Neil Young Archives Albums Ranked

Neil Young‘s Archives Series launched in 2006 as Live at the Fillmore East collected a pair of 1970 shows with Crazy Horse from the famous New York club.

Since then, the Archives have grown to include branches dedicated to the live Performance Series (concerts from over the decades), the Official Bootleg Series (famous underground albums that have circulated illegally for years), and the Special Release Series (entire albums from Young’s extensive vaults that were never released for one reason or another).

The key component of the series, which was to begin with a multi-disc box set spanning the earliest years of Young’s career and then unspool chronologically, has yielded only two era-spanning collections so far. It’s still in the mid-’70s, so there’s a long way to go.

The individual albums released in the interim – sometimes two or three records are dumped at once; others trickle out at a slower pace – have covered everything from Young’s earliest club shows as a solo acoustic act to less-vintage live shows with Crazy Horse, the Stray Gators and his other backing bands from throughout the decades.

The most interesting finds in the Archives are the unreleased albums replaced by other official works. Records like Homegrown and Chrome Dreams have been bootlegged and discussed for years. Having artist-approved versions of these classic records has been a highlight of this ongoing series, as you’ll see in the below list of Neil Young Archives Albums Ranked Worst to Best.

Note: The box sets add other Neil Young records to the catalog – both live LPs and unreleased studio albums – but this list includes only those recordings released as stand-alone offerings.