

The first Neil Young Archives release was a truncated 1970 show with Crazy Horse, 2006’s Live at the Fillmore East. “Low resolution = chicken wire.” The seeds were planted in 1989 “High resolution = fine screen,” Young writes in the book. In their 2019 memoir To Feel the Music, Young and Baker tell the story of how they’ve been trying to save high-resolution audio for years. This has been a long time coming-decades, even.

Like everything else on NYA, Homegrown will be streamable in the highest audio resolution your system can handle. It’s actually beautiful,” he said about Homegrown in a post last month. Soon, Young promises, his long-shelved 1975 album Homegrown will be revealed. The site contains Young’s entire catalog-from his 1963 single as part of the Squires, “ Aurora,” to his 2019 album with Crazy Horse, Colorado-in the highest bit rate your system can handle. The archives began as a physical release series in 1989 and launched as a free website in 2017, before pivoting to a subscription service in 2019. It’s his vision.” (Young was not available to comment for this piece.) “Some people get right into it and others find it a little challenging the first couple of times,” Young’s technology assistant, Phil Baker, admits to Fortune. Most importantly-as Young is fond of saying-it “sounds like God.” Earthy and tactile yet slightly surreal, it looks like an early computer game à la Myst. This quirky project, the Neil Young Archives, cost “ well over a million dollars” out of pocket, his late manager, Elliot Roberts, estimated last year.
