The instrumental track "The Emperor of Wyoming" kicks off the 1969 self-titled debut from the venerated songwriter Neil Young. But some 57 years later, that song's distinct melody has resurfaced as part of Young's 50th studio album, Second Song, out Sept. 18. Along with five, brand new, sprawling and personal tracks from Young and his backing band, the Chrome Hearts, the album features two new recordings of songs he wrote while he was still a teenager in Canada, drawn from his massive and meticulously kept personal archive. One of those songs is "Casting Me Away from You," a track he first recorded around 1965 in a friend's attic in Toronto that he would later rework and release as "Emperor of Wyoming." The other, "I'll Love You Forever," was recorded in 1964 as a love song for his high school girlfriend, "my first real love" he told me.
That interplay between Young's compositional work as a younger man, and the musical (and emotional) place he finds himself in 2026, feels like the thesis of Second Song. The album plays less like a momentary snapshot and more like a meditation on life from someone who doesn't believe in getting stuck anywhere along the timeline. "I dream a way of living, a way of sharing what we find," he sings on the album's title track. "A way of walking slowly, through the smokey leaves of time."
The album was recorded to tape at Rick Rubin's Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, Calif. and produced by Lou Adler, along with the Volume Dealers, made up of engineer Niko Bolas and Young himself. The analog nature of the album is a point of pride for Young, who has long decried the deterioration of audio and sound quality in a world where digital recordings have become ubiquitous. In a long conversation from the control room at Shangri-La, Young talked to me about making Second Song and his strong views on music-making, from his issues with AI to the importance of retaining the soul in a recording: "I feel really badly for people around the world who no longer get to hear the quality of the music that we started doing."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Kira Wakeam, NPR: What inspired you to write these new songs?
Neil Young: I mostly just wrote what was on my mind. Most mornings I wake up and write. If I have a melody which I usually come up with, the night before or that morning, as soon as I get the melody in my head and put it down on my little cassette recorder — doesn't matter if it has mistakes or anything — I like to record the first time I play it. Then I just start writing words that are really not associated with anything. They're just connected to what was going on that previous 24-hour period.
They're very introspective. I'm thinking of "The Foggy Edge of Time," the first song on the record. It sounds like someone who's looking back on their early life. Is that something you've been doing more of lately?
I was that morning, and that's kind of what I was thinking about. You just start playing, and when you hear the melody and the words start coming, you don't really think about it. It's automatic with me. I don't really work at what am I going to sing about or anything like that. I don't know what it is until I've done it.
For me, [in "Foggy Edge of Time"], [it] felt so connected to leaving home and not looking back and going for your dreams. It really was powerful. Do you think about that version of yourself, and maybe you had doubts then that you don't [have] now? It seems to me that that song is you sort of realizing that that was what you had to do.
I got to a point in my life where I had to make some big decisions about where I was, who I was with, and what I was doing and how to move forward without hurting myself and the music and everything. I just had to make some decisions and [they] were not easy decisions, but I made them and they have repercussions forever, you know? When I left, I knew that I was turning a page, and I could either keep reading the same page over and over again and get mired down in it. Or, I could just have a new page. I decided my kids were all old enough, everybody was moving along in their lives, and I was still in good contact with all of them. I felt really good. It didn't feel good to leave because obviously when a family breaks up it's not a good thing. You know, there was a divorce and all kinds of stuff and everything, but it's all in [the] song.
In the song, you say, "I thought about the early days and when I was young and found that place, three beautiful children born and raised, but there were bumps along the way." How do you think about those bumps? Are there moments you wish you could change?
I think we all have moments like that. You can't change what happened. As soon as you realize that, things get a lot simpler. [Knowing it was] time to move on and see what happens next, it's a valuable thing to be able to realize that no matter how old you are, you could be 12 or you could be 85. It doesn't matter.
The other song I wanted to ask you about is "Soon I Might Be Going," because to me it feels like the thesis of the record. There's a lyric I found particularly moving where you say, "I miss you like tomorrow and I see you like today. I wanted to say something before I go away." Who are you speaking to, and what are you trying to say before you go away?
I was speaking to the love of my life at that point. She's just a beautiful person, and she sees the world, too. She knows what's going on. So, there's nothing much you can do except just realize what you're looking at, accept it, and try to move on and make the best of things, you know? That's a very deep one because there's a bit of scary stuff in it. It wasn't like I commanded it to be there. I am a vehicle. I try to disassociate myself from the responsibility of thinking of things like that because they're not thoughts.
You can't change what happened. As soon as you realize that, things get a lot simpler.Neil Young
You also wrote "Earth Girl," which is another new song that feels very obviously [like] a love letter to your wife. Were there things that you felt like you wanted to say to her now, you know, before it was too late?
I just wanted to say it to her now. You know, I don't look at it like it's going to be too late. It's never too late. It's not too late, it's just a different time.
On this album, you wrote five new songs, but you have two old songs on the record that you wrote many years ago. There's "Casting Me Away From You," which you wrote in '64. And then "I'll Love You Forever," which we talked about that you recorded in Thunder Bay in [Ontario, Canada]. What about them fit this record, do you think?
