On new album 'Second Song,' Neil Young meditates on the passage of time

The instrumental track "The Emperor of Wyoming" kicks off the 1969 self-titled debut from the venerated songwriter Neil Young.But some 57 years later, that song's distinct melody has resurfaced as part of Young's 50th studio album, Second Song, out Sept.

18.Along with five, brand new, sprawling and personal tracks from Young and his backing band, the Chrome Hearts, the album features two new recordings of songs he wrote while he was still a teenager in Canada, drawn from his massive and meticulously kept personal archive.

One of those songs is "Casting Me Away from You," a track he first recorded around 1965 in a friend's attic in Toronto that he would later rework and release as "Emperor of Wyoming." The other, "I'll Love You Forever," was recorded in 1964 as a love song for his high school girlfriend, "my first real love" he told me.That interplay between Young's compositional work as a younger man, and the musical (and emotional) place he finds himself in 2026, feels like the thesis of Second Song.The album plays less like a momentary snapshot and more like a meditation on life from someone who doesn't believe in getting stuck anywhere along the timeline.

"I dream a way of living, a way of sharing what we find," he sings on the album's title track."A way of walking slowly, through the smokey leaves of time."The album was recorded to tape at Rick Rubin's Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, Calif.

and produced by Lou Adler, along with the Volume Dealers, made up of engineer Niko Bolas and Young himself.The analog nature of the album is a point of pride for Young, who has long decried the deterioration of audio and sound quality in a world where digital recordings have become ubiquitous.

In a long conversation from the control room at Shangri-La, Young talked to me about making Second Song and his strong views on music-making, from his issues with AI to the importance of retaining the soul in a recording: "I feel really badly for people around the world who no longer...