What Happened to Neil Young's New Release ???

I heard the NPR review as well, and they did not characterize the album as having been "thrown together". The reviewer said that while these were not the best songs Neil has ever written, with some of them going on perhaps a wee bit too long, he still enjoyed the album. His most significant point, and the summation of his review, was a disbelief that the most passionate musical commentary about the current state of the US had to come from a Canadian.

Jeff Jones,
I'm sure you'd have to ask Neil the answer to those questions. I do know that he's lived in California for decades. With his wife, he founded the Bridge School (in the Bay Area) for children with severe physical and learning disabilities, as they have two such children. While he's a Canadian, he's planted his roots in the US. Contrarily, no one deemed it inappopriate for him to pen the song "Let's Roll" in honor of the passengers who took down the would-be hijackers on Flight 93. I'm also not sure why being a millionaire would inherently diminish the weight of his opinion. These are just my thoughts, so again, you'd have to ask Neil for the real answers.

I hear ya, Jeff.