“My body was telling me, ‘You gotta stop.’ And so I listened to my body”: Neil Young explains why he cancelled summer tour

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Neil Young has revealed more about what caused him to cancel his Love Earth summer tour a couple of months back.

Back in June the only explanation we gave was “a couple of us got sick”. Now in a Zoom Q&A with subscribers to the Neil Young Archives, he has provided more information about what actually happened.

“A couple of us really hit a wall,” he explained. “I just woke up one morning on the bus and I said, ‘I can’t do this, I gotta stop.’ I felt sick when I thought of going onstage.

My body was telling me, ‘You gotta stop.’ And so I listened to my body. Then it gets into all the legal matters: ‘You got this, you got that, people bought tickets, they did this, they did that.’ I understand that.

"What matters to me is the art of playing, and the music. That’s what matters. That’s what people loved. That’s what they come to see. But if that’s not there, my going isn’t happening. My body told me to not do it.”

“But now I’m starting to feel like I could do it again and that’s a great feeling. Not all of Crazy Horse - this happened to a couple of us, and we’re not all the way back. Crazy Horse will be back, God willing. And we’ll play more.”

He seems to be back to something approaching full fitness anyway. Young returns to the live stage at Farm Aid on September 21 at Saratoga, Springs, New York. After that he revealed there’s a tour of theatres in the works with guitarist Micah Nelson.

“We haven’t announced any shows yet, but they are mostly theatres that I played before, little theatres, and then I can play a little bit of acoustic, and then have the band come out and play,” he said. “They’ll probably be on the East Coast and then going towards Michigan and then Ohio, and then a few other ones. They won’t be marathons. They won’t be two hours and 10 minutes of blasting rock n’ roll like it was with Crazy Horse.”

Young turns 79 this November and Crazy Horse members, drummer Ralph Molina and bassist Billy Talbot are both 80. It’s still unclear which of them ‘hit a wall’ along with Young and the singer gave no further details. “You can’t tell when that’s going to happen,” he said. “I’m sorry to all the people who bought tickets who couldn’t go, but I listened to my body.”