Neil Young has never been shy about expressing dark, heavy, fucked-up emotions through music; that’s how we get an album as messy and harrowing as On The Beach. But occasionally, even Neil Young apparently sometimes comes up with something too depressing to release. Young has recently been releasing a lot of the music that he’s left on the shelf over the decades, and earlier this year, he announced plans to release Toast, an album that he recorded in 2001 with his longtime band Crazy Horse. In announcing the LP, Young wrote that he didn’t release Toast because it was “so sad that I couldn’t put it out… I couldn’t handle it at that time. 2001.”
Today, Young can handle it, and Toast is coming out next week. When Young announced the album, he also released the heavy rocker “Standing In The Light Of Love.” Today, Young has shared another of the songs from Toast. The bleary zone-out “Timberline” is a song about a lumberjack, but that lumberjack presumably isn’t just a lumberjack. In his album announcement, Young wrote this about “Timberline”: “The scene changes to a religious guy who just lost his job. He’s turning on Jesus. He can’t cut any more trees. He’s a logger.” Check it out below.
Toast is out 7/8.
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