Make no mistake, Neil Young has a ton of archival projects waiting in the wings beyond this year's Carnegie Hall 1970 bootleg, Way Down in the Rust Bucket and Young Shakespeare, and that list will now include a newly discovered collection of tracks dubbed Summer Songs.
Writing on his Neil Young Archives website, the songwriter shared that he and his team of archivists have more work to do when it comes to placing the collection of Summer Songs correctly in Young's career chronology.
"We are not sure of the exact original dates of these recordings yet," Young wrote. "They were all given the same date in the NYA Vault's records, but they all have a very similar unique sound. To give you an idea of place and time, Farm Aid and the Bridge School concerts had just begun their long runs."
"This group of songs had just been written and put down in the studio at [Broken Arrow ranch] (as far as we can figure)," Young continued. "We cannot completely be sure of the engineer who was recording these and I don't remember the sessions at all! Every song in the collection was with acoustic guitar or piano and simple added embellishments — sketches of arrangements we made to preserve the initial ideas."
Among the Summer Songs are tracks titled "The Last of His Kind," "For the Love Of Man," "American Dream," "Name of Love," "Someday," "One of These Days," "Hangin' on a Limb" and "Wrecking Ball." Though they would go on to appear on completed albums including Freedom, American Dream, Psychedelic Pill and Harvest Moon, Young shared, "the words of these originals are significantly different from their subsequent master album releases in many cases."
Young also notes that the Summer Songs will be included in his third Archives box set release, which has yet to be detailed. The songwriter released Archives Vol. II: 1972-1976 last year.
You can read Young's complete Summer Songs announcement here.
Next week, Young will release a new album with Crazy Horse titled Barn, which follows their 2019 outing Colorado.
Writing on his Neil Young Archives website, the songwriter shared that he and his team of archivists have more work to do when it comes to placing the collection of Summer Songs correctly in Young's career chronology.
"We are not sure of the exact original dates of these recordings yet," Young wrote. "They were all given the same date in the NYA Vault's records, but they all have a very similar unique sound. To give you an idea of place and time, Farm Aid and the Bridge School concerts had just begun their long runs."
"This group of songs had just been written and put down in the studio at [Broken Arrow ranch] (as far as we can figure)," Young continued. "We cannot completely be sure of the engineer who was recording these and I don't remember the sessions at all! Every song in the collection was with acoustic guitar or piano and simple added embellishments — sketches of arrangements we made to preserve the initial ideas."
Among the Summer Songs are tracks titled "The Last of His Kind," "For the Love Of Man," "American Dream," "Name of Love," "Someday," "One of These Days," "Hangin' on a Limb" and "Wrecking Ball." Though they would go on to appear on completed albums including Freedom, American Dream, Psychedelic Pill and Harvest Moon, Young shared, "the words of these originals are significantly different from their subsequent master album releases in many cases."
Young also notes that the Summer Songs will be included in his third Archives box set release, which has yet to be detailed. The songwriter released Archives Vol. II: 1972-1976 last year.
You can read Young's complete Summer Songs announcement here.
Next week, Young will release a new album with Crazy Horse titled Barn, which follows their 2019 outing Colorado.
