Last week, Neil Young reunited with Crazy Horse at intimate Fresno and Bakersfield gigs, his first performances with the band in four years. Young tells Yahoo Entertainment that his sprawling Neil Young Archives site, which will include almost everything the prolific rock icon has recorded over the past five decades, will soon feature “four or five Crazy Horse albums that have never been heard, that are sitting there ready to come out.” But Young seems even more excited about another imminent archives addition: one of his most polarizing, fascinating, and misunderstood releases, 1982’s Trans.

First, a little background: In the early ’80s, Young left his longtime label Reprise to sign with Geffen, which guaranteed him $1 million per album and complete creative control. Young’s first Geffen effort was the wildly creative Trans, a Kraftwerkian, vocoder- and synthesizer-heavy electronic album that couldn’t have been more different from his classic Harvest album released a decade earlier. Trans was a true passion project for Young, as it was recorded as a way for him to communicate with his son Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy. But Geffen execs were less than thrilled with Young’s radical new direction, and in 1983 the label filed a lawsuit against the singer-songwriter, claiming he’d produced deliberately “uncommercial and unrepresentative work.”

“Some people loved Trans; a lot of people, they were just lost,” Young shrugs. “But without the [accompanying planned] video, it’s like really half of a letter, cut down the middle.”

According to Jimmy McDonough’s Neil Young biography, Shakey, at the time Young wanted to make the long-form Trans video, depicting “electronic-voice people who were working in a hospital, and the one thing they were trying to do is teach this little baby to push a button,” which would have clarified what the album was about. “It didn’t come out because Geffen Records pulled the funding for the videos because they didn’t like the record,” Young tells Yahoo. “I’d never had anything like that happen. Because it didn’t sound like Harvest, and they wanted me to make Harvest, they ultimately ended up suing me for not making Harvest.”

But now, via the Neil Young Archives, the 35-minute Trans film, “a very touching and moving story about artificial intelligence and communication disorders,” will finally get the green light.

“I can’t wait until that comes out, because then people will hear Trans the way I wanted them to hear it in the first place,” Young says enthusiastically. “The original Trans album will be part of the archives, but the real thing about Trans is, [son of Willie Nelson and frequent Young collaborator] Micah Nelson and I are doing an animated video of the story of Trans, so that you can see all the characters. Every song has got characters; a lot of the characters go from song to song. There’s a factory where they’re making people, and they’re making like clones of people, and computerized versions. When I sing, it’s me but it’s not me, it’s my ‘Neil 2’ that’s singing ‘Mr. Soul’ and other songs.

“This what I wanted to do in the first place, and then the record company made me put it out without the videos, because they didn’t believe in the record, because it wasn’t Harvest. It would’ve been great [if the Trans video had come out in ’82], but it wasn’t to be. But we’re doing it now.”

The Neil Young Archives, which launched last December as a free service but will eventually shift to a subscription model, is a deep-dive interactive timeline on which fans can listen to the majority of Young’s catalog via his own high-quality Xstream streaming platform; fans can also browse rare photos, videos, and films.

“I’m a collector. So I have everything. I’m also very much a geek, and a nerd about things, technology-wise,” Young chuckles. “I like organizing things. We wanted to make kind of a video game that you could play and go around and hear music and have a good time, however you want to listen. You can spend hours there, or you can spend a couple of minutes. But I wanted the music to be as great-sounding as it could be, and we have the best-sounding streaming service in the world. There’s nothing that touches it.”

Photo: Neil Young Archives

As the Trans experience proves, Young has always been ahead of the curve. He’s also always been a zealous champion of quality audio in an age of lo-fi online downloads and streams. And he believes Xstream is the future. “The history of recorded sound is at stake,” he stresses. “It’s not about the new rap song that just came out. It’s about Frank Sinatra, it’s Cab Calloway, Glen Miller. It’s about Bessie Smith, it’s about Dina Washington, it’s about Brook Benton, it’s about Michael Jackson, it’s about all of these people. All of their art is degraded by Spotify, by the streaming. So if you’re a student of music, if you’re a musicologist or a music lover, when you go back into the past to see influences, like who are your heroes, what shoulders was he or she standing on, then you have to go back into history to find out. And that history is very clouded by what we have today, but this [Xstream] technology allows people to go back and hear it.”

So, does Young think other artists should follow his example and open their own high-quality audio archives to the online public? “There’s nothing stopping them,” he says. “If they care about their legacy, if they care about what their music sounds like, if they care about people hearing what they actually did, this is a good way to go. It may not be the only way to go, but right now, there’s nothing like it in the world.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Director Daryl Hannah and Neil Young attend the premiere of “Paradox” at the Paramount Theatre during SXSW 2018 on March 15, 2018, in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images for Netflix)

In 1993, after taking a summer off to attend film school at NYU, Daryl Hannah wrote, directed, and produced the short film The Last Supper, which won a Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival. But it took until now for her to make her full-length feature directorial debut: Paradox, a lo-fi, sci-fi western musical starring her boyfriend Neil Young, Promise of the Real, and Willie Nelson, which premiered Thursday night at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.

