Neil Young’s next album, A Letter Home, has been pushed back to a ‘likely’ spring release, Young told Billboard Originally, back in January, Young told Rolling Stone the album would be out in March.
As I first reported, the album is a collaboration between Young and Jack White. It was recorded at White’s Third Man studio in Nashville, is being released on Third Man Records and features Jack White on two tracks.
“It’s not ready for prime time yet. It’s not really a release yet, but it’s a very unique record,” Young said. “It’s like a time capsule. It doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard that was made recently. And some great songs, some beautiful music.”
“They’re songs that I love, songs that changed my life, songs that made it so that I understood what someone else was saying to me, songs by greater writers.”
Although Young has not revealed which songs will be on the album, I have speculated that it will include many of the covers Young performed at Farm Aid last year and at his recent acoustic shows in New York and Canada such as Bert Jansch’s “Needle of Death,” Phil Ochs “Changes,” Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain,” Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You Baby” and Tim Hardin’s “Reason to Believe.”
Young also told Billboard that his forthcoming memoir will be called “Special Deluxe.”
He told Billboard it’s a book that focuses on his love of cars.
“So it’s a history through automobiles, and it’s a history of automobiles and it’s a history of the environmental impact of automobiles. And it’s a projection into the future of automobiles. It has its own agenda that develops over the book.
Young also said he’s working on new music, and would like to do an album with a full orchestra, live, recorded mono with one mic.
“I want to do something like that where we really record what happened, with one point of view and the musicians moved closer and farther away, the way it was done in the past. To me that’s a challenge and it’s a sound that’s unbelievable, and you can’t get it any other way. So I’m into doing that.”
— A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post —