Neil Young has moved from the fireside of the home he shares with actress Daryl Hannah to their barn for the newest chapter of his ongoing Fireside Sessions streaming concert series. They are calling it a Barnyard Edition.
The session begins in a large field where Young plays his 2014 Storytone tune “Tumbleweed” on the ukulele, which was the standard show closer at his 2017 and 2018 solo acoustic shows. The action then moves near a barn where he plays “Homegrown” as chickens mill about and feed. After noodling around for a bit on what sounds like an instrumental version of “Speakin’ Out” from Tonight’s the Night, he performs a moving rendition of “Harvest,” the title track to his 1972 LP that was partially recorded in a barn.
The Harvest theme continues with “Old Man,” followed by a rare acoustic version of “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.” He wraps up the show with an epic “War of Man” from Harvest Moon, which he sings in the doorway of the barn as the sun sets.
This is his fifth Fireside Sessions concert since the series began in mid-March. They’ve all been directed by Hannah, who films them on her iPad. “The sessions will continue,” Young recently wrote on the Neil Young Times Contrarian section of the Neil Young Archives. “They’re good for us all. I hope we don’t run out of songs, but probably that would take a long time. These songs are for all of us, left, right, in between. ALL. We are stronger together.”
Next month, Young is finally releasing Homegrown, an album he recorded in 1974 and shelved in favor of Tonight’s the Night. Some of the songs appeared on future records, but others have never been heard before.
Young hasn’t played in public since Farm Aid in September 2019. He was planning a Crazy Horse North American arena tour for this year, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to postpone it indefinitely. “May be a couple of years before I feel safe asking people to come and see/hear me,” he recently wrote on the Neil Young Archives. “That’s just the way it is.”
