Neil Young’s Adventures on the Hi-Res Frontier

Laugh at Neil Young first and get it out of the way. With a new Crazy Horse album, a new book, and his very own high-resolution streaming platform, the 73-year-old rock legend has set himself the modest goals of reuniting his beloved band, reinventing the wheel, and rescuing music for all humanity. That’s what rock legends are for, right?

Young’s third book in seven years, To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission to Save High-Quality Audio, is part manifesto and part how-not-to manual. Cowritten with tech collaborator Phil Baker, it details the pair’s attempt to market Pono, the short-lived, high-resolution, stand-alone audio player launched in 2015 at the same moment that low-resolution streaming services like Spotify virtually killed downloads. And it follows the story through Xstream—the high-resolution streaming backend to the Neil Young Archives, ingeniously designed to automatically adjust to a user’s available bandwidth—and Baker and Young’s struggles to license the tech.

“The world is turnin’, I hope it don’t turn away,” Young sang on the title track to 1974’s On the Beach. Some have ridiculed the Canadian songwriter, arguing that Pono’s better-than-CD resolution was inaudible to the human ear (let alone an old rocker’s ear), or that sound quality is something only old people care about, anyway. But the world has perhaps finally started to turn with him.

Courtesy of BenBella Books

Consider: A month before To Feel the Music’s September publication, Apple announced it was expanding its high-resolution music offering. (As some have pointed out, though, “Apple Digital Masters” AAC files are not the same as actual hi-res, defined as anything better than a CD’s quality of 44.1-kHz/16-bit audio.) And, a week after the book hit stores, Amazon announced its own impending entrance into the high-resolution streaming market, likewise with its own definition of the term. With the falling costs of storage and bandwidth, a widespread shift to high-resolution is perhaps inevitable, even if few besides Neil Young seem to be advocating for it (and Spotify continues to dismiss it). Young doesn’t want high-quality audio to be a luxury, but the default, at no extra cost. Amazon’s announcement took Young’s dream one large step closer to reality.

“The world is gonna get it in a big way, and it’s all gonna be there,” Young told me a few days before Amazon’s announcement, sounding quietly triumphant after more than a half decade of battle in the hi-res trenches. “Everything from the record companies will get to be heard through streaming in a very big way, and I think it’s gonna change Earth.”

Dreamin’ Man

Known for aching melodies, screaming feedback, and a voice as creaky as an old acoustic six-string, Neil Young has long made the kind of music synonymous with vinyl’s warmth. He is also known for a half century of nearly mystical recording techniques, favoring rough drafts and first takes. The Telluride sessions for Colorado, his first album with Crazy Horse since 2012, took place under a full moon, another favorite practice.

But for all Young’s obsessions with instinct, he has also long possessed an equally mystic attention to technical detail. Since the ’70s, Young’s guitar rig has included home-brewed electronics like the Whizzer, invented by associate Sal Trentino, using potentiometers to control an amp’s volume knob from a foot switch without incurring signal loss. Young’s name can be found on several dozen patents pertaining to electric cars, model trains, and media distribution. The attention toward the homegrown even extended to picking special material for his LP jackets, like the earthy oatmeal paper used for 1972’s Harvest and the stark blotter of 1975’s Tonight’s the Night.

Now consider the well-documented ways major streaming services have reduced fidelity of all kinds in the name of convenience. Sound quality has diminished, with parts of Spotify’s catalog allegedly built on suspect recordings. (Spotify declined to comment on the allegations.) Album art has been reduced to a thumbnail of a front cover with no back. Royalty rates have bottomed out, reportedly about less than half a cent per stream on Spotify or Amazon Prime in a recent estimate. (Spotify notes that rather than paying artists per stream, it pays rights-holders, labels, or distribution companies according to their agreements, who then pay artists. Amazon does not comment on payments.)

If Young is going to summon Crazy Horse and schlep a bunch of beautiful analog gear to a remote, high-altitude recording studio under a full moon, how could he possibly be satisfied with what his albums sound and look like via digital music distribution? Or, for that matter, take it as anything less than an insult to his life’s work?

“There aren’t really music streaming services so much as there are tech streaming services,” Young rumbles from Los Angeles, giving voice to an increasingly common complaint from music fans and musicians alike. “It’s not the same thing from what I see, or they’d be complaining themselves about the technology they have to use. They don’t seem to understand what the music’s about, or care about who’s making it.”

“Besides sounding really terrible, there’s no credit given for anything,” he continues, warming to the point that the tech world has seemingly hijacked the music business without actually caring about music. “You can’t find the information, and it doesn’t seem to matter to them. Yet we’re in the information age and they’re tech companies, so that’s very confusing.”

