There is a version of Neil Young that never quite made it to the stage — hushed, unfinished, caught between takes — and In the Wings is where he lives.
Released in 2012 as part of the monumental Neil Young Archives Vol. II box set, this collection draws from sessions scattered across the late 1970s: material recorded at Indigo Studios, Quadrafonic Sound in Nashville, and various California locations between roughly 1976 and 1978. These were the years after Tonight’s the Night, after the rawness had curdled into something more ambiguous. Young was writing constantly, releasing sporadically, and leaving enormous amounts of music in the vault.
What’s Here
The players drift in and out depending on the session — Ben Keith on pedal steel, Karl T. Himmel on drums, Tim Drummond on bass. That rhythm section, Young’s loose confederacy from the Comes a Time era, gives these recordings a particular warmth. Himmel especially has a way of sitting behind the beat that makes everything feel like it’s being played in a room you’re just now entering.
The production — such as it is — bears the fingerprints of Elliot Mazer, who worked with Young through much of this period and understood that the goal was presence, not polish.
Some of these tracks feel like they were abandoned mid-thought. One or two probably were.
The Tape Hiss Is the Point
Young has always been suspicious of completion. His archives project, overseen with characteristic obsessiveness, is in many ways a monument to the idea that the unfinished thing can carry more truth than the finished one. In the Wings sits comfortably in that philosophy.
What you hear here is a man working out ideas in real time. There are songs that would surface later, transformed. There are songs that never went anywhere. There is no hierarchy between them.
The version of “Pocahontas” floating through these sessions — skeletal, with Young’s guitar right up close in the mix — hits differently than the Rust Never Sleeps recording. Both are correct. That’s the strange generosity of the archives: they don’t replace, they layer.
Listening to this late at night, you stop caring about completeness entirely. You’re just glad someone kept the tape running.