A Neil Young album that treats time as raw material
Neil Young’s Second Song is a collaborative Neil Young album with The Chrome Hearts that merges five new recordings with songs first written in the 1960s, framing his current band as a living bridge between his earliest songwriting and his present creative momentum, and treating decades of archive material not as nostalgia but as fuel for classic rock new music. Neil Young has confirmed September 18 as the release date for Second Song, recorded with The Chrome Hearts and preceded by the title track, which is already streaming with an official lyric video and available to pre-order. On paper, it is seven tracks; in spirit, it is Young’s latest argument that his past is not finished yet. The key takeaway: this is not a greatest-hits victory lap, but an artist in his late career risking his legacy by rewriting it in real time.
Chrome Hearts collaboration: a real band, not a backing crew
Second Song matters because it treats The Chrome Hearts as co-conspirators rather than hired hands. The project continues Young’s recording relationship with the group and follows their studio album Talkin To The Trees, which has already made this lineup central to his touring life through the Love Earth Tour. That history gives the new record weight; this classic rock new music is rooted in a band that has already proven it can carry his catalogue on stage. On the album, Spooner Oldham’s organs and keys, Micah Nelson’s electric guitar and vocals, Corey McCormick’s bass and harmonies, and Anthony LoGerfo’s drums frame Young’s voice, guitars, piano and even marxophone. This Chrome Hearts collaboration sounds, on the evidence of the title track, like a group that breathes together instead of carefully reproducing old templates.
Five new songs, three from the 60s: why the archive now?
The most striking creative choice is the way Second Song splices time. Young has described the project as containing “three 60 year old songs and five brand new ones” tracked across a recording cycle that began and ended around full moons. Formally, there are seven album tracks, five of which are previously unreleased alongside two new versions of Casting Me Away From You and I’ll Love You Forever. Informally, this is Young refusing to let his own history calcify. Second Song is notable for combining contemporary recordings with material he wrote decades ago, including songs dating back to 1963, before his Buffalo Springfield breakthrough. Instead of locking these early pieces in a museum, he drags them into the present with The Chrome Hearts, insisting that youthful sketches can stand beside today’s writing if the band and the sound are honest enough.
The title track’s sound and Young’s fight for analog depth
The already released title track is the lens through which Second Song should be heard. Young sings about a life’s worth of experience—“a way of walking slowly through the smokey leaves of time”—over a soothing, slowly unfolding arrangement that feels more like a lived-in conversation than a radio single. That pacing is deliberate: this is music designed to be disappeared into, not skimmed. Young has called the recording “a lifetime experience” and emphasises that all seven songs are “straight from the heart” while the band cut analog and high-resolution digital masters simultaneously to show what he sees as the gulf between them. In his words, “music is infinitely deep. Museum quality sound is analogue”. The point is not audiophile purism for its own sake; it is consistency with the album’s time-folding concept—sound as another way of refusing to flatten the past.
Anger, hope, and an artist who refuses to coast
Second Song lands in the middle of an unusually busy period for Young. He finished the album at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio, turning to earlier compositions only after cutting five new tracks. He has also admitted he was channelling anger at the Trump administration into the new material, writing that current politics are “sad and depressing” and that he sees “the worst president in the history of our country” on his screen every day. Yet the press material frames the record as hopeful music that gathers the past into strength for a difficult future. In parallel, Neil Young Archives Volume IV—covering albums from Freedom through Greendale, with original masters, unreleased cuts, alternate mixes and more—is in production and expected to be the second-last volume in the series. Second Song therefore sits in two catalogues at once: it is both new work with his present band and another front in his long-term excavation of the archives. The conclusion is clear: at a point when many peers are content to tour the hits, Young is rewriting his story by putting unfinished business from the past into loud dialogue with the present.
