Neil Young

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Tetragrammaton.

Neil Young (0:25)

Elliot was so great. He was just amazing. He was like a great friend. I met him when I was in Buffalo Springfield.

He was with Joni, and we wanted him to manage us, and he wanted to manage us. But then the group broke up, and I told him, you had to manage me.

So that's how we came together, and then he's just been my best friend for all those years, and fantastic. Somebody to talk to all the time about everything.

Rick Rubin (0:57)

Did you talk to him every day?

Neil Young (0:59)

Oh, yeah. I was terrible with him. I always talked to him every day, and I'd be yelling and screaming about shit.

Rick Rubin (1:09)

He was a good listener though. I felt like he was able to digest that information well.

Neil Young (1:14)

Absolutely, man. He was so great. I miss him.

But I got him here. He's with us.

Rick Rubin (1:20)

Yeah. Tell me about the new album. What was the first thing that happened that led to this new album?

Neil Young (1:27)

I was just in Colorado in January and February of this year, and I just started to feel the music again towards the full moon, and I started thinking about music, and then I started to write things. I wrote a bunch of little notes and titles and things, then just started coming really fast, and I used to wake up in the morning and write the words to the songs. I had a few melodies in my head, so I just started writing and I just couldn't stop, and the words really were coming fast, so I just wrote them all down. Then I went right to Shangri-La, your studio in Malibu on March 1st, and I moved in there and on March 1st, I think was March 1st or maybe the 2nd was the full moon. So after writing these during the full moon, I moved right into the studio and it was the full moon and we recorded. I had five songs and we recorded four of them the first day. Wow.

And the second day we recorded the second song and that was it. I was out of songs.

So then I started thinking, I told the guys, I said, well, just let me go to sleep and wake up and we'll see what happens. And maybe I'll have another song or something and we'll figure out what to do next. So the next day I woke up and sitting around having a cup of coffee and I just started playing these songs. One song that I had written back in 1964 or 65

It was on the archives somewhere and I remembered it and I started playing it. It was called Casting Me Away From You and it was a song that I remembered rehearsing with the Squires, which was my first band. We had moved to Toronto from Winnipeg and I was rehearsing in the lobby of a theater that my dad had set up for us. So we set up our equipment in the lobby every day because the theater didn't have anything going on in it. So we were in the lobby playing and that's where we played Casting Me Away From You. Then I did, somewhere along that time, I had a friend named Comrie Smith. It was a guy I went to school with. Since I was back in Toronto, I was revisiting my old school friends. So I went to his house and we recorded Casting Me Away From You in his attic. It's in the archives somewhere back in the 60s. So it would be in Volume 1 somewhere.

Rick Rubin (4:10)

It's incredible that these songs you wrote so long ago, found their way to the new record.

Neil Young (6:50)

So I remembered that one, and then I remembered this other one that was from 1963

So these are a 60-year-old songs. Oh, here's a couple. So yeah, it was called I'll Love You Forever. And I wrote it about my girlfriend, Pam Smith. She was a lovely young lady who I knew in high school. And we went to different schools. And then we got together at this place called Falcon Lake, where I was visiting in the summer and sleeping in a tent. That was cool. There's a picture around here somewhere of me and Jack in our tent. Jack Hogg was the drummer in the Squires. Anyway, I just, I remembered that song. And when I first left home, and we were playing in a place called Fort William, Ontario.

I was playing there in a place called the, I think it was called the Fourth Dimension.