“I knew it would come out someday”: the album that Neil Young took 22 years to release
Every year, there seems to be another archival Neil Young album release, and as a bit of a superfan, they’re always a welcome surprise. This year saw the release of Oceanside Countryside, a beautifully curated selection of recordings done between May and December 1977. Most of these archival releases compile alternative versions of songs which we all know and love, but it’s rare to witness a delay in the release of brand-new material.
In an interview with Uncut Magazine in 2022, Young was asked about Toast—an album he recorded with Crazy Horse back in the year 2000 but wasn’t released until 22 years later. “I knew Toast was great,” he admitted. “I knew it would come out someday. I mean—we finished it, y’know. We cared enough about it to finish it. So that says something right there. But it just didn’t seem, like, important for it to come out at that time. Or it would have.”
Young’s intuition about timing has always been a core part of his mystique. Whether he holds projects back for creative reasons, he clearly makes no concessions to what the market demands. Releasing Toast after 20 years of shelf life is a case in point. Its commercial reach was minimal and must have missed Spotify completely while Young was boycotting the streaming service. Thankfully, he’s backtracked on that one, and his music is now available to stream. Phew—my bank account was taking a bit of a beating, keeping up with all the vinyl reissues.
What many people don’t know is the other reason why Toast was held back for as long as it was. During the recording sessions, Young was having difficulty writing music due to personal issues with his wife, Pegi. According to Crazy Horse’s guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, “It felt like there was something wrong”. Young also remembers it being a pretty sombre time, recalling, “The songs of Toast were so sad at the time that I couldn’t put it out. I just skipped it and went on to do another album in its place.”
This kind of comment tells us something interesting about the way Neil Young composes music. Clearly, his personal experiences are explicitly tied to each project, so much so that he leaves a part of himself on the recordings. With this album, the emotional difficulties latched to the songs actually made it too difficult for him to see the project through.
In this way, Toast becomes more than just a delayed release; it is a reflection of a specific moment Young wasn’t ready to share until 20 years had passed. This process is pretty unique to him and is what makes his archival releases so effective, rather than feeling outdated or stale. There are so many artists from his era whose music today feels so tired and worn out, but Neil Young’s catalogue hasn’t aged at all in comparison. Long may he randomly dig up old recordings and continue to put them out in such a haphazard way!
