Following recent claims that Jack White and Neil Young had been working on an album together, Young has confirmed that the former White Stripes frontman will appear on the singer’s new LP.
Entitled A Letter Home, Young’s new album will be available “very soon”, and was recorded at White’s Third Man Records studios in Nashville, with White joining the singer on two tracks, according to Billboard. The album, which features covers of Young’s most revered songwriters and is slated for release this spring, isn’t “ready for primetime yet,” Young said. “But it’s a very unique record. It’s like a time capsule. It doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard that was made recently. And some great songs, some beautiful music.”
As well as revealing details of his new LP, Young went onto discuss some additional potential projects: “I’d like to make a record with a full-blown orchestra, live – a mono recording with one mic,” he said. “I want to do something like that where we really record what happened, with one point of view and the musicians moved closer and farther away, the way it was done in the past. To me that’s a challenge and it’s a sound that’s unbelievable, and you can’t get it any other way. So I’m into doing that.”
If his musical ventures and recent Pono Player project weren’t enough to occupy the veteran rocker, Young also confirmed that he is in “the final editing stages” for his second book, Special Deluxe, which is scheduled for release this year and “focuses on my life as regards to my transportation, as regards to my love for cars”.
No further details are available about his forthcoming album. At the start of 2014, however, a report on the Neil Young fansite Thrasher’s Wheat suggested the prospective tracklist for A Letter Home would feature covers such as Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind, Tim Hardin’s Reason to Believe, Phil Ochs’ Changes, Gordon Lightfoot’s Early Morning Rain and Ivory Joe Hunter’s Since I Met You Baby. The site also claimed that the album was likely to incorporate a version of Needle of Death, by the late Bert Jansch, which Young covered last spring.
• Neil Young and Crazy Horse will headline a concert at London’s Hyde Park on 12 July.
