After spending over 40 years locked up inside of a vault, Neil Young will finally officially release of his long-rumored, “lost” albums, a wholly acoustic record titled Hitchhiker next week. You can actually listen to the whole thing now over at NPR. As has been the case over the course of his entire career, Young is a wholly unpredictable person, and for whatever reason, decided to share his first comments about the album while a surprise guest on the Colorado community radio station KOTO.
Reading from a pre-written script, Neil opens by laying out the history of how the album was recorded. “Around the time of the full moon on August 11, 1976, my producer David Briggs and I recorded an album in one night at Indigo Studio in the hills about Malibu, California. My friend, Dean Stockwell, was in the studio with me as I sang these songs. No one had ever heard them before. The album was called Hitchhiker.”
Neil talked about how he got in the mood to record, “I smoked a little weed with Dean [Stockwell] and we settled into the smaller room, where I would play acoustic and sing.” Apparently it’s around the title track where “you may be able to hear the drugs kicking in.” He also talked about why the album was ultimately shelved, and so many of the songs were used on later records like Rust Never Sleeps and Hawks and Doves. Apparently his label felt that in this stripped down form they sounded more like a “collection of demos,” than an actual album.
You can watch Neil’s entire commentary about Hitchhiker in the video below.
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