In November of 1991, Neil Young told Rolling Stone about his ambitious plans to dig into his archives and release eighteen to twenty albums worth of unreleased material in some form or another. We cant put it all out, Young said. But it will be like an archive. There will be a lot of detail, things you wouldnt usually find on a box set. Im not so much concerned with how or when it comes out but that its in order. I want to do that myself. And I only have so much time to do these things.
Well, it took him nearly 30 years, but Youngs vision has finally been realized on the revolutionary Neil Young Archives 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 theres also an interactive timeline packed with unseen video, photographs and lyric manuscripts from throughout his entire career. Theres also the Times-Contrarian newspaper where Young and his team post regular news updates and respond to fan letters.
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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 Muddy Track and Solo Transthat are practically impossible to find anywhere else.
Young called up Rolling Stone 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.
Lets start with the history of the Archives. What gave you the idea to turn it into an interactive website?
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 couldnt have music on a website since it sounded like crap. I didnt 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. Its on equal playing field with Spotify and Apple, whatever all the other ones are. You listen to it through your phone, its the same as that, and people automatically are just saying, Hey, wow! This is a lot better!
What was the hardest part about turning the website into a reality?
We spent a lot of time developing the interface for the Blu-ray, but we couldnt 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 Ragged Glory [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. Its just kind of a nerdy thing that I do.
The technology just kept getting better and better. The future is just incredible for the sound of music. Weve got 5G coming. But even without 5G, Ive got it working. You can have high-resolution sound over the internet and people are going, Well, this really sounds different! It sounds good! I get all these letters saying that. Its 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 theyre talking about. I was attacked by everybody for trying to make music sound better.
It felt really great to be able to develop the technology now where you dont need anything special. You dont need a Blu-ray player. You dont need anything. You can hear this right off your iPhone and eventually off your Android product as well.
Are you tempted to remove your music from Spotify and Apple so people are forced to hear it in high quality on the Archives?
I already did that, and then I put it back on. Thats where people get music. I want people to hear music music no matter what they have to get through to do it. Im 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. Its 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.
Do you ever get frustrated that most people dont care about the sound quality of their music and theyre happy with Spotify or even YouTube?
You know, Im definitely not frustrated with those people. What Im 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 youre listening to is like Fisher-Price quality. Youre listening to a toy. It didnt 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. Its something that got right into your soul. Hi-res is the digital version of a good vinyl record. Its better for the art.
Im not upset about people who dont seem to care, because why would they care? Tell me. What would they be comparing it to? Theyve never heard the other thing. Thats the way I look at it.
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. Its like having a Picasso show and finding out theyre all Xeroxes. Thats what Spotify is. You can recognize that its maybe the Picasso that you like, but then youre like, OK, next. Youre not lost in it. Youve got to feel the music.
This whole thing is about feeling the music. Thats what the technology is doing. Thats what our technology does and what people are hearing. Its got to be the 21st century. You shouldnt have worse sound than in the 20th century.
How will the Archives grow and expand in the coming months and years?
Probably based on me just never wanting to give up. Were going to do everything we can to make quality available to people who want it. We have a lot of things in there. Youve probably been around it, but its not a normal situation. Youre really walking around a museum or an archive, and youre 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 didnt get released. They are portions of things that were great, but werent long enough to be released. Its the history around each one of the creations. Its the ambience of the times, of the music. Its a project and I really wanted people to hear it.
Thats the real reason Im still here. Its because I made songs that peopled liked hearing. I want to make it so todays artists can get heard the way I got heard. There are some great singer-songwriters. Theres great artists of all kinds, no matter what kind of music you like. Theyre 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. Its 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 youre getting at these other things, then why not do it? Its the 21st century. Look at all the other stuff weve 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?
In the Archives timeline I see placeholders for Chrome Dreams,Homegrown, Boarding House, Toast and a bunch of other unreleased albums. Are those all eventually going to be made available there?
Were actively completing and going through the post-production stages of mastering several of those right now. Each one takes time, because its a special thing, and weve taken real care to make sure that weve got our original tracks that were on it and the highest quality before we put it together. Weve 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 thats the way it was created.
Will Archives II ever come out as a physical set or will the whole thing be digital?
