For more than 20 years, Neil Young’s mythical lost album “Toast” has sat on the shelf. Shelved by Young: “I was not happy with it, or maybe I was just generally unhappy,” he wrote in his Super Deluxe memoir. I don’t know. “It was a very desolate album, very sad and unanswered.” Now, “Toast” is being released. On July 8th, the “lost” album recorded by the singer-songwriter and his long time compatriots in his band Crazy Horse will be released on CD, double vinyl, and digital formats.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded the album “around the turn of the millennium” at San Francisco’s Toast Studios but the prolific and notoriously mercurial artist soon thought better of releasing it. “Quit” and “Goin’ Home” appeared on 2002’s “Are You Passionate?“, the former in a re-recording with a different band (including Booker T. Jones, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Crazy Horse’s Frank “Poncho” Sampedro).
Still other tracks including “Standing in the Light of Love” were familiar from Young having played them live in 2001. Young teased a release in 2008, telling Rolling Stone at the time that it was a “mind-blowing record…great rock and roll, very moody, kind of jazzy.”
Clearly it was back on his mind last year when he devoted an entry on his Neil Young Archives website to the album. He wrote, in part, “It must be said that here Crazy Horse shows a depth never seen or heard before. The greatest group I have ever met. This is a pinnacle.” He described the music to which the band applied its particular brand of alchemy: “”The music of “Toast” is about a relationship. There is a time in many relationships that go bad, a time long before the breakup, where it dawns on one of the people, maybe both, that it’s over. This was that time.”
On July 8th, listeners will finally have a chance to hear what Young and Crazy Horse cooked up two decades ago. Their last collaborative album to date, “Barn”, was released in 2021. “Standing the Light of Love” is currently streaming at YouTube and all other streaming services.
Meanwhile, “Toast’s” existence was never officially revealed until 2008; since when it has become a central part of Young’s cannon of ‘lost’ albums, alongside “Homegrown“, “Chrome Dreams“, “Oceanside/Countryside“, “Island In The Sun” and “Times Square“.
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