On September 22, 2026, Neil Young stood on stage at the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and played “Casting Me Away From You” in concert for the first time. He had recorded the song in a friend’s attic in Toronto in October 1965, when he was 19 years old. By the night of its live debut, he was 80.
It was no ordinary night for him, either. Back in February, Neil had canceled his 2026 European tour with his band the Chrome Hearts, telling fans he simply needed a break and was listening to his body. Bridgeport was the band’s first full show in close to a year, one of two warm-up dates booked on a double bill with Willie Nelson ahead of Farm Aid in Virginia Beach that Saturday. Before his own set, Neil joined Willie, then 93, for “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?”, the duet that appeared on Neil’s 1985 country album Old Ways.
Neil opened gently, mostly on acoustic guitar, with “Long May You Run,” “Human Highway” and “Comes a Time.” Then he told the crowd that some of the night’s songs were old and some were older, and then he added:
“This is the oldest one – I was there!”
An Attic in Toronto, October 1965
The song goes back to Neil Young’s Toronto folk days, before Los Angeles and before Buffalo Springfield. Archive session notes date the recording to around October 15, 1965. Neil and his high school friend Comrie Smith both played guitar and sang on it, up in Smith’s attic.
A few months later, Neil left Canada for Los Angeles, and the attic recording stayed behind. It sat unreleased for more than four decades, until it finally appeared on the 2009 box set Neil Young Archives Vol. 1 (1963–1972): a little over two minutes of two young men, two guitars and two voices. Even then, he never recorded the song for one of his albums, and it never turned up on his concert setlists.
The Melody That Opened His First Album
The tune itself did not stay buried. Neil reworked the melody into “The Emperor of Wyoming,” the instrumental that opens his self-titled first solo album. Anyone who dropped the needle on that record heard the bones of this song decades before they ever heard it sung.
How the Song Came Back
More than 60 years later, it returned almost by accident. Early in 2026, Neil Young and the Chrome Hearts were recording a new album, Second Song, at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La studio in Malibu. In a note on his Neil Young Archives site, Neil explained that he had only five new songs, all of them long, and that he “ran out of tunes fast.” He needed more, so he started feeling his way back into the past.
He told NPR it began with something simple. He woke up one morning with “Casting Me Away From You” in his head, and he followed his own rule:
“I said, okay, if there’s anything in my head, I’ll do it.”
He went into his archives, found the old attic recording he had made with Comrie Smith, and cut the song again with the band, a group that includes Willie Nelson’s son Micah on guitar. The new version has a lonesome, country-leaning feel. Second Song came out on September 19, 2026, with one more song from his teenage years beside it: “I’ll Love You Forever,” which he first recorded in 1964 with his early band the Squires and wrote about his first real love.
Neil has said there was no big concept behind putting the old songs next to the new ones. “Those two old songs, they just seemed to fit with the new ones,” he told fans.
A Song He Can’t Quite Date
Ask Neil Young exactly when he wrote it, and the answer moves around. In his archives note, he guessed 1964 or 1965. On stage two nights after Bridgeport, he said 1963 or ’64. The attic recording itself is dated October 1965, so the song is at least that old.
Two Nights Later in Philadelphia
Neil played it again on September 24 at the TD Pavilion at the Highmark Mann in Philadelphia, his second night sharing the bill with Willie Nelson. This time he introduced it by saying he had written it back in 1963 or ’64. Then he asked the crowd:
“That makes it a new song, right?”