Coinciding with the release of Neil Young & the Promise of the Real’s new album The Visitor on Friday came the massive news that Neil has also just launched his long-promised online music archive, the Neil Young Archives.

“We developed [the archive] to provide fans and historians with unprecedented access to all of my music and my entire archive in one convenient location,” writes Neil in a Welcome Letter introducing the archive.

The archive promises the “ability to play back master quality audio” and offers FREE streaming on Neil’s entire catalogue, as well as a wealth of unreleased material. That unreleased material includes ten unreleased albums and a few unreleased films!

“These are projects I did not release at the time for one reason or another, and many of the songs subsequently appeared on other albums as the years flew past,” Young explains. “The archive is designed to be a living document, constantly evolving and including every new recording and film as it is made. It is not yet complete as we are still adding a lot of detail to the older recordings.”

Friday also saw Neil’s one-off solo concert in North Ontario streamed live; the entire show is available to view now via a post on Neil’s Facebook page, here.

In all this excitement we mustn’t forget the new album, The Visitor. It’s Neil’s third album with The Promise of the Real -  a Californian rock outfit led by Willie Nelson’s son Lukas Nelson. It follows 2015’s The Monsanto Years and 2016’s live set Earth, and it finds Neil railing against Trump, and grieving for what he sees happening politically in his adopted homeland. Album opener “Already Great” begins with the simple statement:

“I'm Canadian by the way / And I love the USA (my American friend) / I love this way of life / The freedom to act and the freedom to say”

And concludes with anger: “No wall / No ban / No fascist USA / Whose streets? / Our streets”