Decade (Neil Young Album) - History

History

Compiled by Young himself, with his hand-written notes about each track, Decade represents almost every album from his career and various affiliations through 1977 with the exception of Four Way Street and Time Fades Away. Of the previously unreleased songs, "Down to the Wire" features the New Orleans pianist Dr. John with Buffalo Springfield on an item from their shelved Stampede album; "Love Is a Rose" was a minor hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1975; "Winterlong" received a cover by Pixies on the Neil Young tribute album from 1989, The Bridge; and "Campaigner" is a Young song critical of Richard Nixon. The track "Long May You Run" is a different mix to that found on the album of the same name, featuring the harmonies of the full Crosby Stills & Nash before David Crosby and Graham Nash left the recording sessions.

For many years, Decade was the only Neil Young compilation album available. A 1993 compilation called Lucky Thirteen was released, but it only covered Young's 1982–1988 output. It was not until 2004 that Reprise Records released a single-disc retrospective of his best-known tracks, titled Greatest Hits. Throughout the 1980s and '90s, Young promised fans a follow-up to the original Decade collection, provisionally titled Decade II; eventually, this idea was scrapped in favor of a much more comprehensive anthology to be titled Archives, spanning his entire career and ranging in size from a box set to an entire series of audio and/or video releases. The first release of archival material since Decade and Lucky Thirteen would appear in 2006, Live at the Fillmore East, a recording from a 1970 concert featuring Crazy Horse with Danny Whitten. Several other archival live releases followed, and in 2009 the first of several planned multi-disc box sets, The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972, was issued.