Neil Young

August 3, 2005 - Neil Young, who has made musical and visual innovation a constant during one of rock & roll’s most exciting and unpredictable careers, will be filming a two-night stand on August 18th-19th at Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium, the legendary home to country music’s Grand Ole Opry from 1943-1974. The concert film will be directed by Jonathan Demme, whose distinguished career includes an Academy Award for The Silence Of The Lambs, and the groundbreaking concert film Stop Making Sense with Talking Heads.

Young, a musician famous for creative surprises, will be joined by a wide array of special guests, including Emmylou Harris, Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns, the Fisk University Jubilee Singers and Carl Gorodetsky and the Nashville String Machine. He will be performing songs from his upcoming album Prairie Wind, which is being called one of Neil Young’s masterpieces, a moving series of songs reflecting his life’s journey. It was recorded recently in Nashville and Northern California and is scheduled for a September 27th release. Among those playing on the album are keyboardist Spooner Oldham, pedal steel guitarist Ben Keith, drummer Chad Cromwell, percussionist Karl Himmel and bassist Rick Rosas. All will appear at the Ryman Auditorium shows. Young has a long history of recording in Nashville, going back to his best-selling album Harvest, originally released in 1972.

Neil Young has always taken a strong interest in filmmaking, beginning with a planned movie (After The Gold Rush) that ended up becoming a title of one of the singer-songwriter’s most acclaimed albums. Other films—Journey Through The Past, Human Highway, Rust Never Sleeps and the 2004’s Greendale—have taken Young as director into new territory with each project. Teaming with Jonathan Demme on the new concert film was a natural, since the two had worked together on Demme’s Philadelphia project, with Young contributing the Academy Award-nominated title song.