Archives II is just a regular set of CDs that you can listen to and it will have a book with it that is very cool. Its got a lot of great pictures. Its a beautiful book. If you like owning your music and taking it with you on CD, its good. I really, myself, like the files now. The files, youre not limited to the electronics of the CD player. You can play back the whole file, really hear what we heard in the studio. Thats what I want.
Its 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 theyre really a relic. Theyre from another time. Hello. Goodbye! This is what were doing now. Its the highest res sound. Its 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.
When you play our files streamed by NYA through Bluetooth into speakers, it definitely sounds much better than what youre used to hearing with Bluetooth. The reason is that were giving people the real file. Were not giving them some dummied down version thats five percent or 10 percent of what we originally made so that people can save space on their devices. Were giving you the whole thing because memory is not a problem. Streaming made that a non-issue. Were just going forward.
Youve been playing a lot of concerts recently for your Archives subscribers. What have those been like for you?
Theyre great. Im 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. Its great to be in town, but I dont In Minneapolis there are four incredible theaters. So, Im playing every one of them. I just go from one theater to the next. And these theaters are beautiful. Theyre the stars of the show. Theyre, 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. Its vaudeville. Its early movies.
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, its my way of giving them this. Its a gesture toward them for supporting me, in some cases, 50 years. I cant help that Im 73. Thats the way it rolls. I still like what Im doing and I wanted to do it better. I dont want to leave behind going, I didnt try to make it better. The art form right now is being stifled by the technology. We are living with a blindness for technology when it comes to audio. Its 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.
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?
I dont know anything. I just feel what Im doing here. These tours are great for me. Its a moving target. Everything changes all the time. The only box I can put myself in is if I say, Well, I dont want to do that or I dont want to do that. I want to do whatever I feel like doing. Because Ive 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 were doing a big show we also do five or six supporting shows before. When we get there, weve been playing, were on fire. We walk onstage, were loose. Thats what everyone deserves.
Are you looking forward to these Crazy Horse shows in Winnipeg coming up?
Yeah. Thatll be fun. I was just conversing with Ralph [Molina] about some of the songs that were going to do, and Im looking forward to it. Theres nothing like being able to get together and play.
Will Nils Lofgren be on guitar again?
Hell be on guitar, yeah. Nils played all over After the Gold Rush 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.
Are you working on a new album at the moment?
No, Im not. I really cant put my finger on it. Im writing songs and Ive written some really interesting songs, I think, for me. I dont know where Im going. Im just going. Then when I arrive Im sure Ill identify it, but I dont know where that is right now.
Whats the next Archives release? Is it Odeon/Budokan from the 1976 Crazy Horse tour?
Thats 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. Odeon/Budokan is ready to go, but Tuscaloosa is next.
Whats that?
Its [a concert] from the period right around Harvest and Tonights the Night. For me, its edgy. Its like those mellow songs with an edge. Its really trippy to be down in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and singing those songs from Harvest and the songs that we were doing for Time Fades Away 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 well do the other one and the other ones after that. Theres just so many that I keep changing my mind all the time. Its good. Its good to be able to change your mind. [Note: The February 5th, 1973, Tuscaloosa, Alabama show has never circulated in bootleg circles and fans have never even reconstructed the complete set list.]
Tell me what its like for you to write for the Times Contrarian as much as you are. I imagine youre utilizing a lot of lessons you learned from your father.
When I write for the newspaper I enjoy it because my dad was a newspaper man. We have a lot of freedom. We dont have deadlines. We dont have story counts. We check type, but we dont say that you have to have a headline thats sensational. We try to make do with what we have in the way of whats going on. We can write about anything we want and theres no pressure. What you write shows up in your column and it just stays there until you write something else. Were just doing it our way. Im having a lot of fun doing it.
And theres no filter now between you and your fans. You talk right to them and they talk right back to you.
None at all. We have letters to the editor. They dont have to be on some blog by somebody who has a grudge against somebody. Its old-fashioned. You write a letter and if the letter is stimulating to me, Ill answer it. Even if it doesnt and its just someone saying something they care about, Ill 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 theyre missing something and why were different. Its a good thing. Its a direct conversation with the people who love the music and are able to take part.
Finally, theyre doing a Woodstock 50 concert. Do you want to play at that?
I didnt know about that. Andy, you are on the cutting edge!