Computer Cowboy

Seven years after Pono’s attempt to change consumer audio, its successor project Neil Young Archives actually has created a new way to experience music, inventing a complete, self-contained ecosystem for an artist to present themselves. The library happens to be almost entirely made up of Young’s music and is designed in such a way that virtually no other artist would possibly want to use it as a model. There are switches to flick, file drawers to thumb through, and timelines to crawl. “It’s like an art project if I was in the age of newspapers,” he says of the site, custom coded down to its Myst-like sound effects.

While streaming services have flattened major labels and small companies alike into the same bland corporate templates, Neil Young Archives is a new way to imagine what it could mean to be an independent musician outside the mainstream of the music industry. Even as contemporary artists splatter themselves across music streaming services—plus Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, Soundcloud, Facebook, and Twitter—Young’s Archive has created the virtual equivalent of his oatmeal-paper LP jackets from the ’70s, keeping his music safe inside.

His whole catalog is there, plus rotating movies and the occasional livestream from the road, all for $1.99 a month. The site’s free public face is the Neil Young Archives Times-Contrarian, overseen personally by Young. “We’re not a newspaper that is timely,” smirks Young, the paper’s main editor, print setter, and predominant contributor, who posts more days than not. “We may be early or late, and it doesn’t bother us.”

The Times-Contrarian isn’t a blog, but formats itself after an actual newspaper, cramming stories side by side in columns over seven impossible-to-fold pages. Despite its occasional slow-loading clunkiness, it is the only news source I don’t dread checking each morning. “It was a very difficult site to build,” says Phil Baker, who runs its day-to-day operations.

Baker says the Neil Young Archives site is up to about 25,000 subscribers, still around 15,000 short of their goal but also still growing. “We could have gotten newspaper software, but we didn’t do that because that would be like an ordinary newspaper. He wanted that look that the Times-Contrarian now provides, everything about that—the color, the fonts, the columns.”

This is no Jeremy Renner Official run by a third-party startup, but Young’s own social anti-media. There are no interns or assistants posting under the Canadian-born musician’s name. After a recent New York Times feature, Young took to the Times-Contrarian to repost and annotate the entire story. “I’m not putting down Mark Zuckerberg,” the paper of record quoted him as saying.

“I am putting down Mark [Zuckerberg],” Young clarified in the Times-Contrarian. “He is in over his head.” There is no comment section, but lots of reader mail.

Over the years, Young’s lefting and righting has become legendary to the point of legal action. An incomplete list of extra-musical projects Young has been derided for includes sci-fi filmmaking, a project to convert a 1959 Lincoln Continental into a gas-electric hybrid, and buying a stake in the Lionel model train company. When Neil Young Archives was announced, @80sNeilYoung was on it.

But Neil Young Archives is hardly extra-musical. It is convoluted homegrown tech designed to prevent Young’s music from being downgraded into mere content. It is a memory palace and living home for Crazy Horse and the many other idiosyncratic and accomplished bands he has fronted, from the Santa Monica Flyers to the International Harvesters and other configurations yet to jam. It is absurd and over the top and contradictory. Just like Neil Young.

Don’t Spook the Horse

High on the list of Young’s most enduring and idiosyncratic technologies is Crazy Horse themselves. Once a Los Angeles doo-wop band called Danny & the Memories, formed in 1963, they’d transfigured into the Rockets by late 1968, around the time they met Young, who joined for jam sessions in their Laurel Canyon garage and rechristened them Crazy Horse.

In recent years, Young has played most often with Promise of the Real, a younger band featuring Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah. “Promise of the Real is a very beautiful energy,” Young says. “They’ve got a great feeling; it’s amazing to play with them.”

“That said, Crazy Horse is not a great band and does not have a great feeling all the time. And yet Crazy Horse is able to go places that I can’t go with anybody else. I know I can go bipolar, I can go cosmic, I can go wherever I want to go when we play the instrumentals and the band just starts to gel like this one big heartbeat, and it’s this special thing I’ve only experienced with Crazy Horse. Other guys have got their bands, and that’s true for them, too. But this is the most cosmic band I’ve played in, period. There’s no comparison.”

Danny Whitten, Memories front man and Crazy Horse lead guitarist, died of an overdose in 1972. Frank “Poncho” Sampedro came on in 1975 and departed last year, a major shift in the band’s chemistry. “We realized that Poncho isn’t up for it anymore, because he’s over there in Hawaii and he’s grooving,” Young says. “We love Poncho, but we decided that we were going to keep going.”

