Neil Young And Crazy Horse To Release Lost 2000 Album

Neil Young and Crazy Horse are resurrecting their aborted 2000 album Toast for release sometime in the near future. Recorded at San Francisco's Toast Studios, the group worked for a few frustrating months on the disc before scrapping nearly all of it. According to a post on Young's website, the album's co-producer John Hanlon is at work mixing the songs. "Many songs share a bluesy, jazz-tinged vibe as a common thread," the post says. "Three solid rockers are interspersed in the mix. Other songs are long with extensive explorations between verses, a Crazy Horse trademark, kind of like a down-played Tonight's the Night, except these songs deal directly with love and loss, not drugs."

The item concludes with the news that "This first NYA 'Special Edition' is the beginning of a new series of unreleased albums." This begs some questions: Is he also going to release the fabled Homegrown (1975), Chrome Dreams (1977), Times Square (1989) and god knows what else is sitting in the vault? Isn't the box set supposed to come out this year? Why release these things separately? Anyway, for a good idea of what the Toast songs might be sound like, check out this killer performance of "Goin' Home" below. It's the only track to survive the sessions, and probably the best song he's put out in the past decade.

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Song Stories

“Tonight's the Night”

The Shirelles | 1960

The lead cut and title track from this girl group's debut album, "Tonight's the Night" was written by 19-year-old bandmember Shirley Owens, who sings lead, and producer Luther Dixon. The band from Passaic, New Jersey met in high school, first calling themselves the Pequellos. The song's frank thoughts about sexual and emotional surrender was racy for the time, but that didn't stop the Chiffons from cutting a similar version immediately after the original came out. "We were the first female group to write some of our own material," band member Beverly Lee recalls. "We did have some say-so in our writing."

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