \u201ceighteen to twenty albums\u2019 worth of unreleased material\u201d in some form or another. \u201cWe can\u2019t put it all out,\u201d Young said. \u201cBut it will be like an archive. There will be a lot of detail, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-481425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-13 04:29:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481425"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481425\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}