Neil Young and Crazy Horse cancelled the latter half of their first tour since 2019 — including several Canadian amphitheatre dates, as well as US festival appearances — in June due to illness, saying that a couple members of the touring party had gotten sick after a May 22 performance in Detroit. While Young is scheduled to return to the stage for Farm Aid in September, few other details had been given about the cancellation or any other future plans for the songwriter to return to the road until a Zoom conference for Neil Young Archives members yesterday (August 28).
During the Zoom, Young offered some more details about what exactly happened on the Crazy Horse tour, explaining, "I was doing great and we were moving right along. Everybody's loving the shows. Then I just woke up one morning on the bus and I said, 'I can't do this. I gotta stop.'"
"It was like I felt sick when I thought of going on stage," he continued, having once been a vocal skeptic of pandemic-era touring. "My body was telling me, 'You gotta stop.' So I listened to my body. Then it gets into all the legal matters: 'You got this, you got that, people bought tickets, they did this, they did that.' I understand that, but what matters to me is the art of playing, and the music. That's what matters. That's what people loved. That's what they love to come to see. But if that's not there, me going is not happening. So, my body told me to not do it."
"But now I'm starting to feel like I could do it again and that's a great feeling," Young said, adding, "Not all of Crazy Horse — this happened to a couple of us, and we're not all the way back. Crazy Horse will be back, god willing. And we'll play more."
In the meantime, however, the artist said in the fan recording of the conference posted to Reddit that he's booked some yet-to-be-announced shows in "little theatres" that he's played before with Micah Nelson on guitar and the Promise of the Real rhythm section, Corey McCormick and Anthony Logerfo.
"They'll probably be on the East Coast and then going towards Michigan and then Ohio, and then a few other ones," Young explained. "They won't be marathons. They won't be like, two hours and 10 minutes of blasting rock 'n' roll like it was with Crazy Horse."
Check out the clip of the Zoom below.