In the guitar chair now is Nils Lofgren, a Crazy Horse collaborator since the Whitten era and an auxiliary member on the Horse’s stand-alone 1971 debut. But when Young speaks of Crazy Horse’s inconsistencies and ecstasies, he means drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot.

“There’s a very solid simplicity with Billy and Ralph, and it lends itself to space,” says Lofgren of the battery. “You can go off the grid a little bit, but they’re going to keep you covered, and there’s going to be space for it. It’s not going to be a train wreck of rhythms, even when Ralphie steps up his fills. They’re just sometimes so unusual and rhythmic, but Billy would always be there on the one.”

The band arrived in Telluride a few days early to acclimate to the altitude, with oxygen tanks provided by Young. (It’s legal in Colorado now.) “We’d go out at dinnertime every night and watch the moon as it was becoming full,” Lofgren says. Rejoining the band for a rehearsal-free tour in early 2018, the 68-year-old junior guitarist subsequently holed up with the rhythm section at Talbot’s place in South Dakota for a few days of deeper musical reconnecting.

Young recently debuted *Mountaintop*, a full-length documentary about the making of *Colorado*, screening in theaters for one night only (October 22) and presumably making it eventually to a certain artist-owned streaming service/archive site.

Colorado boasts several firsts for a Crazy Horse album. “We started off doing something that we’d never done before, just to see what would happen,” Young says. He’d played some solo shows in the months leading up to the session and rediscovered a concept even more satisfying than first takes: no first takes at all.

“Every time you do a song, it’s an opportunity to define it and what it means and how it feels,” he says. “So if you feel it while you’re doing the song [live], you’re fucked, you’ve already done the song. It’s only going to happen once like that, when you get that feeling. And so I had that feeling on a couple of the songs, that I’d done the song. I didn’t want to do it again.”

“It’s really hard to chase something once the singer’s done,” Lofgren says. “Why do it? So it was quite challenging. When Neil plays live, he’s got great time, but he wasn’t playing to a click track. Ralphie and Billy were great at learning the track and weaving in with the groove.”

There are jams and there are half-baked ideas. There are indelible melodies and eco-anthems and echoes of the Memories. There is a rhythm track made from Lofgren’s tap dancing shoes run through an octave divider (“Eternity”). There is Ralph Molina’s and Billy Talbot’s otherworldly sense of space on perhaps the most exquisitely fragile Crazy Horse jam of all time (“Milky Way”), the type of creation Young wants listeners to experience in the same fidelity as the band did.

“I’m glad this new record is benefitting from all this technology, because it’s been a lifelong quest to keep the music sounding right,” Lofgren says. “I remember being in a car on Neil’s ranch with him when CDs first came out, and he was lamenting how the sound was so damaged. He was pretty horrified by it, and I was kind of amazed. He really made me aware of the damage the fidelity had taken.”

“I don’t have Neil’s ears to really get as bothered as he is by it,” Lofgren says, “but it is an extraordinary difference when you know what you’re doing and you get the sound right.”

Young grew disillusioned with digital recording “about the same time I stopped listenin’ to my own records,” he once said, pinpointing the 1983 first draft of Old Ways. “We had these Sony digital tape recorders; they were huge,” Young tells me. “I was going, wow, there’s no hiss! But then, after one day of mixing, my ears were ringing, and I knew with this technology I couldn’t mix the way I used to mix, which would be louder and as big and beautiful as you can make it. They didn’t record at a very high rate. I didn’t realize what rate was.”

It would take Young roughly a decade to escape back to the world of the sound he loved. Attributing the tinnitus he was afflicted with while mixing 1991’s Weld to “low-quality digital sound,” he began his return to soothing analog recording techniques for 1992’s Harvest Moon, even building his own echo chambers, and would become one of analog sound’s most famous ambassadors.

For Colorado, he brought in the “green board,” a Universal Audio 610 console once belonging to Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco, used on Harvest. But while Young might surround himself in hip analog gear and mystical tricks, the hippest way to listen to his new album certainly isn’t Spotify, it’s not on CD, and it isn’t even vinyl, but as a 192-kHz/24-bit file.

Revolution Blues

“It’s kind of like being a pagan mechanic,” says Young, describing his balance of the mystical and technical. It’s a full moon when we speak, though it’s accidental this time. He understands it’s an uphill battle to make others believe. “Audio is the invisible thing in the room you can’t see. If you’re listening to a song you know or an arrangement you really like, audio quality isn’t something you’re necessarily connected to. When it comes in big, you don’t recognize how big it is until you’ve been living in it for a while. It’s very trippy.”

