Counting Down the Days for the Neil Young Archives

Remember those Charlie Brown cartoons where whenever Charlie went to kick the football, Lucy pulled it away at the last second?

Does that remind you of anything? Like Neil = Lucy, Football = Archives, Charlie = you & me.

So, only 25 days, 6 hours, 47 minutes, and 12 seconds until the football errr.... Neil Young Archives is released.

At this point, it seems like things are right on track for hell to freeze over on June 2.

We're counting down the days in the right sidebar.

So will that poll we took earlier this year be right or wrong? Time will tell....

Or as Prefix Mag calls it: Sledding Party Scheduled in Hell as First Finished Copies of Neil Young's Archive Arrive".

Or from LA Weekly - West Coast Sound "23 Years in the Making -- and Worth the Wait" by Randall Roberts:

After about ten years, it had become a sort Ark of the Covenant or King Arthur's Sword -- this mythical thing that we're pretty sure existed, but heretofore unproven. By the early '00s, the project had expanded to include outtakes, photos, lyric sheets and 'every possible kind of thing we could find that we could put together and he could form,' recalled archivist Joel Bernstein. It was a running joke among Neil Young fans: 'Will this thing ever come out -- and if so, could it ever live up to what exists in our imagination?' Over the years the project grew bigger, thicker, as though Neil Young and his longtime documentarians had secured a Philosopher's Stone and were teaching themselves alchemy.

More on The Neil Young Archives Roundup

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UPDATE: 5/8

From Uncut.co.uk | Neil Young: Archives Volume One, 1963-1972 by John Mulvey:

"There’s a telling clip buried somewhere in “Archives Volume One”, where Neil Young is poring over a tableful of photographs and clippings with Joel Bernstein. Here, it seems, everything is ready for this release. Young talks enthusiastically about the recording of the Massey Hall show he’s been listening to – and then you notice the date of the footage. It is 1997. Not only has Young been talking up this project for decades, he also seems to have had most of the material sorted and to hand for most of that time.

Spending yesterday in the company of “Archives”, a couple of things crossed my mind. One, it may be churlish to complain about the endless prevarication surrounding it, now “Archives” has finally arrived, but the epic build-up to this release now seems critical to its legend – as Young himself clearly understands by including such clips."

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