UNCUT Review: Neil Young's Upcoming Album "Hitchhiker"

Neil Young | Hitchhiker
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Neil Young's newest album "Hitchhiker" is now due for release on September 8.

"Hitchhiker" is now available on vinyl and CD to pre-order on Amazon.com. The song "Hitchhiker" (Like An Inca) is available to download as pre-release single now.

In the meantime, here is a album review from UNCUT by John Mulvey:

It’s been a while since I did a round-up of recent and forthcoming releases, so the imminent arrival of Neil Young’s “Hitchhiker” seems as good an excuse as any this week. The full story of “Hitchhiker” and many of Neil’s other recent albums, you’ll recall, was covered in the September issue of Uncut, which is on sale in the US now

An entire eight months without a new album, and a concomitant pause in live activity, have evidently given Young some time to get back to the business of putting his archives in order. “Hitchhiker” is a focused solo acoustic set recorded on August 11, 1976, hitherto unknown until Young mentioned it in his second memoir, Special Deluxe. There, he alludes to “pausing only for weed, beer, or coke” as he ran through the songs, and critiques his performance as “pretty stony”.

That seems harsh, as the intimacies of David Briggs’ production and the pure strength of the songs suggest an album which, with a few overdubs and a bit more polish, could have worked as that desperately-anticipated follow-up to “Harvest”. Eight of the ten tracks would surface on subsequent Young albums, sometimes – as with “Powderfinger” (“Rust Never Sleeps”, 1979) and “Hitchhiker” itself (“Le Noise”, 2010) – in radically different forms. Pride of place, though, goes to the two unreleased tracks. “Give Me Strength”, possessed of the noble frailty of Young’s most commercially resonant work, has been intermittently revived at live shows, but “Hawaii” is the real curveball; a mix of “Ambulance Blues”-style narrative and Jansch-ish fingerpicking that makes one marvel at what else lingers incognito in those storied vaults.

(Thanks HtH!)

More on Neil Young's "Hitchhiker".

Also, we posted a YouTube video on Neil Young's Indigo Ranch "Hitchhiker" 1976 Sessions Revealed: Behind the Scenes w/ Richard Kaplan. Here is Part #2 of a two part podcast about Neil Young and his recordings at Indigo Ranch Studios with the resident Producer at the time, Richard Kaplan, where he explains how Neil Young recorded "Will To Love" and "Trans".

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