Neil Young Archives

The Neil Young Archives is now on-line, starting today [December 1, 2017]. 

“We developed this site, neilyoungarchives.com, to provide fans and music historians with unprecedented access to all of my music and to my entire archives in one convenient location. My team and I have spent years developing this site to make it both enjoyable and easy to use. The site allows me to share with the world the material I’ve spent a lifetime creating and collecting. I hope you enjoy it.”  Neil Young, December 1, 2017.

The NY Archives allows you to log on through your Facebook account.  Once you do so, you are presented with a picture of the front of a filing cabinet.  In big bold letters there is a “WELCOME MESSAGE FROM NEIL’.  After you click there, the man himself gives you a 10-minute tutorial video on how to navigate the archives.  He doesn’t walk you through every little detail – he leaves the exploration of things unexplained to you, the user.  I will show some of the features that I think are good.  To get to the main menu, you click on the “filing cabinet” in the upper left-hand corner, and then you can navigate accordingly.

Audio Setup.  NY has provided the master recordings of his music for you to hear.  If you have a screaming internet connection with blazing speed, this feature is for you.  But if you are a “disadvantaged user” like me, there is a toggle switch that lets you listen at 320 kbps.  For my ears, that’s good enough.

Find.  This is the search engine portion of the archive.  In this example, after I clicked on “FIND”, I typed in Cinnamon Girl.   The results include every album on which the song appears.

Info Card.  Once you click on one of the links presented by the FIND feature, you get an “Info Card” about the song.  Here’s where you find the who, what, where, and when this particular version of this song was recorded, and on which album it was released.  I clicked on the Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere link.  Click on the “play” button at the top of the Info Card, and it will playback that version of the song you chose.

Buy.  NY doesn’t do any of this for free.  If you want to buy the version of the song you’re listening to, click on “BUY” and it will take you to Amazon.

Video.  If there is any video connected to the song, a VIDEO button appears.  Not every song in the archive has this feature.  After you click VIDEO, a “VIDEO TAPE LOG” appears.  For those songs that have the video feature, there is at least one video related to the song.  Some songs have more than one related video.  In the case of Cinnamon Girl, there’s a 53-second promo video.

Lyrics.  This one is self-explanatory.

File Cabinet.  If you have a lot of time, the File Cabinet feature will let you browse.  When you click on the song title you’re interested in, the Info Card pops up.

Timeline.  Another feature I like is the TIMELINE feature.  From the song’s Info Card, there is a TIMELINE link in the bottom right-hand corner.  When you click on that link, you go to the TIMELINE page [shocking, I know].  Here you find almost everything NY released – from his first single with his group The Squires [The Sultan – 1963] to his latest album, The Visitor [also released today].  For Cinnamon Girl, there is a metadata arrow that points to a blue bubble.  Click on it and it’ll take you back to the Info Card. I noticed there are two other blue bubbles under Cinnamon Girl.  These are for the songs Running Dry [Requiem for the Rockets] and The Losing End [When You’re On].  In the little metadata bubble, there is a “VIEW” button.  Notice that when you get to the song’s Info Card, there is a date on the bottom of that card.  For these three songs, the date is March 20, 1969.  NY and Crazy Horse recorded these three songs on that day.  When you go back to the TIMELINE, notice there is a band that indicates what month you’re looking at.  Below the band are the individual songs and their respective recording dates.  Above that band, you see the albums on which those songs were released.

View All Tracks/Zoom Out.  This feature can be accessed via the link in the bottom right-hand corner of the timeline.  It’s a toggle switch – if it says VIEW ALL TRACKS you see both the track recording date and the album on which the track appears.  If you don’t want that much information, click ZOOM OUT.  The track information disappears, but you still see where each album has been released.  In the lower left-hand corner, there are toggle switches for “ORIGINAL RELEASES” and “ADDITIONAL RELEASES”.  The additional release feature indicates various compilation albums.  If you see an album you want to know more about, click on the album icon you want. 

Significant Dates.  In the ZOOM OUT mode, you’ll see there are icons that look like price tags.  These indicate significant dates in NY’s history.  The example I provided shows when Danny Whitten died in 1972.

Video.  Also included among the “significant dates” are little video icons with the Shakey Pictures logo.  Here, I clicked on NY performing Birds [from the then yet-to-be released After the Gold Rush] during a CSN&Y show at the Fillmore East.

The good news.  There is a ton of stuff in this archive, and NY promises there will be more to follow.  The entire archive is very easy to navigate through.  The quality of the streaming audio is probably as good as it gets.  Since my internet connection usually as slow as dogshit, I have to settle for 320 kbps.  But on those odd occasions when I actually have some extra bandwidth, the audio is very good.  For amateur music historians like me, having the ability to find out the journalistic questions about all the songs included [who, what, where, and when] is literally at your fingertips and is very convenient.  The songs are in chronological order, so as you go from song to song, you can see that as he recorded songs, they wouldn’t all go on the same collection.  For example, one can see the sessions for the albums that became American Stars ‘n’ Bars, Comes a Time, Rust Never Sleeps, and Hawks and Doves overlap.  All the songs are cross-referenced to albums they appear on [original album, compilation, or live].

The bad news.  This is where I get to nit-pick, because there isn’t anything horribly wrong here.

- Truth in advertising.  In his announcement of the archives on Facebook, NY says people will have “unprecedented access to all of my music”.  This is slightly deceptive as the music available for listening is music that has already been released.  If there is previously-unreleased music in this on-line archive, I haven’t found it.  It isn’t “all” here – yet.  To be fair, the archive is a work-in-progress.

- Not all the music is available for streaming.  If you want to find streaming audio of the music he created during the Geffen years, you won’t find it here.  This appears to be a Warner Brothers/Reprise-only archive.  NY’s music at Geffen has gotten a bad rep over the years, but I think that is somewhat exaggerated.  I am biased – I actually like some of that stuff, most especially the Trans era.  Songs that NY didn’t write [such as Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower] aren’t streamed either.  Perhaps he couldn’t get the rights to do so from the publishers.

This is just my first exploration of NY’s Archive.  When he makes this a subscription service, I’ll probably join.  Enjoy!