“I can’t even tell you how many years I told my manager I wanted [to direct],” Hannah tells Yahoo Entertainment. “I have been working on actual, real scripts and stuff for years, and have things that I’ve developed over the years that I wanted to make as narrative features, and I never even could get a meeting. I even had production deals, but they were always kind of like vanity production deals, ultimately.”

Hannah, who has spoken before about being sexually harassed by Harvey Weinstein (including one scary encounter when he burst into her hotel room), pauses when asked about her struggles in Hollywood. “There’s so many stories, but I actually never got a meeting on a movie after Kill Bill, not one — not an offer, not a meeting, not an anything. The next thing I got was Sense8, and that was accidental. They called me for a phone number for somebody else, and they were like, ‘Why don’t you come in?’ I have no idea why. [Kill Bill] was a big, successful movie, but I never got even a meeting, nothing. I think it was … maybe tied slightly to the Harvey thing, because that was part of it. He was telling people I was ‘difficult,’ because I kicked him out of my room!”

Interestingly, in Paradox, a movie made far outside the Hollywood machine, Hannah envisions a utopian future “when the womenfolk had rightfully just about given up” on men, in which a band of male outlaw prospectors — led by Young’s grizzled character, “the Man in the Black Hat” — work for a tribe of frontierswomen. “Every once in a while, I think probably almost every woman has fantasized about just living in a commune or something with their girlfriends and making art and raising babies and growing food, and just letting the guys come visit once in a while,” Hannah chuckles. “[Paradox] was just sort of a little exploration of that fantasy, that in the future women have just said, ‘You know what? We’re done with the mining, the plundering, the pillaging, the fighting. We’re just going to go over here. We’ll take care of the land. We’ll take care of the kids. You guys try to stay alive. We’ll come and visit you once in a while.’ The women [in the film] still have a good feeling about the men, though — it’s not like they’ve written them off completely!”

The real man in Daryl’s life, Neil Young, says he was delighted to be part of Hannah’s quirky vision. “Daryl did everything. She wrote the script, she went out to the thrift shops and bought all of the costumes herself,” he marvels. “She is a real artist, and she knows what she wants. She wrote what everybody said. She gave us good direction throughout the whole thing. … Daryl is great at what she does. She’s a true professional, and a joy to work with.”

“[Neil] has such a natural communication with the artistic process that he doesn’t question it, ever,” Hannah adds. “He just was like, ‘Oh, yeah, right. We’re making a movie.’ It was very natural.”

Young says he trusted his partner’s vision so much, “I never read the script. … I said, ‘Why don’t you just tell me my lines?’ She told me about the story, and so I wanted to see it develop.”

Neil Young (Photo: Netflix)

There’s one amusing line in the Paradox script, uttered in the outhouse, that stands out: “Love is like a fart. If you have to force it, it’s probably s***.” Hearing that line recited back to him, Young chuckles. “That sounds about right.” Young speaks glowingly of Hannah, and he says nothing about their romance has ever felt like a struggle at all — even when working together on a movie set. “She says I’m unruly, and I think she’s too tough, but aside from that, we’re great!” he laughs. More seriously, he continues, “We’re pretty real. As artists, we support each other and understand, because we both have an element of fame. We understand what that means.”

It seems like Young is referring to the media scrutiny that exploded once he and Hannah went public with their relationship, following his divorce from his wife of 36 years, Pegi. But he insists, “We didn’t pay any attention to that. It doesn’t matter. We don’t give a s***. We don’t care, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. And if they do know what they’re talking about, we still don’t care, but we’re happy for them. It doesn’t matter. What matters is us, not the press.”

It wasn’t just the press that had opinions on the Young/Hannah romance: Young’s onetime CSNY bandmate David Crosby also had some nasty words (for which Crosby later apologized). “When we got together, even some of my good friends were negative about it, and I could never understand it,” muses Young. “[Daryl is] a wonderful human being, and I’m very lucky to know her. That’s all I was thinking.”

Nowadays, Young seems in great spirits, with a slew of forthcoming new releases — including the Paradox soundtrack, which features six new musical interludes with Promise of the Real — and it seems Hannah has a lot to do with the 72-year-old’s zest for life.

Neil Young in Paradox. (Photo: Netflix)

“She’s helped me physically to be stronger; she’s got a really intense physical regimen she follows, and I crawl along behind her,” Young reveals, laughing. “We do Pilates twice a week, sometimes three times a week, and get in the pool with weights. We have routines we do in the pool, a lot of stuff together like that. There’s always something. … I’m very lucky. We’re very lucky to have found each other. I’m eternally thankful for the opportunity to share my life with her, and she feels the same.”

That sense of joy permeates Paradox, a freeform romp shot over two days in the Colorado mountains on a shoestring budget. (“It was more of a no-string budget,” jokes Hannah. “It was like a Velcro budget,” quips Young.)

“It was just for fun. We wanted to make a movie, so why not?” Young says. “We had all these people, everybody’s capable of doing it, and we had some time to kill. We started talking about it about a week before we did it. … We said, ‘Do you really want to do this? Yeah? OK, let’s get the tent.’”

