Ten Deep Cuts We Hope Neil Young Plays on His Upcoming Rarities Tour
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Neil Young is returning to the road at the end of this month following a four-year hiatus from touring. But he’s not bringing along Crazy Horse, Promise of the Real, or most of his famous songs. He’s instead plotting out a solo acoustic show built around rarely played songs from the depths of his vast catalog.
“I don’t want to come back and do the same songs again,” he said in a live Zoom event to patron members of the Neil Young Archives. “I’d feel like I was on some sort of carnival ride. I’d rather be doing these other songs I haven’t done…I won’t have to compare how I’m doing ‘Heart of Gold’ to [how I played it in] 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, 2020…”
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He said that 80 percent of the set will be songs that he’s virtually never played live before. He’s already mapped out 15 of them, including 1982’s “If You Got Love,” 1994’s “Prime of Life,” and 1995’s “Song X.” We have no idea what other tunes he’s contemplating, but these three — all serious rarities — give us a bit of a road map.
“If You Got Love” is so obscure it hasn’t appeared on any album, but he played it live 28 times in 1982 and a single time in 1986. “Prime of Love” is from Sleeps with Angels, but he didn’t tour that album, and only played the song at three charity shows in 1994. “Song X” was played throughout Young’s 1995 tour with Pearl Jam, and he hasn’t touched it since.
“They’re not new songs,” Young said in reference to the tunes he’s planning on breaking out. “They’re old songs. But I wake up with them in my head every morning. They are songs that apply to my life right now, and apply to everyone’s lives in this era that we’re in. Some of them were written 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, but never really played live.”
Using this as criteria, we’ve picked out 10 songs we hope to hear on the tour. We’d love for any of these to pop up on his setlist this summer. Then again, Young is notoriously unpredictable — so it’s anyone’s guess if we’ll get to hear any of them.
“L.A.”
Young wrote this sarcastic tribute to the “city in the smog” in 1968 and completely forgot about it until he went on the road in 1973 in support of Harvest and a friend reminded him that it existed. He played it early in the set most every night to baffled fans who just wanted to hear “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man,” and included it on the live album Time Fades Away. It then sat dormant and nearly forgotten again until Oct. 14, 2014 at the Forum in Los Angeles, when Promise of the Real coaxed him to revive it. That one-off rendition nearly disqualifies it from this list, but we’ll let it slide since it was a single time in 50 years, and many of these upcoming shows are taking place either in Los Angeles or in nearby cities. It feels like the perfect occasion to break this one out.
“Motion Pictures (For Carrie)”
Young’s tumultuous relationship with Diary of a Mad Housewife actress Carrie Snodgress produced one child, Zeke Young, and about 40 songs of love, loss, and deep heartbreak. You can start with “A Man Needs a Maid” (“I fell in love with the actress”) and slowly hear the dissolution of their relationship through “Love is a Rose,” “Separate Ways,” and many of the other songs on his lost 1975 album Homegrown. Things were already starting to fall apart when he wrote “Motion Pictures (For Carrie)” in a motel room alongside country singer Rusty Kershaw and pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith. (The three of them were stoned out of their minds on the potent weed/honey concoction he’d dubbed “honey slides.”) The song appears on the second side of On the Beach, and the only live performance to this day took place during his surprise set at New York’s Bottom Line on May 16, 1974.
“L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys”
Songs were pouring out of Young at such a furious clip in the mid-Seventies that only a fraction of them founds spots on albums. That’s even true when you factor in the albums he shelved, like Homegrown and Chrome Dreams. Many gems from this period have trickled out over the years thanks to bootlegs, live performances, and archival releases. The sparse piano ballad “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys” remained unheard by the public until it showed up on the ten-disc box set Neil Young Archives Vol. II 1972-1976. Recorded a couple of weeks before he kicked off CSNY’s 1974 reunion tour, it radiates with pain from the Carrie Snodgress breakup. “We used to be so calm,” he sings. “Now I think of you all night long/’Cause you’ve been with another man/There you are and here I am.” (He reused those lines the next year on “Danger Bird.”) The lyrics cut right to the bone, and it’s easy to understand why he held the song back all these years. But now that it’s finally out there, perhaps it’s time to play it live.
