Neil Young Releasing New Disc, 'Le Noise,' Next Month

Neil Young has announced on Facebook that his new album will be called Le Noise, and that it will be released on CD, vinyl and iTunes on September 28th. In late November it will then become available on Blu-Ray, and in the form of an iPhone and iPad app. "The app will be free," Young wrote. "It gives you an interactive album cover. Forgive my use of the word 'album.' I am old school. When you buy the songs/movies from I-tunes they show up in your APP."

Young and producer Daniel Lanois recorded the album in a Los Angeles mansion earlier this year. "We cut a couple of solo acoustic songs, but the rest is very electric," Lanois told Rolling Stone last month. "There's no band, but I got in there with my sonics. There's nothing else out there like it." Young previewed many of the tracks on his recent solo theater tour. You can to see his performance of "Hitchhiker," at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, here. Young first performed the autobiographical tune - which features a list of the drugs he has ingested over the decades - on the 1992 Harvest Moon tour.

Neil Young also took to the web recently to address negative fan comments on the popular Neil Young fansite Thrasher's Wheat. (The site’s commenters have complained about Young’s ticket prices, charity work with Tyson Foods, and that he hasn’t played with Crazy Horse for years.) "This is the most respected site on the net for this type of activity," Young wrote about Thrasher's Wheat on his own web site. "Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in what I am doing,” he continued, addressing the site’s operators. “There is always negativity with any internet endeavour. Now it has perhaps worn you down. It is alright to say goodbye ... Whether you choose to continue or just hang it up and get on with your life is up to you.”

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Song Stories

“Help Me”

Joni Mitchell | 1974

Joni Mitchell wrote and recorded this song for her album Court and Spark, but she had to switch from her regular band to make the song sound exactly the way she wanted. "I had attempted to play my music with rock & roll players," she told Rolling Stone. "They’d laugh, 'Awww, isn't that cute? She's trying to teach us how to play.'" Mitchell switched to a jazz band, Tom Scott’s L.A. Express, and scored the biggest hit of her career in the process.

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