Neil Young has kept a low public profile this year, popping up only for a brief, unannounced performance at the 90th birthday party of Canadian environmental activist David Suzuki back in May after cancelling a planned summer tour of Europe. But Farm
Aid is coming up on September 26, and Young booked two warm-up shows with Willie Nelson in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Philadelphia to shake off the rust and prep for the annual charity concert.
Rusties (the preferred nomenclature for hardcore Neil Young fans) flocked to Bridgeport from around the globe for the first show on September 22, having no clue what to expect beyond the fact that he’d once again be backed by the Chrome Hearts. The first curveball of the night came when word hit that Young was closing out the night, as opposed to Willie Nelson. At every Farm Aid throughout history, and every iteration of his long-running Outlaw Tour, even when Bob Dylan has been on the bill, Willie has been the final act.
After an opening set by 19-year-old phenom Ty Myers, Nelson came onstage with a stripped-down band that included harmonica player Mickey Raphael and guitarists Waylon Payne and Micah Nelson. Near the end of his set, which included standards “On the Road Again,” “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,” and “Bloody Mary Morning,” Nelson invited Young onstage to revive their 1985 duet “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?”
On his 2025 summer tour with the Chrome Hearts, Young played an eclectic mix of songs from across his entire career, including “Ambulance Blues,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and even two cuts from his 2003 rock opera Greendale, switching back and forth from acoustic mode and Rust Never Sleeps-style electric jams. At Bridgeport, however, he remained mostly unplugged and hewed closer to his more familiar tunes, kicking off with gentle, singalong renditions of “Long May You Run,” “Human Highway,” and “Comes a Time.”
“Well, these songs, some of them are old, and some of them are older,” he joked with the crowd early on. “But this is the oldest one.” He then launched into “Casting Me Away From You,” which he wrote and recorded in 1965, before he moved to Los Angeles to begin Buffalo Springfield, and recently re-recorded for his new LP Second Song. It was not only a deeply moving rendition of the song, but it also shattered the record for the longest gap between the time he recorded a song and debuted it live.
He then moved to the piano for the live debut of Second Song‘s “Earth Girl,” the only genuinely new song in the set. It’s a tender tribute to his wife, Daryl Hannah (“You sure were hard to find/All around me all the time/Smilin’ in the windy rain/With so much to share, so much to share”), that he played while Hannah herself watched from the wings, often breaking out a camera to film the proceedings.
The attention of some casual fans drifted during two consecutive unfamiliar songs, but he won them back quickly by breaking out the Harvest hits “Old Man” and “Heart of Gold.” It’s impossible to perfectly recreate Ben Keith’s pedal steel work from the original recordings, but Micah Nelson did a stellar job on the lap steel. The younger Nelson son has been in Young’s touring band for the past 11 years as a member of Promise of the Real, Crazy Horse, and now the Chrome Hearts. And he deserves a role in whatever backing group Young assembles in the future. He’s an incredible asset.
The main set wrapped up with the Silver and Gold deep cut “Daddy Went Walkin’,” a gorgeous “Harvest Moon” (just four days before the peak of the actual Harvest Moon), and a haunting, full-band rendition of “After the Gold Rush.”
The encore began with the title track to 2006’s Living With War. It was a solemn take on the song, obviously inspired by the ongoing war in Iran. (When I last heard this song live, I was standing right behind Donald Trump, Patti Smith, and Salman Rushdie at a 2006 CSNY show at the Theater at Madison Square Garden. Never in ten trillion years would I have predicted where we’d be as a nation the next time I heard it.)
For the final number of the night, Young finally snapped on Old Black. A lot of possibilities lingered in the air as he called out to the band. Would it be “Like a Hurricane?” “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)?” “Powderfinger?” Unsurprisingly, it was “Rockin’ in the Free World,” though at an oddly slow tempo that seemed to briefly throw the band. In keeping with recent tradition, he led the crowd in a furious “Take America Back!” call-and-response throughout the song.
The clock was a few seconds short of the one-hour mark at the end, but Young was done. He made that pretty clear by ripping the strings off Old Black and walking off the stage. He’s likely to repeat slight variations of this set at Philadelphia on the 24th and Farm Aid on the 26th, but it’s impossible to be sure since Young has made a career out of defying expectations.
Let’s just hope this is a preview of a larger tour that’s coming in 2027. Young’s recent recording output has been frustratingly inconsistent, even though Second Song has received several positive reviews, but he remains near the absolute top of his game as a live act.
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