Neil Young Announces ‘Return to Greendale’ Live Album and Film

Neil Young’s 2003/04 Greendale tour with Crazy Horse will be chronicled on Return to Greendale, a live album and film coming out on November 6th. It will be available as a two-disc set or limited edition box set with two LPs, two CDs and a documentary, Inside Greendale, about the creation of the album.

Greendale is a rock opera about a fictional small town that is rocked by the death of a beloved police officer. Along the way, it addresses corporate greed, a scandal-obsessed media environment and Bush-era propaganda. It climaxes with one of the central figures, a teenage girl named Sun Green, heading off to Alaska to fight for the environment.

Two months before it came out, Young and Crazy Horse launched a tour of North American amphitheaters where they played all 10 songs from the album in sequence with a large cast of actors and dancers. Many fans bought tickets thinking they were seeing a traditional Neil Young and Crazy Horse concert and were none-too-thrilled with the show, even if it ended with a brief set of Crazy Horse classics.

But the tour stayed on the road for nearly a year and it slowly won fans over, especially once the album finally came out and the encore portion of the show was dramatically lengthened until it essentially became a second set.

Return to Greendale is one of many archival Neil Young projects coming out in the near future. The 10-disc box set Archives Volume 2: 1972-1976 is coming out on November 20th. It will be followed by Way Down in The Rust Bucket, a 50th-anniversary edition of After the Gold Rush, Carnegie Hall 1970, Road of Plenty and Noise and Flowers, although exact dates have yet to be announced.