According to Neil Young, his long-running fuzz rock band Crazy Horse has a new album, and it’s called… Pink Moon. Is it a tribute to Nick Drake’s stripped-down Brit-folk masterpiece? Some kind of weird troll? Or does he simply not know that Pink Moon is already the name of one of the most highly-regarded singer-songwriter albums ever made? When it comes to Neil Young, all three options are possible.
In typical Young fashion, he made the announcement in the middle of a basically unrelated blog post this week, celebrating the 50th anniversary of 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his second album, and first with Crazy Horse as his backing band. The post reads in part:
This album is fifty years old. The 50th anniversary is right now! It stays because it was a high point. Now, coming from the Horse fifty years later, we have ‘Pink Moon.’ That’s our next studio album.
That’s it. Everything else in the post is about his memories of making Everybody Knows. If the Pink Moon title is a conscious Drake reference, there’s nothing here to indicate it.
Young has a rich history of not putting out music he says he’s going to put out, but on the other hand, he has been fulfilling promises that initially seemed farfetched lately. In an interview last year, he alluded to “four or five Crazy Horse albums that have never been heard, that are sitting there ready to come out.” If Pink Moon actually happens, it would be the first Crazy Horse studio effort since 2012’s actually-pretty-good Psychedelic Pill, and the first new Neil Young album since last year’s Paradox soundtrack.