In the estimate of Young’s sainted manager Elliot Roberts—who died in June at the age of 76—Young spent more than $1 million of his own money chasing his hi-res dream. Says Phil Baker, Young’s coauthor on Feel the Music, one-time Pono COO, and day-to-day chief of Neil Young Archives, “One of the surprises to me was when Pono was all over, [Neil] just said, ‘OK, we just keep moving, we’ll do something better, we’ll do streaming.’ There was like 30 seconds of hesitation and then off to the next project.”

Just as when he’s taken up various ecological mantles over the years, Young is fighting large and historical forces. As Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format argues, the telephone industry built itself over the course of a century on squeezing as much content into as little bandwidth as possible. By the time Apple decided to focus on low-resolution audio for its earliest iPods, it was a fait accompli. Young’s audio quests have been called quixotic, lonely, or worse, but he is hardly a solitary figure in his pursuit of high-definition audio. Or, rather, he doesn’t have to be.

In fact, part of the problem was solved long before Young came along. First there were AIFF and WAV files, soon followed by the more taggable FLACs, for distributing CD or better quality, the standard Neil Young Archives would ultimately follow. But, by 1999, there was already a format even higher-resolution than that: Direct Stream Digital. Since then, with a small but devoted audience, DSD has become the audiophile standard, higher than the 96-kHZ/24-bit FLAC-based audio of Tidal Hi-Fi, and even higher than the 192-kHZ/24-bit FLAC favored by Neil Young Archives.

Two years before Pono, hi-fi purveyor Astell&Kern introduced its AK100 portable player, supporting DSD, FLAC, AIFF, and other lossless formats. Recommended by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, DSD has been used on SACDs and, after complaints from audiophiles and a software update, was made to be compatible with the original Pono. “When we released our first DSD files in 2010, there weren’t even devices to play them,” says Cookie Marenco, a veteran producer and engineer whose Blue Coast Music and DSD-Guide have become destinations for contemporary digital audiophiles.

Since the typical DSD download is about 10 gigabytes for 60 minutes of music, Marenco (like Young and Amazon) is counting on bandwidth issues becoming a thing of the past.

“The audio we’re using probably won’t really be adopted for another five or 10 years, even though it’s possible to stream now,” Marenco says. “The highest rate now for high-resolution streaming is 192,000 hertz. DSD 256 has more than 11 million parts per sample.” DSD 128 is already a standard format on portable audio players by Fiio, Pioneer, Astell&Kern, and more than a hundred others.

A network of sites sell DSD files by artists from across the spectrum traditionally appreciated by audiophiles, from classical to metal, ambient to jazz, plus live shows by Dead & Co. and Bruce Springsteen. “The whole thing is completely consumer driven,” Marenco says. “But I’ll be happy as a clam if people are just listening to FLAC. Passionate listeners deserve sound that is better than MP3.”

DSD has not yet made the widespread leap to streaming, though Marenco hopes it will soon. Even before Amazon’s announcement, though, others have made stakes in the high-resolution streaming market. Launched in France roughly a decade ago, Qobuz, the European-based, 24-bit streaming service, hit the United States this spring. It includes Neil Young’s catalog and much else.

There are also many people, such as Young’s sometimes bandmate David Crosby, who believe that audio fidelity is only one part of the problem and that streaming services’ payment structures have damaged the music industry. For musicians and creators, the lack of metadata standards in the mainstream streaming services matters, because it makes it difficult for songwriters and copyright holders to receive proper payment.

Idagio, a classical site that streams in 16-bit FLAC, has attempted to address some of the problems with metadata, understanding that the differences between performers and conductors and composers are significant and that this knowledge often works as a primary tool for discovery. Qobuz, too, includes liner-note credits for as many albums as possible, often sourced from the All Music Guide, as well as scans of CD booklets when provided by the labels, both major steps for a streaming service.

It could be argued, though, that the lack of contextual information is a probable cause of the oft-reported anecdote of not being able to remember any of the artists served up by a service’s algorithm—what some marketers are now calling the “dry streams paradox” of being unable to convert listeners from playlist ears to actual fans.

Neil Young Archives attempts to do it all at once in a way that none of the other services approach, encompassing clear audio, liner-note information, business model, and direct artist-to-fan communication channel. Alongside Qobuz, Phish and other jam acts perhaps come closest, streaming every performance through their own apps, offering FLAC downloads, and webcasting in HD, but they haven’t made the jump to hi-res audio streaming yet.

