Neil Young’s next album, The Monsanto Years, is very much a political album. Some of the songs, such as the one that may be called “If I Don’t Know,” is quite good — one of his best in some years. Others are more like political rants that, at least on initial listen, don’t hold up. It’s admirable that Young wants to use the platform he has to deliver political messages, but at times his songs suffer because it seems the message is more important than the song. Also, while GMOs are an issue, they pale besides the horrendous impact of animal agriculture on climate change and our environment and I wish Neil Young would get hip to the biggest cause of climate change and focus some of his political energy on it.

Or is that just too hot a topic for Neil Young to address.

“I don’t really have anything against the people at Monsanto or the human beings working for Monsanto,” Young said on April 22, at a screening at the IFC Center in New York of a “work in progress” documentary about the making of The Monsanto Years. “But the laws that they’re making have made Monsanto the perfect poster child for problems that we have with the corporate government. So I wrote a bunch of songs about it. These kids I’m playing with all are with me on it.”

The film was part of The Bernard Shakey Film Retrospective” that took place from APril 17 through April 23, 2015.

Bernard Shakey is the name Young uses for his films.

On April 16, 2015, Young performed at the SLO Brewing Copany in San Luis Obispo, CA accompanied by Promise of the Real, a band featuring Wille Nelson’s sons, Lukas and Jacob Micah Nelson on guitars, Corey McCormick, bass, and Anthony Logerfo, drums.

Neil will be touring with this band.

Check out his entire set at SLO Brewing Company including nine new songs that were played live for the first time. The songs will likely appear on Young’s upcoming album, The Monsanto Years, due out June 16, 2015. However, thus far, the titles of the songs that will appear on the album have not been officially released.

Titles below of the new songs are tentative and definitely not official.

You can download all of these songs here.

1 “Country Home”:

2 “People Want to Hear About Love” (live debut):

3 “New Day for the Planet” (live debut):

4. “Down by the River”:

5 “Too Big Too Fail” (live debut):

6 “Rock Starbucks (live debut)”:

7 “Walk On”:

8 “Monsanto Years” (live debut):

9 “Working Man” (live debut):

10 “Seeds” (live debut):

11 “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”:

12 “Big Sky Wolf Moon” (live debut):

13 “Love and Only Love”:

14 “If I Don’t Know” (live debut):

15 “Country Home”:

16 Crowd Cheer:

17 “Roll Another Number” (For the Road)”:

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