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01 - Neil Young - Second Song - The Foggy Edge Of Time.flac 
02 - Neil Young - Second Song - Day After Day.flac 
03 - Neil Young - Second Song - Earth Girl.flac 
04 - Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts - Second Song - Second Song.flac 
05 - Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts - Second Song - Casting Me Away From You.flac 
06 - Neil Young - Second Song - Soon I Might Be Going.flac 
07 - Neil Young - Second Song - I’ll Love You Forever.flac 


Exystence Review ---------------
Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts – Second Song (2026)
Filed Under: rock by exy — 5 Comments
September 17, 2026

At the start of 2026, MOJO enlisted the help of our readers to compile a guide to the best new Neil Young albums of the 21st century.
It had proved, thus far, a hectic and complicated 26 years: by our count there had been 20 studio albums, six live albums, two memoirs, approximately 30 Archives releases,
at least seven movies, innumerable tours, a revolutionary car and a Toblerone-shaped rival to the iPod.
Young’s 21st new album of the 21st Century, however, is strong evidence that the Top 10 we constructed needs revision.
Second Song is comfortably his best since the molten sprawl of 2012’s Psychedelic Pill, the last hurrah of Poncho Sampedro-era Crazy Horse.
And while Young’s current backing band, The Chrome Hearts, can channel the Horse’s monolithic stomp, it is their grace and sensitivity –
their Stray Gators acoustic sway – that comes to the fore on this late-period classic.

Second Song, then, sits on a continuum that stretches from Harvest and Comes a Time through to Silver and Gold and Prairie Wind, via Harvest Moon –
a record that also featured significant contributions from the Chrome Hearts’ keyboardist, Spooner Oldham.
The vibes are warm, reflective, not a little frayed around the edges, as Young’s commitment to spontaneity only becomes more militant with age.
“You don’t want to think about it.
You don’t want to have it practised,” Young told us recently, in the interview that heads up MOJO 396.
“The whole idea is to not know what you’re doing.” “Even jazz guys work the stuff out a little more,” bassist Corey McCormick confesses to MOJO’s Grayson Haver Currin for the same piece.

The younger members of The Chrome Hearts are evidently fast learners, however, and flexible accomplices.
Second Song’s title track unravels haphazardly over 11 minutes, but the playing is constantly empathetic and inventive –
the dulcimer with which Micah Nelson tracks Young’s acoustic was a spur-of-the-moment decision, which complements the silvery flow of the song.

It’s a song of memory, of old ways, but not one that’s exactly predicated on melancholy defeat.
“Too much has changed around us,” Young sings, beautifully, between bursts of harmonica, as drummer Anthony LoGerfo keeps up a measured swing, “but we can bring it back somehow.”

“I disassociate it from the time frame,” Young tells Grayson, and that feels like a critical theme of the record itself – one where old memories and songs, old and young collaborators,
become blurred and interdependent, collapsing in on one another in Neil’s autonomous zone.
I’ll Love You Forever was first recorded by Young in 1964 with his teenage band, The Squires, and if you listen to the original on the first Archives boxset,
it sounds like an enchanted bit of adolescent twang; a lonesome surf ballad to a first love.
Revisited 62 eventful years later, however, the lyrics have a new resonance – a paean to the miracles of finding a soulmate later in life, in the shape of Daryl Hannah –
and the music has matured into a cosily evocative echo of Harvest Moon.

There’s nothing unusual about Young digging out and re-recording lost songs from his vaults, of course, but going as far back as the time before Buffalo Springfield is new,
and a neat way of showcasing the robust consistency of his songcraft that was there from the start.
Casting Me Away From You originally dates from 1965, and manifested on Archives Volume 1 as a clean-cut folk revival strummer with his friend Comrie Smith.
Now, in the hands of The Chrome Hearts it’s fuller-blooded, knockabout country; a wholly successful resurrection.

The best songs, though, are three new burners: the title track, Day After Day and Soon I Might Be Going.
Day After Day has that off-the cuff air of many latterday Young songs, as if he’s articulating every random passing thought.
This time, though, the overall effect is more cohesive than whimsical, a flowing evocation of ongoing personal contentment.
“Now the sun is out and the snow’s melting on the roof,” he sings.
“I hear the water drops falling so the day is here/ You’ll be coming down the stairs and I’ll make a special cup for you.” The artlessness is touching,
the improvising delicacy of the Chrome Hearts perfectly attuned as it rolls on; a Colorado reverie, with echoes of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,
that’s stronger than some of Young’s other freeform paeans to Hannah in recent years.

Soon I Might Be Going, meanwhile, rides in on stunned electric powerchords, a masterpiece of how internal and external weather, the personal and political,
nature and mortality, become entangled in ever more profound and perhaps confounding ways.
It’s an open letter of a kind, possibly addressed to his daughter Amber Jean (their relationship the focus of the more upsetting Dark Mirage, from 2025’s Talkin’ To The Trees),
that also finds room for a sorrowful allusion to Donald Trump “tearing down the old White House”.
The mood is valedictory, the feedback shade and Oldham’s organ adding a fraught undertow to the strikingly lovely lilt of it all.
But even here, there’s a recognition of the temporal nature of things, the possibility of change and “waiting for a song”: for better or worse, all these things shall pass.
— MOJO