Neil Young will open his archive and release Hitchhiker, an unreleased new studio album. The release date is September 8, 2017 on Reprise Records – it will be available on vinyl, CD and digitally. The 10-track acoustic solo album was recorded in Malibu, CA at Indigo Studio in 1976. The original session was produced by Young’s long-time studio collaborator David Briggs. Pre-orders for Hitchhiker are now available, here.
Recorded between Zuma and American Stars and Bars as a solo album in a single session, the resultant performances are truly breathtaking and passionate. The simplicity of a single voice and guitar captured here is as pure and powerful as it gets, with only Young, Briggs and actor Dean Stockwell in the room at the time of recording. A few of the songs would not appear on vinyl until years later. Some have never been heard, included in the original sessions for Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Dume, another unreleased record of original sessions that yielded the classic album, Zuma. When the Hitchhiker album was recorded, none of the included songs had ever been released and many of the performances of the songs were the first ever. This is truly an album of original performances.
Check out the title track here...
This news comes at the same time Neil Young has posted a note on his website, here, announcing an online archive of music called the NYA (Neil Young Archive), although it is yet to be announced when the archive will become available.
“The NYA Timeline shows when and how the music was made. Every single, recorded track or album I have produced is represented. It is always current.” the note reads.
“You can browse through the music I made between today’s date and 1963, when I made my first recording in Canada and it was released as a 45 RPM single. You can zoom in to the timeline and see a particular period in detail, and pull back to view the surrounding years. View all albums currently released and see albums still unreleased and in production just by using the controls to zoom through the years.”
It also states that “all of the songs in the archive presented chronologically; stored on Info cards with their associated credits, memorabilia, films or videos, press and photographs." and, “information is still being added. The NYA is a living document"
In the mean time, chekc out our I Like: Neil Young play list here...
