In the Van With Neil Young: An Exclusive Interview

Rolling Stone caught up with Neil Young in St. Paul, Minnesota.

I was impressed with how well the new songs came off live -- the crowd really liked them. Do you get that sense from the stage?
On the stage, I'm mostly so into what I'm doing that I don't really realize what the crowd is up to, but I can hear them at the end, and each song, they seem to react more and more to, and there are some that they're kind of shocked at, like when we do "Families," and they see all of those soldiers over there and they see some of the images that go with it, it reminds them of what the songs are about. The songs are important songs, even though they're just folk songs. They're no big deal, but they're just talking about things that some people feel. When they hear what you say, what they think, it just frees them up, it's like someone having a voice for them.

"Find the Cost of Freedom" was very powerful. I have rarely heard a crowd so still and quiet.
It's the real deal, it's not about entertainment. This is what's so funny about what's going on today. People make a record, I make a whole album about this war, and some people are still stupid enough to say that I just did it for the money because I'm an old fart. They're out of touch. It's not about the entertainment business, it's about a fucking war that people are getting killed in. Musicians, you can only ignore things for so long, and things that people say start soaking in on you, and it just reflects everything you hear on the street. There's nothing new in any of this.

I think that of all the upsetting things going on, not letting us see the caskets. . .
If he went to a funeral, which he has never done, if he did, they're afraid it would cause more television coverage for the war. I'm pretty sure -- I would even go out on a limb and say that by the time this is printed, that he will finally go to a funeral, because he's slowly starting to do the things that are obvious that he's done that don't make any difference to anything other than people's feelings. Those are the things he can fix. The other things, where he screwed the country out of billions and billions of dollars, and thousands of lives, and ruined our reputation around the world, those things aren't going to change by going to a funeral.

When you first booked this tour, you didn't have those songs yet, right?
No. I felt them.

How quickly did they come to you?
They came in a period of about a week and a half.

Is that the fastest you've done an album?
I don't know. Tonight's the Night was pretty fast. I've done a few fast ones. Quickness has nothing to do with it, it's how into it you are, and how important it is to be good. It's not important to have every note perfect, but it's important to have the message felt, and I like to record a version where I'm singing live. I don't like to overdub. So if I'm delivering and I can see the picture and I can feel like I'm talking to people with my performance, that's it for me. That's all I need, I don't need anything else. If I'm into something a lot, like I was this, then it happens real fast. That doesn't mean I threw it off or anything. It's physically draining and mentally exhausting to do it that fast, but when it's coming, it's a gift. It's all a gift. You can't turn it down. You've got to stay open all the time.

They worked well with Crosby, Stills and Nash, they took the place of the choir, really. I felt that when they translated to stage, they sounded almost better.
Yeah, well, it's live, and I love to hear the choir singing along with us, too. In some cases, in the audience, you can hear the audience singing the songs, and time is going by, and they're getting to know them better. So it's the real thing, real people and their feelings.

How did you put together the show's set list?
We rehearsed for about ten days for the tour. We tried sprinkling my songs throughout the show, and that didn't work, because they disturbed everything. We put them all together, basically, and isolated other ones. Having four in a row here and having the bulk of it done in one place, that took us almost two weeks to discover, that that was the way to do it. We mostly worked on remembering what we were doing and the old songs, you have to practice and remember them.

For a good twenty-five years, you didn't tour with these guys. Why, in the past six years, have you done three of them?
I think it's a time of life where this reuniting with your friends that you had when you were a kid and when you were growing up, it's a big part of life, keeping those relationships going. I like playing with these guys, and I like playing with Crazy Horse. It's all different.