Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts are dropping their new LP Second Song on September 18, and you can check out the lyric video for the title song right now. It’s a wistful, acoustic ballad, stretching past the 11-minute mark, about the passage of time and the need for human connection.
“I need to talk to someone,” Young sings. “Someone who smiles and answers back/Someone as old as I am/Who still remembers some of that I dream a way of living/A way of sharing what we find.A way of walking slowly/Through the smokey leaves of time.”
Second Song is the second LP by Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts – which features guitarist Micah Nelson, organ player/pianist Spooner Oldham, drummer Anthony LoGergo, and bassist Cory McCormick – following 2025’s Talkin’ to the Trees. It was produced by Young and Lou Adler at Rick Rubin’s ShangriLa Studios in Malibu, California.
Five of the seven tracks on Second Song are new works. “They’re just a rambling set of songs that all came to me while I was in Colorado around the turn of the year,” Young told Neil Young Archives premium subscribers during a Zoom in July. “Then I came back here to Malibu and recorded them all, and it went great.”
Young and the Chrome Hearts cut all five songs in just two days, and didn’t have anything else to record until Young dug deep into his archives and uncovered “I’ll Love You Forever” and “Casting Me Away From You” from his teenage days on the mid-1960s Canadian music scene.
“Those two old songs, they just seemed to fit with the new ones,” Young told fans. “There was no concept. [The album] is a couple of old songs, and lot of new ones. With the length of the new songs, we could have knocked out the old songs and still had an album, for length. But we went ahead and added the two old songs. That’s what this album is about. It’s about the new songs vs the old songs. The old songs offer some sort of reflection and juxtaposition or something. They all seem to fit together.”
In 2025, Young and the Chrome Hearts toured all across Europe and North America. He was originally slated to return to Europe this summer for an encore run, but he cancelled the dates earlier this year. “Everything is OK,” he told fans. “Just needed a break. Listening to my body.”
Young returned to the concert stage May 22 when he played four songs at the 90th birthday of environmental activist David Suzuki, which was held in Vancouver at the Queen Elisabeth Theatre. He’s next scheduled to play September 26 at Farm Aid in Virginia Beach, Virginia. It’s the only date on his public calendar, but recently told fans that other shows are in the works around the time of Farm Aid. “We will be playing,” he wrote in a response to a fan letter. “I have a few shows with Willie [Nelson].”
Second Song Track List
1. “The Foggy Edge Of Time”
2. “Day After Day”
3. “Earth Girl”
4. “Second Song”
5. “Casting Me Away From You”
6. “Soon I Might Be Going”
7. “I’ll Love You Forever”
