Earlier this year, Neil Young gave Uncut an update about the status of his anticipated Archives 2 project.
“I’m putting a website out, probably just before Christmas,” he told us. “It’ll be my entire archives on a website. You can listen to music, and you’ll see where albums are that are penciled in, not finished. From throughout a 40 or 50-year span, you’ll see unfinished records behind you, in front of you, right now, way in the future.”
Now Young’s manager, Elliot Roberts, has further updated Billboard on this second volume, telling them it is “nearly completed and should surface in 2017”.
“Neil has a whole series of Shakey Films that we’ve done through the years,” Roberts says. “We haven’t really had a chance to put a lot of them out. Either he tours or starts doing an album or moves on to the next one. But we have about six or seven full-length films that will be coming out over the course of the next two years. These are really the first two.”
The contents include Hal Ashby‘s film of Young’s 1982-83 one-man Trans Tour, a Tim Pope chronicle of an early Young concert in England, and 2003’s Greendale.
This is excellent news for Young fans, following on from the announcement that four of Young’s classic albums – the long out of print 1973’s Time Fades Away, 1974’s On The Beach and 1975 Tonight’s The Night and Zuma – are coming on Septemer 6.
Roberts says Young has finally signed off on Time Fades Away, Archives 2 should arrive next year.
“Neil had a lot of things that were important to us – not because they sold well,” Roberts notes. “I think of it as we’re introducing him to a younger audience, a new audience. We know there’s our core audience that’s 50-70 or so. That’s always been the case, and it’s nice to actually have. But it’s like discovering Dylan – you may like EDM, but at some point in your life you’ll be into Dylan and you’ll get it, whether you’re 23, 24, 21 or 26. Discovering Neil or discovering those catalogs, that material. It’s still fun for Neil to create. He doesn’t mind going back or going forward.”
Uncut: the spiritual home of great rock music.