Neil Young Explains Why He Canceled Crazy Horse Tour: 'My Body Told Me Not to Do It'
"I just woke up one morning on the bus and I said, 'I can't do this, I gotta stop,'" the singer shared in a recent fan livestream
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Neil YoungNeil Young is pulling back the curtain on the decision to cancel his tour with Crazy Horse.
Two months after the singer-songwriter, 78, announced on his website that the remainder of his and the band’s Love Earth Tour was canceled, vaguely citing illness among the performers, he provided his fans with a more thorough explanation.
In a livestream with fans that has since been posted on the singer’s subreddit, Young said that “a couple of” the tour's performers — himself included — “really hit a wall.”
“I just woke up one morning on the bus and I said, ‘I can’t do this, I gotta stop.’ And it was like, I felt sick when I thought of going on-stage,” the musician recalled. “My body was telling me, ‘You gotta stop.’ So I listened to my body.”
Astrida Valigorsky/Getty
Neil Young performing in May 2024 prior to canceling his tour with Crazy HorseThe “Harvest Moon” singer said that despite the difficulties the cancellation posed, it was for the best, because he could not provide fans with the performance they deserved to see.
“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, but what matters to me is the art of playing, and the music,” Young explained in the livestream. “That’s what matters. That’s what people loved. That’s what they loved to come and see.”
“But if that’s not there, me going isn’t happening,” he said. "My body told me to not do it.”
As for how he is currently doing? The music icon told fans he is “starting to feel like I could do it again.”
“And that’s a great feeling,” Young said.
Some members of the band, however, are “not all the way back,” he noted. “Crazy Horse will be back, God willing, and we’ll play more,” Young said. “But in the meantime, I have a lot of friends that I play with.”
neilyoungchannel/Youtube
Neil Young performs with Crazy HorseThe musician is slated to return to the stage this fall at New York’s Farm Aid Festival, the music festival announced on Tuesday, July 23. The festival lineup also includes Willie Nelson and family, John Mellencamp and Dave Matthews (with Tim Reynolds).
Plus, Young teased in the new fan livestream, he will be embarking on a “pared down” theater tour with partially acoustic shows featuring members of Promise of the Real in “a couple weeks.”
“They won’t be marathons,” he said of the upcoming shows. “They won’t be two hours and 10 minutes of blasting rock 'n' roll like it was with Crazy Horse.”
Young originally announced that the Love Earth Tour was canceled in a late June blog post on his website.
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