As Neil Young passes 80, time doesn’t stand still. For Young, time is a shifting, changing, moving force that encompasses the past, the present, and the future, and not always in that order. While his contemporary Bob Dylan has said “don’t look back,” Young often does, using memory as a jumping-off point for yet another new song and another new album.
Young also subscribes to Dylan’s assertion not to look back but to move ahead. He does it by creating new sounds, working with new people, and confounding those who would like him to remain the blue-jeaned ’60s icon of Sugar Mountain, forever mining for gold and living the hippie dream.
While he does release a cascade of archival music, it’s the new albums and new groups he plays live with on the road that keep him as relevant as ever. Time is very much on his mind with his new live album, appropriately titled As Time Explodes. The name of the album follows other similarly titled releases: Time Fades Away and Comes A Time, as well as albums where some reference to time exists: Tonight’s The Night, Long May You Run, Old Ways, Early Daze, Decade, Journey Through the Past, and Before and After, to name a few.
In 2010 and 2011, when Young reformed the Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay for benefit shows and a short tour, at the Bonnaroo Festival, in Manchester, Tennessee, on June 11, 2011, he walked on stage and introduced the performance by saying, “We’re Buffalo Springfield; we’re from the past.”
On his new live album, the past is very much on Young’s mind. The 13-song set is taken from shows on Young’s 2025, 31-date tour of Europe and North America. It features the Chrome Hearts, with Spooner Oldham joining Young, along with three members of Promise of the Real, including Micah Nelson, one of Willie Nelson’s sons, with whom Young has been playing for some time. The set list is predictably unpredictable. Micah is no longer part of Promise of the Real.
The album starts with a trilogy of acoustic-based songs capped off with “Harvest Moon,” before Young and company jump into a countrified, ragged rocking version of “Ohio” that unfortunately still feels so relevant. “Name of Love” quiets things down again, and “Be The Rain” offers some chilling vocal effects.
The new song “Big Crime” takes direct aim at the corruption of the Trump regime and is yet another in a long list of on-target political broadsides Young has written over the years. It is right at home on a live album that includes “Ohio,” making the songs bookends chronicling the two most criminal presidents in American history. “Long Walk Home” is the perfect follow-up and is one of the many tracks here with a mournful feel.
On the second disc, Young and the band start with the edgy “Vampire Blues,” followed by the sprawling “Cortez the Killer,” the elegiac, still relevant “After the Gold Rush,” with its environmental apocalypse narrative even scarier in 2026, and a long, sprawling “Like A Hurricane,” where the band finally opens things up full throttle. The album closes with the fairly new road song “Silver Eagle.”
Much of the edge, guitar feedback, fury, and raging glory of Young’s live albums with Crazy Horse are missing here, but this set captures Young at 80: still relevant, with new songs to sing and highlighting songs from the past that still ring true. The music is a perfect mix of country roots and unpolished, gentle rockin’ power.
The package is a double album in a gatefold, with die-cut paper sleeves. Part of the Neil Young Archives Performance Series, the albums are digitally sourced. The album was produced by Young, Niko Bolas, and Lou Adler, returning for the second time. Adler also produced the upcoming new studio album Second Song, due in September.
The album doesn’t feel for sure like it’s a restless farewell, so much as another road chapter with an undetermined number of bus stops still to come.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
