Neil Young to release aborted album

By Jonathan Cohen

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Neil Young has another unreleased album ready to see the light of day.

Indeed, despite the fact that Young still hasn't put out his decades-in-the-works "Archives" boxed set, he's authorized the excavation of "Toast," a Crazy Horse album aborted in 2000.

"There is no firm release date, but it's coming," a Young source tells Billboard.com.

According to Young's Web site (http://www.neilyoung.com), Crazy Horse recorded at the album's eponymous San Francisco studio "for months and came up with very little" aside from the song "Goin' Home," which has been occasionally performed live.

Some of the tunes written for the album wound up being recorded instead for Young's 2002 album "Are You Passionate?"

"Many songs share a bluesy, jazz-tinged vibe as a common thread," the site says of the project, which is being mixed by John Hanlon. "Three solid rockers are interspersed in the mix. Other songs are long with extensive explorations between verses, a Crazy Horse trademark, kind of like a down-played 'Tonight's the Night,' except these songs deal directly with love and loss, not drugs."

Potentially even more confusing: the site claims "Toast" is the first "special edition" of "a new series of unreleased albums." Whether this series is a part of, or separate from, the intended "Archives" series is unknown.

Young's last communique on the status of "Archives Vol. 1" came in late January, when he stunned fans by revealing that the project would only be released on Blu-ray and DVD, but not on CD. "There's no doubt it will come out this year," he said.