Saturday, March 28, 2026

Covered: Neil Young, Volume 10: 2023-2026

Finally, here's the tenth and last volume for the Neil Young "Covered" series. A big thanks again to Fabio from Rio for doing most of the work to put these together.

Before I go to Fabio's notes about the songs, I want to mention something. My rule here was to include only one cover version of each song (and no versions performed by Young himself). We kept to that, except for two songs, "Heart of Gold" and "Cortez the Killer," where we had two versions. Now that I'm posting this last volume, you can look over all the volumes and see just what songs we included or didn't include. Let us know if you think there are any great Young songs that we didn't include a cover for.

Also, Fabio says he's going to make a kind of "extras" album or albums, consisting of cover versions that he liked that didn't make it here. That's a good opportunity to have second covers of some songs, instead of just one. So if you have ideas of covers that you don't see here, please post them in the comments. I'm sure Fabio will look those over and take that feedback into consideration for his "extras."

One more thing. Fabio wanted this to end on a strong song Young wrote in recent years, specifically "Green Is Blue." But we didn't have a good cover version for that one. So Fabio reached out to the Neil Young "Rust" community. A person named Jeff Winter stepped up and recorded a version of that song just for this collection. So thanks to Jeff as well.

Now, here's Fabio's comments about this time period. 

More than sixty years after Neil Young first emerged in the folk clubs of Toronto, Canada, and later with Buffalo Springfield in the mid-1960s, his songs continue to travel across generations, genres, and continents. The covers gathered throughout these ten volumes show how Young's catalog has become a kind of shared musical language: interpreted by classic rock veterans, indie artists, folk revivalists, Americana performers, and even bedroom musicians recording from home studios.

In recent years this process has only accelerated. Streaming platforms, Bandcamp releases, and fan communities have made it easier than ever for musicians to reinterpret songs from every era of Young's career - from the fragile acoustic ballads of the early seventies to the politically charged songs of his later decades. At the same time, Young himself has continued to release new music and expand his archival releases, ensuring that both longtime fans and new listeners keep rediscovering the depth of his songwriting.

This final volume works almost like an epilogue to the project: a reminder that Neil Young's songs remain very much alive, constantly finding new voices and new meanings. Even when he will no longer be with us - after all, we are all mortals - as long as musicians keep picking up guitars or sitting down at a piano, these songs will continue their journey.

As a final note, I'd like to add that putting together this collection has been both a challenge and a pleasure. Revisiting more than six decades of songwriting made it clear once again how remarkably durable Neil Young's music is: the same songs can survive countless reinterpretations while still retaining their emotional core.

My thanks go to Paul for the idea, the patience, and the many suggestions along the way - and also to the worldwide community of fans, collectors and musicians (the "Rusties") who keep discovering, performing and sharing these songs. Without that ongoing enthusiasm, projects like this would hardly be possible.

Most of all, this collection is simply a tribute to one of the most distinctive songwriters of the last sixty years. As long as people continue to listen to, perform and sing these songs, Young's music won't burn out nor will it rust. And his legacy will never fade away. 

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Note that Fabio wrote individual paragraphs about all the songs in this volume. To see that, please look at the Word file added to the download zip file. Thanks again to Fabio for his help putting these albums together.  

This album is an hour and six minutes long.

01 Ten Men Working (Enrico Di Bella)
02 Berlin (Jens Thomas)
03 There’s a World (Sufjan Stevens)
04 Hitchhiker (Minus 5)
05 Out of My Mind (Minus 5)
06 Crime in the City [Sixty to Zero Part 1] (Paul Besselle)
07 No More (Gil Michael)
08 One of These Days (Kassi Valazza)
09 Borrowed Tune (Chris Eckman)
10 Lookin' for a Love (Jeffrey Martin)
11 Philadelphia (Brandi Carlile)
12 White Line (Kurt Vile)
13 Cowgirl in the Sand (Anders Osborne)
14 Here We Are in the Years (Sharon Van Etten)
15 Sail Away (Tyler Ramsey & Carl Broemel)
16 Green Is Blue (Jeff Winter)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/ZdgpPS8Z

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/NxLoGxoSibb70Jq/file

The cover photo is from 2019. 

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