Neil Young Opens Second Song With an 11-Minute Title Track

Neil Young has introduced his next album with an eleven-minute title track, a modest gesture only by his standards. Second Song arrives September 18 on Reprise with seven songs: five new recordings and two previously unreleased pieces dating to the 1960s. A small record, then, with roughly six decades folded into it.

It is Young’s second studio album with the Chrome Hearts, following last year’s Talkin to the Trees. The band returned to Shangri-La Studios and to the same production team: Lou Adler and the Volume Dealers, the name Young and Niko Bolas use together. The room and the hands stayed put. The calendar did not.

The older titles, “Casting Me Away From You” and “I’ll Love You Forever,” sit inside the track list rather than in a separate archival appendix. Pitchfork identifies them as unreleased songs from the 1960s but gives no exact recording dates, so the useful fact is the juxtaposition itself. Young is not issuing a historical exhibit. He is placing old work in the running order of a new album.

The announcement also lands three months after the fashion company Chrome Hearts dropped its trademark claim against Young. That legal coda is shorter than the single. More consequentially, the album continues his preference for long forms and for a catalogue in which an unfinished past can still turn up as present-tense material.

One final piece of sequencing feels properly Youngian. On an album called Second Song, the title track is number four. It explains nothing, but a catalogue this restless was never likely to submit to tidy arithmetic.