Rock legend Neil Young has taken yet another dive into his bottomless vault of musical treasures, announcing the upcoming release of a new collection of recordings from 1987 titled Summer Songs.

Over the past few years, Young has unveiled an astonishing amount of works from his extensive archives, most notably 1975’s Homegrown which was shelved in favour of Tonight’s the Night and features early versions of future classics. Most recently, Young released Carnegie Hall 1970, the first of his new Neil Young Official Bootleg Series. Read more, here. 

Now, Young is taking us back to 1987, with a full-length album of studio material recorded with is band Crazy Horse under the name Summer Songs. 

“We have recently found a collection of originals from 1987 named Summer Songs at the time of recording,” Young explained on his website. “That time was about 35 years ago. We are not sure of the exact original dates of these recordings yet. They were all given the same date in the NYA Vault’s records, but they all have a very similar unique sound. To give you an idea of place and time, Farm Aid and the Bridge School Concerts had just begun their long runs.”

“This group of songs had just been written and put down in the studio at Broken Arrow (as far as we can figure),” Young continued. “We cannot completely be sure of the engineer who was recording these, and I don’t remember the sessions at all! Every song in the collection was with acoustic guitar or piano and simply added embellishments — sketches of arrangements we made to preserve the initial ideas.”

“These originals were first introduced in their final master versions on the albums Freedom, American Dream, Psychedelic Pill and Harvest Moon. They will be included in NYA Volume 3 and may be released as a separate Archive album before that. It is a beautiful listen, created over a short period of time, that influenced four albums.”

Among the list of songs said to feature on the new release, you’ll find early versions of The Last of His Kind, For the Love of Man, American Dream, Name of Love, Someday, One of These Days, Hangin’ on a Limb and Wrecking Ball which, as Young notes, appear “significantly different from their subsequent master album releases in many cases. Several completely new and unheard verses are found in the songs of this collection.”

While Neil works to rejig his memory and decode some of the information regarding the sessions, the release date for Summer Songs is yet to be announced – we will keep you posted!  

Neil Young & Crazy Horse | ‘Heading West’ 

Last month, Neil Young and Crazy Horse announced the upcoming arrival of a new studio album Barn. Young shared news of their follow up to 2019’s, Colorado back in June, with a cryptic post saying “the Horse is back in the barn, shaking off the rust”. Barn is due out on December 10th. Pre-order, here. 

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