Neil Young is back in the forest again. This time with a new band, a new album, and a fresh gust of that particular wind he’s been chasing since the first Buffalo Springfield chorus cracked the airwaves. Talkin to the Trees arrives on June 13 — ten new tracks, one new outfit, and no sign that the old man is slowing down.
The band is called the Chrome Hearts. It sounds like something you’d find scratched on a motorbike tank in Laurel Canyon, circa ’71. But the line-up is real and sharp: Spooner Oldham on organ (a name that already hums), Micah Nelson and Corey McCormick on guitar and bass respectively (both offering vocals too), and Anthony LoGerfo laying down drums with the kind of pulse Young's songs demand.
This is Young's first album of brand-new material since 2023’s All Roads Lead Home, and his first since World Record with Crazy Horse in 2022. The new album’s lead single, “Big Change,” arrived in January like a quietly strummed warning.
Young wrote all ten songs and co-produced the record with Lou Adler — yes, that Lou Adler. If that pairing sounds too perfect, remember: Neil has always had one boot in the canyon and the other on a road heading anywhere else.
Before this, Young gave us Coastal, a live document of his 2023 solo run down the West Coast, and Oceanside Countryside, an unearthed album from 1977 — the kind of thing only Young could toss out with a shrug and have it sound like an urgent dispatch from a more interesting planet.
And now Talkin to the Trees. Ten tracks that read like chapters in a thumb-worn journal left on a windowsill. Titles include “Dark Mirage,” “Bottle of Love,” “Thankful,” and “Let’s Roll Again.” You don’t need a lyric sheet to know what they probably sound like — you just need to close your eyes and picture Neil in a flannel shirt, guitar in hand, muttering to the wind.
Come mid-June, Young and the Chrome Hearts hit the road. First Europe — Malahide Castle in Dublin, Glastonbury, the Montreux Jazz Festival — then, in August, the North American leg kicks off in Charlotte. A month-long run through the continent follows, including twin nights in Toronto and Vancouver, with a final bow (for now) at the Hollywood Bowl.
And the tour, like the album, comes wrapped in that faintly elegiac Young aesthetic — part protest, part poem, part porchlight left on in case somebody lost finds their way home. The name of the tour? Love Earth. Of course it is.
“The people and places I've bumped into have been amazing,” Young said not long ago, and he’s not wrong. He’s been the whisper behind half a century’s worth of dreams. Now he’s whispering again — to us, to himself, and, yes, to the trees.