“There was a lot that was just sort of improvised, or you didn’t even realize we were filming. … We just did it for a couple of days, by ourselves,” Hannah says. “We just made it. We didn’t go around asking anybody for permission or organizing. Most of these guys were wearing my clothes, or stuff I got at the thrift store. We did everything ourselves. It was just like, ‘Let’s make a movie!’”

“We had no limitations. We just didn’t have any money,” adds Young.

Ironically, Paradox wasn’t even supposed to be Hannah’s full-length directorial debut — she’d only written a 10-page script. But she, Young, and Promise of the Real were having so much fun, “We just kept shooting,” says Young. “We’d get up in the morning and shoot all day and never stop.” Eventually, Hannah ended up with enough footage for a 73-minute feature, which will make its Netflix debut March 23. “It wasn’t made like a normal movie. That’s why it isn’t a normal movie. … If you go in expecting an ordinary movie, you’re going to be confused,” Hannah laughs.

Hannah still has plans to make a more conventional film, based on an old Irish folk tale that was adapted by the poet W.B. Yeats, though she isn’t sure when that will happen. “I’m going to need an actual budget and an actual crew for that one,” she chuckles. But with Young by her side, she says, “I will always do creative stuff. That’s just the way it goes.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

This October, six revered rock legends — Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Roger Waters, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young — will join forces for the historical Desert Trip festival, held on the Coachella grounds in Indio, Calif. It will no doubt be a historic, once-in-a-lifetime event — especially in light of the fact that the music world has recently lost many greats we’ll never have the privilege to see in concert again (David Bowie, Prince, Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead, Merle Haggard, Glenn Frey, et al). However, despite the excitement surrounding Desert Trip — tickets for both weekends sold out in three hours — the festival has also been the butt of many ageist jokes. Snarky detractors have dubbed it “Oldchella” or have cracked wise that the only drugs that graying concertgoers will attempt to smuggle past security are Lipitor and Boniva.

But Young, who at age 70 is actually the bill’s youngest performer (Dylan, at 75, is the eldest), isn’t bothered.

“From where I stand, I feel pretty strong. I don’t feel like I’ve got a lot of years, but I don’t feel old,” he tells Yahoo Music. “And I don’t feel fatigued about what I’m doing and about who I’m playing with.”

Young is referring to Promise of the Real, the band led by Willie Nelson’s son, Lukas Nelson, and featuring Lukas’s brother Micah. POTR, whom Young describes as having “no fear – zero fear,” backed Young last year on his 36th studio album, The Monsanto Years, and they’ll join him onstage at Desert Trip for what is sure to be one of the festival’s most high-energy sets. “We’re gonna go there and rock out!” is Young’s only agenda for their Saturday show alongside McCartney. “We have no plans for what we’re gonna play, and we won’t know what we’re gonna play until we walk out there. And we don’t know how long the songs are gonna be, and we don’t know whether were gonna play acoustic at all or whether we’re just gonna play electric. We don’t know what we’re going to do at all — and we don’t care. Because we never know.”

Perhaps fans will get a taste of what Young’s freeform Desert Trip concert will be like via Earth, his new live album with POTR, out June 24. A thematic continuation of The Monsanto Years (his 2015 concept album protesting agrochemical/agricultural biotech giant corporation Monsanto), Earth is a sprawling, trippy, and “meditative” work that clocks in at over an hour and half, with each of the 13 tracks segueing seamlessly into each other. It’s an atypical concert album, but a true “live” album, with ambient overdubs of real animal sounds — many recorded near Young’s Northern California home — weaving in and out of the music. (“I just started to sprinkle them into the audience because it was a live show, and I thought they deserved to be there too. And they fit really well!”)

Young describes Earth as an “ear movie” and says, “It’s kind of a lost art, the concept album. There’s really no need for that in today’s civilization — except for me. I feel that I needed to do it.” As for whether today’s music buyers have the patience for a 98-minute experimental live album (featuring one epic track, “Love & Only Love,” that’s nearly a half-hour long), he shrugs: “It doesn’t really matter. The thing is, we make the record, we do what we do, we create the art, we finish the thing, we feel good about what we’ve done — and we move on. That’s what matters. … I’m not really a commercial success, in as much as, you know, I don’t sell millions of records. I have done all of these things, but now it’s more important for me to just do what I want to do. It’s more important that art live, and that the expression happens, than anything else.”

Earth is, of course, not available on iTunes. In fact, any journalists wanting to interview Young about the album were required to listen to it first on a Pono, the high-resolution audio player and accompanying digital music service that Young founded in 2014 with the goal of presenting music as the artists intended. “The whole thing of iTunes saying what you can do and what you can’t do is so counter-art. It is so against everything that I believe in that I can’t sell my music that way. … There’s nothing there. There’s no music there. It’s all about selling things. It’s about commercials or whatever. It doesn’t have to do with music the way I like music to be,” Young grumbles. “I can’t sell my music there, I can’t rent it there, and I can’t present it there. If somebody wants to rip my music and put it on any device, they’re welcome to do that. I just don’t want to charge for it.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.