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You can’t fault Neil Young for his industry. Second Song is his second new album of 2026: the first, a double live set called As Time Explodes, was released just over three months ago. Indeed, at 80, his work schedule seems mind-boggling. Since 2020, he’s released nine new albums, a 30-minute EP, five self-directed films and three more films directed by others, 10 archival live albums, six archival studio albums and two immense box sets. He has embarked on tours with his longstanding backing band Crazy Horse, his recently convened backing band the Chrome Hearts, and solo. He has gone to public war with Spotify, Amazon, Ticketmaster and – briefly – the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury, and penned umpteen op-ed pieces about politics, the environment and corporate media for his online newspaper the Times-Contrarian. When he recently cancelled a European tour citing exhaustion, it was hard not to think: well, I’m not surprised.
You do find yourself wondering if his workload is such a good thing: not just for an elderly gentleman’s health but also for the quality of his output. Young has always prized spontaneity over finesse, but some of his more recent releases have suggested that at least a soupçon of finesse might not go amiss. Last year’s Talkin to the Trees, however, seemed to cross the line that separates the instinctive from the dashed off. Young frequently sounded as if he was making the material up as he went along, with nugatory results: “When today has come and gone, I might be singing my new song,” he offered on Family Life. “Might be short, it might be long, but I’ll be singing my new song.” If some of the melodies sounded familiar, that’s because they were. Not one but two tracks echoed the tune of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land; First Fire of Winter was essentially Young’s 1970 masterpiece Helpless with different lyrics; Thankful rewrote 1992’s Harvest Moon.
Its follow-up leans more into Young’s gentle acoustic side than the gargantuan Crazy Horse-like din the Chrome Hearts are more than capable of creating. The music seems a little more honed than that on its predecessor. There are audible overdubs, including a backwards guitar solo on opener The Foggy Edge of Time. Like 1973’s Don’t Be Denied or 1979’s Thrasher, it’s one of those Neil Young songs in which he defends his right to follow his muse, regardless of the personal cost. But if you’re worried about declining inspiration, the omens augur ill. Two of Second Song’s seven tracks are re-recordings of tracks Young first performed with his early 60s band the Squires, which hardly suggests a surfeit of great new material.
Casting Me Away From You and I’ll Love You Forever turn out to be pleasant enough, but slight. The former has already been plundered for its melody on The Emperor of Wyoming, from Young’s eponymous 1968 solo debut; I’ll Love You Forever, reworked as a paean to Young’s partner Daryl Hannah, is at least more charming than the tribute he offered up on Talkin to the Trees, which described Hannah as “my best wife ever” and “the best cook in the world”. Elsewhere, there’s another song cut from the same rambling cloth as the stuff on Second Song’s predecessor – Day After Day’s seven minutes feel like seven months – and an unexpected, but sweet diversion into pre-rock’n’roll pop on Earth Girl.
That leaves two songs, although in fairness, they take up nearly half Second Song’s running time. From its title downwards, Soon I Might Be Going is thick with intimations of imminent mortality – “I miss you like tomorrow”, Young sings at one point – and feels like a weary, far older cousin of 1974’s Ambulance Blues: a long, ruminative sigh of a song whose subject matter ranges wildly about, from Donald Trump’s White House renovations to Young’s estrangement from his daughter Amber Jean. He also addressed the latter on Talkin to the Trees, but while the tone there was huffy and injured, here Young sounds plaintive and bereft: “Come back to me, my lovely girl, your memory is mine.”
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It is genuinely gripping, but Second Song’s title track is something else entirely: a latter-day Neil Young song that you might compare to his best work without recourse to special pleading. Its melody is impossibly beautiful and – crucially – not markedly similar to any of the impossibly beautiful melodies Young has previously written: 11 minutes of it slip by without the listener checking their watch. Its lyrics capture a dying-of-the-light quality – “the leaves are falling, gathered in piles to burn outside / Somehow the smoke is calling, somehow the embers will decide” – but unlike Soon I Might Be Going, it reaches a comforting resolution: everything may be turning to shit, its final verses suggest, but you can always find solace in music.
It would be nice if everything here was as good as those two songs, if you could justifiably claim Second Song as an autumn-years masterpiece along the lines of Dylan’s Rough and Rowdy Ways. Instead, the sublime shares space with the not bad and the insubstantial: a superior example of a late-period Neil Young album, but a late-period Neil Young album nonetheless.