“Through My Sails”
The day after he cut “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys” by himself, Young brought David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash to Broken Arrow. The ostensible purpose was to prep for their tour, but they also cut this gorgeous new song. It’s arguably the single greatest song the quartet made after Deja Vu — and it could easily have been the centerpiece of their proposed third LP, Human Highway — but Young decided to scrap that album at the end of the ’74 tour. He wound up sticking “Through My Sails” at the end of Zuma, his 1975 album with Crazy Horse. It’s never been played in front of an audience, but he did break it out in 2020 during a Fireside Sessions online show. That seemingly ups the odds it’ll make the cut for this tour.
“Little Wing”
On Jan. 21, 1975, Neil Young went into L.A.’s Village Recorders with Ben Keith and cut the three geographic songs on Homegrown: “Mexico,” “Florida,” and “Kansas.” He also laid down the sweet, short, and tender “Little Wing.” On the surface, it’s about a bird that flies away at the end of the summer, but is clearly a reflection of the loss Young was feeling at the time. “Little wing, don’t fly away,” he sings. “When the summer turns to fall/Don’t you know some people say/The winter is the best time of them all.” For a few years, the only people that heard the song were the lucky few that saw him play with his Santa Cruz bar band, the Ducks, in the summer of 1977. But he went on to include the original 1975 studio version on 1980’s Hawks and Doves. He’s never played it live outside of a few Ducks gigs, but it must have been back on his mind when he broke it out at two separate Fireside Sessions streaming events in 2020.
“Midnight on the Bay”
The story of Neil Young abandoning Stephen Stills midway through the inaugural Stills-Young Band tour in 1976 via telegram (“Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil.”) has been told so many times that the actual music they made together has largely been overlooked. Long May You Run is definitely a mixed bag, but the high points are extremely special. “Midnight on the Bay” is a beautiful little song that Young wrote while briefly living on a houseboat in Coconut Grove, Florida. The lyrics reflect the tranquility he felt alone at night. “Lights are shinin’,” he sings. “On the sailboats that sway in the cool ocean breeze/Blowin’ down through the keys.” He played it four times in 1976, a single time in Australia in 1985, and not one time since.
“Will To Love”
A couple of weeks after his coked-out performance at the Band’s Last Waltz — which was the culmination of a brutal year on the road where he played with Crazy Horse all over the globe and sandwiched a Stills/Young tour in the middle of it — Young sat in front of the fireplace at his home, turned on his Sony cassette recorder, and recorded this stunning song. “You can hear the crackling and hissing of the fire as I played my old Martin guitar,” he wrote in his 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace. “Laden with my own feelings of love and survival, the recording stands alone in my work for its audio vérité style, a live sketch of a massive production number with only the highlights presented, fragments of parts, the sound of the fire, the underwater sound created by vibrato.” Young fans have been dreaming about a live performance for decades, but he’s never once even attempted it.
“Transformer Man”
Many Neil Young fans were so stunned by the Kraftwerk-style sounds of 1983’s Trans that they didn’t recognize the brilliance of the work. They certainly didn’t understand that the distorted vocoder vocals on several songs were meant to represent his inability to communicate with his son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy. “Transformer Man” is one of the standout tracks on the album, and he reworked it completely as an acoustic tune for 1992’s Unplugged. He attempted it solo acoustic for the Bridge School in 1994 before dropping it completely from his live repertoire. It’s time to try it again.
“Bandit”
Even the most hostile critics of Young’s 2003 eco-rock opera Greendale recognized “Bandit” as something special. The song is about a broken-down Vietnam vet character who’s unable to process the modern world, but there’s a universality to the lyrics that allows it to stand totally separate from the broader narrative of the record. He played it at all 90 stops of the Greendale tour, and it usually brought the arena to a hushed silence. He hasn’t done it since.
“It’s a Dream”
Neil Young recorded 2005’s Prairie Wind shortly after suffering an aneurysm as he awaited major surgery. He had no idea if he’d live through the experience, so he proceeded as if the album might be his final statement to the world. “It’s a Dream” is a reflection on the cruel passage of time and the little joys that make life worth living. “It’s a dream,” Young sings. “Only a dream/And it’s fading now/Fading away/It’s only a dream/Just a memory without anywhere to stay.” He played it a handful of times in 2005, but it’s been absent since then.
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