“Quality whether you want it or not,” reads a motto atop the Times-Contrarian. It might be the streaming service equivalent of the Edsel, but that doesn’t matter. For Neil Young, fidelity is more than just a bitrate, it’s a form of art and truth.

Driftin’ Back

Burrow into the Timeline on the Neil Young Archives, scroll to 1995, and zoom out to display the videos unattached to any particular music session or performance. There, you can watch two episodes of “3 Rail World,” a home video project shot entirely inside Young’s pinecone-adorned model train setup. Young provides the squeaky voice for grizzled, fedora-wearing reporter Clyde Coil. The videos’ presence on Neil Young Archives is likely the first official acknowledgment of Young’s mid-’90s online alter ego.

“Clyde Coil,” Young laughs, as if remembering a friend he hasn’t thought about in awhile. The name became his handle around the time he bought a stake in Lionel model trains, and he used it during his first forays into online forums. “They were some of my last ones too,” he cackles.

“I realized what it was,” he says. “It was an opportunity to really screw with things. That’s what’s so dangerous about it. Because you never really know who you’re talking to, advertising becomes subversive. It’s very weird. I don’t know what to think of it, but I took part in it for a while. I didn’t advertise that it was me. I didn’t want anybody to know who it was, though I didn’t really care.”

Young developed the TrainMaster Command, a wireless control system for Lionel model trains, and the site he built to sell it, CoilCouplers.com, is still live. There, you can read the Hi-Rail Times, a precursor of sorts to the Times-Contrarian. Search out information about “Clyde Coil” and you also find a wealth of cranky rants and a trail of confused forum members. “Clyde Coil was not always popular with everyone!” Young says. “He has to wear a lead cape.”

“It’s all one song” is one of Young’s maxims, and nearly all of his obsessions have ultimately taken him on the same quest for the most direct signal possible. In his 2012 memoir Waging Heavy Peace, he broke character from Clyde Coil and wrote under his own byline about how and why model train whistles should stop trying to imitate train whistles and simply become whistles. One of his last updates for the Hi-Rail Times was to gush over a touch-sensitive new model train bell.

Over the course of our conversation, Young returns constantly to the theme of signal purity, no matter what the topic. There’s always a signal, whether it’s Crazy Horse or Young’s songwriting or some tape deep in his vault or his pedal board or his archival project itself. “Everything you do to a sound has to compromise it.” he says. “If it was great in the first place, and you don’t do anything to it, that’s magic. You haven’t screwed with it. That’s what we’re trying to find—the stuff that’s so beautiful that you don’t have to do anything.”

On Colorado, he returns to the same amp setup on which he recorded Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in 1969: a Fender Deluxe tube amp with no pedals. “My amp on this is just the same amp I had when I first started. I haven’t added anything to it. There’s nothing that changes the signal,” he says, then adds a detailed description of the Whizzer amp control system and why it doesn’t change the signal.

It’s obvious, of course, in the audio resolution of Pono and Xstream, but it’s also true of Neil Young Archives as a whole. The sum total is that, since launching the archives in late 2017, Young has made it fun to be a Neil Young fan in an almost daily way. Neil Young Archives doesn’t provide access to Neil Young. Neil Young Archives is Neil Young, with nothing in between his signal and yours.

Young’s columns in the Times-Contrarian are sometimes accompanied by an author photo many decades old. “I don’t look like this picture anymore, but it’s still me,” he wrote in one, and it very much is.

After casually promising a full Crazy Horse fall tour recently, he turned heel, announcing that he would instead spend the rest of the year focused on digitizing videos for the Hearse Theater, the site’s video cabinet, buzzing happily about a six-camera shoot of a Crazy Horse show at the Catalyst, a small club in Santa Cruz, California, and sounding a lot like his mercurial ’70s self.

“I was thinking we could put that out right now, it’d blow people’s minds!” he exults. “Everything about it is the opposite of how it’s been done with me for years. It’s a lot more free. I have so much stuff, I might as well do whatever I feel like doing with it. I can put something up for three hours if I want to, and whoever sees it, sees it. This way we don’t have to commit to doing anything, but if we want to share something, we can share it.” He is also finishing up a science fiction novel.

So far, Young hasn’t used the Archives to go on any kind of major creative tangent, nor used it to tweak any of his already-extant works, the way Kanye West used Tidal to work and rework Life of Pablo. But Neil Young virtually invented such whims. Once, when the mastering on 1978’s Comes a Time wasn’t up to snuff, he recalled the record’s entire pressing and used the LPs to reroof his barn. The possibilities are endless. Folk-rock science has always had better guitar solos than pop science, anyway.

More Great WIRED Stories

Read More