[ORIGINAL POST 2/7]: Although tickets have not yet gone on sale to the general public, Neil Young has two Oregon shows scheduled for May. The first is a solo show at Portland's Keller Auditorium, taking place on Friday, May 17. The next is a full-band show with one of his backing bands, Promise of the Real, at the University of Oregon's Matthew Knight Arena in Eugene on Thursday, May 23. In between, Young will do a solo show in Spokane and two band shows in Seattle.
The only people who can buy tickets right now are subscribers who have signed up for Young's streaming platform at neilyoungarchives.com. That might sound like a pain, but it's $19.99 for a year and it gives you streaming access to everything Young's ever released, with the promise of additional livestreams and unreleased goodies; livestreams of two Winnipeg shows with his other backing band, Crazy Horse, were offered earlier this week, although technical glitches hampered the first night.
A public on-sale for any of the Pacific Northwest shows has not been announced—currently the only place to get tickets is by signing up through Young's site. We reached out to Portland5, which runs the Keller, but unfortunately there is no information about a public on-sale at this time.
It's shaping up to be a busy year for Young, at least in terms of his archival recordings. His Archives website, which operated in beta mode for about a year, became a full-subscription service in December, and offers high-quality streaming audio, probably better than your laptop can handle. (It can also be downscaled to lower-resolution audio so you don't bump your roommate off Netflix every time you want to hear "Cortez the Killer.") It's also available as an iPhone app, although you probably won't get the full experience of 192/24 audio on your phone.
A hard copy of the second installment of Young's archives is also rumored to come out in May. Young's Archives Volume 1 box set came out way back in 2009 and covered the beginnings of Young's career up through 1972. The long overdue Volume 2 is supposed to cover 1972 to 1982, years which some consider Young's prime. We'll see if it materializes; the set has been delayed countless times, and the new box is apparently only being released on CD, and not in high-resolution audio and video formats on DVD and Blu-ray, as Volume 1 was. Presumably high-res audio and any accompanying video will be available at the Neil Young Archives website instead. A separate book will also be available.
There's more: A live show recorded during the ill-fated Time Fades Away tour in Tuscaloosa, Alabama on February 5, 1973 is also scheduled to be released. Tuscaloosa is something of a surprise; Young casually mentioned it in a recent Rolling Stone interview when the reporter asked him about a different archival release—one called Odeon Budokan that collected 1976 live recordings from London and Tokyo. That, too, is supposedly on its way. Young often releases something for Record Store Day in April, so it seems likely that one of these releases will correspond to that.
Also, Young's 1996 soundtrack for the Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man is being given a re-release on vinyl, after being out of print for decades. That's due out March 8.
If you've been out of the loop on all things Neil Young, you will be saddened to learn that his ex-wife, Pegi Young, tragically died of cancer on January 1. They were married for 36 years and she sang backup for him on several occasions; they divorced in 2014. Young married actress/activist Daryl Hannah in 2018.
In addition to the Crazy Horse shows in Winnipeg, Young has spent the beginning of 2019 playing a series of solo shows in Wisconsin and Minneapolis. One of those shows saw the first-ever live performance of "Running Dry (Requiem for the Rockets)," a song from his classic 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Judging from that, it might be safe to assume Young is in a reflective mode in terms of his back catalog—something that could bode well for the upcoming shows in May. Then again, it's never too safe to assume anything with Young.
