Recently, through his official website, Neil Young announced the existence of another lost album, a collection of tracks dating back to 1987 that was dubbed Summer Songs.
Noting himself, Young said that “we are not sure of the exact original dates of these recordings yet. They were all given the same date in the NYA Vault’s records, but they all have a very similar unique sound. To give you an idea of place and time, Farm Aid and the Bridge School concerts had just begun their long runs.”
“This group of songs had just been written and put down in the studio at Broken Arrow (as far as we can figure),” he continued. “We cannot completely be sure of the engineer who was recording these and I don’t remember the sessions at all! Every song in the collection was with acoustic guitar or piano and simply added embellishments — sketches of arrangements we made to preserve the initial ideas.”
The songs included in the collection — “The Last Of His Kind,” “For The Love Of Man,” “American Dream,” “Name Of Love,” “Someday,” “One Of These Days,” “Hanging’ On A Limb,” and “Wrecking Ball” — eventually made their way to completed albums, appearing on Freedom, American Dream, Psychedelic Pill, and Harvest Moon, but Young noted that “the words of these originals are significantly different from their subsequent master album releases in many cases.”
According to Young, he plans to include these tracks on his next massive archival volume, and also may be released separately before that.