All it was, was when I woke up in the morning, ["Casting Me Away From You"] was in my head. I said, okay, if there's anything in my head, I'll do it. Somehow, I went back in the archives because I had this recording with Comrie Smith from his attic in the archives from 1963 or '64. I was looking at that and then I looked at other songs in the same period, and I saw "I'll Love You Forever," and I remembered that I had a record of it. So I listened to the record, which is in there, and then we just did that arrangement. We did it just like the original record.
The album, at least in my listening, feels like it's actively engaging with the early work that you've made in your life, songs that you made early in your career when you had just come to California and you were trying to make it. Are you returning to your root sound?
All I'm doing is trying to make it sound as good as I can. I believe in the analog technology of recording music. I think that is museum-quality sound, and what we have today is a bad knockoff. It's not a recording of the music, it's a simulation of what the music sounded like based on analysis of the waveforms and digital recreation of those tones. [It] has nothing to do with the soul of the moment. So that's what happened to music. I was there recording analog in the beginning, and I still record analog. And we did this in analog. So when this record comes out vinyl, it's going to sound amazing. I mean, it does sound amazing. It sounds like what it is, and the music is real. I feel really badly for people around the world who no longer get to hear the quality of the music that we started doing. Now, of course, it's over. I mean, we're moving into AI and all this stuff. And thank God that I did all my work before AI — that's really the biggest gift.
Recently, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine did an interview with The New York Times and said that AI is a "new tool for creativity" and that it's not a threat to artists. I'm curious what you think about that thought.
The idea of AI and old recording, they're just not even the same thing. AI is a simulation. It's an artificial simulation of a thought, of things that already happened and algorithms spewing out what they think could happen. Okay, great. That's very creative. Go for it. That's not what I do.
You can tell artificial intelligence doesn’t have the soul.Neil Young
I don't believe in it because it doesn't apply to what I believe in. If you want to create something artificial, then there's nothing wrong with artificial things. But there's nothing wrong with real things either. My thing was to get real stuff and record it. Human things with all the flaws, with everything. I don't see that I've missed a chance to be creative by using artificial intelligence. You can tell artificial intelligence doesn't have the soul. There's no soul. I don't feel a soul in artificial intelligence. If somebody else does, that's great. They're from a different generation or from a different time than me. Maybe they're right on for where they are, but that's not where I was.
You've been making music now for six decades, roughly. Within that, you're very experimental. You've moved in and out of different musical eras and sounds. How do you think about those musical moments in your life? Do those feel different to you, or [are they] pieces of one larger puzzle in your mind?
When I look at the things I've done, it's just the history of my experimenting with music and my exploring possibilities as they came to me. Not before or after, but as it was happening, that's what I wanted to do. I had no idea that I was going to do [the album] Trans when I was doing the record before Trans, I had no idea that I was going to do Everybody's Rockin' after whatever record I made.
There was a time when I was kind of going through genres historically, just looking around. I'd already done a lot of stuff that people think of me as doing that, but I continued to try to do things that were in genres of music that I appreciated and enjoyed. After that, that all just fell apart and I just kept on going. I'm a musician and I like writing, so I'm not trying to do anything else. I don't care about the career or about whether I'm doing this or that, or whether it's going to work or not.
That seems like a pretty good attitude to weather, you know, six decades in this business.
I think it's the only way. I don't know how anybody could do six decades or whatever amount of decades just by following some playbook.
You've had your music on streaming apps, [then] taken off streaming apps. It's not currently available on Amazon. Streaming is the most direct way for people to access your music in 2026, but the business model is obviously not great for creators and rights holders. How do you feel about streaming and having your music on these platforms right now?
Well, streaming sounds like s***. That's my answer.
That's your main beef with streaming right now?
My main beef is the quality sucks. It's very convenient. It's easy for people to collect royalties — mostly the people who are actually presenting it, not the musicians who created it. It's easy for it to be manipulated. Streaming is a record without a record, without a record cover, without any art. It's the song, it's the sound. It's the digital representation of whatever it was. Some streaming stuff is old analog stuff that's been re-sampled at a super low rate and played back with a very bad quality. Spotify quality is some of the worst quality. I don't know how you could get worse. But that doesn't matter to Spotify. That's just business. The thing about digital, is it separated music into equal mathematical situations. Quality of music, the bitrate — the higher the bitrate, the more you could charge. They're presenting the music with no responsibility, they're presenting it as a business.
I think broadly, we live in a pretty pessimistic time. You've always looked to use your voice to change things. How do you hold on to that sense of resilience or positivity?
It's going to be better. Nothing is more obvious than that. You look back at the big things that happened in history and the big changes that happened. Why did they happen? Because people saw something so bad that they had to stop it and do something good. That's where we're at right now. People are all seeing it, and next thing that's going to happen is somebody is going to put a way of stating it out there in front of everybody and everyone's going to go, yes, and they're all going to go that way. That's how we affect big change and that's how we can get rid of a lot of the problems that we have, is by changing them because they're so obvious. They're just getting so obvious now that everybody's seeing it.
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