If the 2026 tour was cancelled, this excellent live recording from the previous run shows that the Canadian rocker still has no intention of hanging up his axe and going quiet. We’re here for it.
When, in February last year, Neil Young announced the cancellation of his European summer tour (13 dates including two French stops in Nîmes and Nancy with Elvis Costello and Charlie Sexton as the headline openers), we could fear the worst. The Canadian rocker, now 80, seemed determined to tour until he collapsed, until the end. Has that moment arrived? No, he swore in a tersely worded statement, justifying it with the need for a break, and, after apologies, this laconic line: “This is not the time.” So, in the meantime, we turn to this indulgent live document, chronicling his 2025 tour with his new band, The Chrome Hearts. This quartet makes something new out of the old and the young as well, blending the rhythm section of Promise of the Real, the group that backed Young in 2015, with the addition of another octogenarian, the organist Spooner Oldham, who played on Harvest (in 1972) and guitarist Micah Nelson who could easily be Neil’s son (even grandson) but has as his real father the outlaw Willie.
With this new outfit, Young indulged in what he prefers: revisiting his gargantuan repertoire by including ultra-celebrated peaks, while sidelining others, all while spotlighting lesser-known or newer songs. As Time Explodes is thus a snapshot of the current favorites of this lumberjack-looking rocker who vacillates between a greatest-hits approach and more offbeat detours. One might wonder forever why he left out Ambulance Blues, which, rarely performed by a band, opened the most recent Paris concert and about twenty other European dates with a great deal of emotion. But he has his reasons, such as preferring Vampire Blues (excerpt from the same cult album On the Beach). In the middle of the record, you’ll find the most urgent and contemporary Big Crime, a MAGA-burner recorded last August. Following it — and this is hardly a coincidence — is the softer yet still sharp Long Walk Home, performed on piano and harmonica. Young reworks this protest song from 1987 and Reagan, replacing the Vietnam War allusion with the one currently in Ukraine.
An Electric Rage
Well supported by these Chrome Hearts, who know their craft and carry heart, the survivor from the north has his own formula for a successful live show. He saves only one track from his latest studio album Talkin to the Trees, the first with his new band, drawing from songs written for Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young – Ohio but also the less obvious and equally catchy Looking Forward and Name Of Love. And then there are the classics, the eternal bravura numbers you can’t tire of, performed with intensity and electric fury by the musicians. Perfect for air guitar, Cortez the Killer and Like a Hurricane, with an atmospheric intro before the storm, flank After the Gold Rush, still as delicate. It’s inevitably a somewhat truncated reflection of a tour that was nonetheless very solid, and this live record offers irrational hope that Young’s career will never truly end.
As Time Explodes (Reprise/Warner Records). Release on May 29.
