An Essential Q&A with Neil Young

An essential Q&A interview with Neil Young in The Billboard.

On CSNY/Deja Vu film:

"It's CSNY," he told Billboard recently during a lengthy interview about the new film. "It really is CSNY. It's not overdubbed. There's no fixes. It's straight from the board."

"The basic mixes are the mixes that people heard when we were playing it," Young continues. "So it's got rough spots all the way through it, which I think is refreshing, especially considering the subject matter. Why should we polish? Why polish this? Who gives a shit whether it's polished or not? It is what it is, and that's the message of the music. It's what we're doing. If you don't like, you don't like it. If you like it, you like it. But it is what it is. Chroming it is not going to help it."

The thinking, Young said, was that the more raw the soundtrack is, the better they will sound and the more exciting it will be. "And nobody's heard that from CSN," he said.

On let's impeach the president:

And he needs to be impeached for what he did. I mean, the Senate has verified it. It needs to happen for history. It's like a dirty business. It needs to be taken care of. Nobody wants to be bothered, but it should happen, because do we want to let this go down in history? It's a cancer. It's a blight. It has to be eradicated. You have to look at this and go, "The president mislead the people into going to war, lost 5,000 troops, there's hundreds of thousands of people killed in Iraq, billions and billions of dollars were taken out of the economy for the war, and now we've discovered for sure -- the Senate committee has said, 'Yeah, he did. He lied.'" So what do you have to do to get impeached? What do you need to do? And who are we if we don't do it ... if we don't actually say, "Hey -- the law! You can't do that!"

Later in the interview, Neil's comments on his search for the Holy Grail are inspiring and definitely worth a read here.