Neil Young Heads to "Prairie"

Neil Young's Prairie Wind will hit stores September 20th. The album -- his first since suffering a brain aneurysm in March -- will feature long-time collaborators keyboardist Spooner Oldham, pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith and drummer Carl Himmel.

Young is laying the recording process bare by releasing the album as a CD/DVD. "The DVD shows us recording the whole record," he writes in a post on his Web site. "Every note you hear, you see!" Young also promises that the elusive Archives, Volume 1, a long-promised and exhaustive document of his career, "will follow."

The rock legend will be the focus of Jonathan Demme's cameras next month, as the Silence of the Lambs director adds a Young gem to his collection of music-related films, ranging from Stop Making Sense (Talking Heads) to Storefront Hitchcock (Robyn Hitchcock). The movie will feature Young's August performances at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium.

Alongside Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews, Young is also set to make his annual appearance at Farm Aid on September 18th at the Tweeter Center in Tinley Park, Illinois.

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Song Stories

“I'm Yours”

Jason Mraz | 2008

Jason Mraz re-emerged after his disappointing second album with this lead single, a Jack Johnson-esque ditty about giving yourself fully to someone else. The success of the reggae-tinged song (it earned two Grammy nods and a spot on the Billboard singles chart for well over a year) was something the folk-pop singer never predicted when he wrote it in 15 minutes at home. "I played a happy-hippie chord progression that would probably work without 50 different Bob Marley songs," he told Rolling Stone. "I thought, 'It's too novelty. This is a nursery rhyme,'" concluding that "you can never guess what's gonna be a hit."

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