Neil Young and Crazy Horse reunite for ‘Colorado’ album and related film

Neil Young’s last album with Crazy Horse was seven years ago.

Now he and the band are back with a new one, “Colorado,” recorded in that state in a studio near Telluride that sits at 9,000 feet above sea level.

Young also has a new movie coming out about the making of the album. Plus he’s working on 13 other films, is archiving all of his recordings online and has a book coming out.

The veteran singer-songwriter, 73, says he’s happy being busy with all the work.

“I think that I do the best when I’m right here,” he recently told NPR of living in the moment.

Young has returned to Crazy Horse every few years for over half a century, and says he’ll keep doing it despite what some critics say.

“They (critics) don’t know what we’re doing,” Young said. “That’s why they say, ‘Well you can’t do this, you can’t do that,’ because we don’t play that well, we’re not technical. There’s much more to it than technical. We’re thinking about making it sound real, like you can feel that this means something to the people playing it.

“We’re not trying to impress anybody.”

Young describes the new music as raw and says much of the message of the album — out this Friday — is about climate change.

“The raw thing that we create is the soul of music and the stories and the feelings of being human,” he said. “Mostly I would like a lot of people to see what’s going on [with] the planet — that’s so obvious to me. I just don’t know why people don’t get it. Or if they do get it, then why don’t they get with it?”