Dear Neil,

When the big white cardboard box with the YOUNG SHAKESPEARE release arrived inside, I wasn't too sure of its story. I know how vast your Archives are, and it never ceases to amaze me what sometimes comes to the surface. But this one definitely felt like a left-field find. A live album and a film of the concert it comes from: things started to seem like the jackpot had been hit.

I started thinking of the album title, YOUNG SHAKESPEARE, and saw it was a solo acoustic concert from 1971 at the Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut. I have to admit my entire knowledge of William Shakespeare consists of a few lines like "To be or not to be, that is the question," and that he was definitely from England. During my 9th grade English class in Houston in 1965, when we were supposedly learning about the great British playwright, I was lost thinking about Otis Redding and the Rolling Stones. I just couldn't read what Shakespeare wrote. It confused me and made my mind feel like it was being twisted into a soft pretzel. When that used to happen, I shut the thoughts off and went back to wondering how Al Jackson, Jr. played that magical light snare drum tap on Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness." I had to figure that out before anything else.

But when I looked at the big album box, with the beautiful gold and black sticker on the outside, I somehow recalled that William Shakespeare was from Stratford-upon-Avon, and your album was recorded in Stratford, Connecticut at the Shakespeare Theatre. Yes! I started to see a certain linear pattern come into view. Like maybe everything was connected, and a cosmic tingle came over me. There is nothing better than feeling our world is held together by a master plan, and discovering it makes life become a flow. So I was ready for takeoff: time to play the album and see how these pieces fit together.

I listened once. Then I listened again. I felt like you were sitting in a chair across the room from me, playing these twelve songs like you'd just written them. They were so alive and so personal and so strong, and your voice sounded a bit in awe of them yourself. Like maybe you were somewhat surprised these were all your creations. Each time another song would start I would get the chills, like I was walking through a new door into a room I'd never been in. Many of the songs had been on earlier albums and those original versions had always sounded cast in stone--"Ohio," "Cowgirl in the Sand' and others. But now, just you, your guitar and piano, and played them all like they were flowing from your heart for the very first time. You were twenty-five years old that night in Stratford, but the sound of your voice carried an eternal resonance that felt like you had landed on planet Earth carrying a timeless message from another land. It's hard to describe, but you didn't sound like someone on a theatre stage with an instrument or two. This was way beyond that. This music had a cosmic reverberation going on that really did bring in a new different reality. Something was happening.

As I played YOUNG SHAKESPEARE for the third time, I suddenly realized that if I would only be allowed to own one Neil Young album, this would be it. It's the one I need the most now as I roll into my seventies, knowing that so many of my closest friends and comrades didn't make it out of their seventies. I'm not sure why that is, but if I had to guess it would be that very few of us had lived our lives in our youth looking at the long run. We shot for excitement as we hit so-called adulthood, and figured that we could worry about the later years when we got there. And now that we're here, well, the bets have been called. Which is okay: I'm not sure I would have done anything that different. When life is really rolling is not the time most of us would put on the brakes. More likely, we punched the gas. So to listen now to "Journey Through the Past" and "Helpless" from a half-century ago pulls back the curtain all the way into what being young sounds like. And then to be astonished that it seems so ageless.

Maybe that's why listening to YOUNG SHAKESPEARE in 2021 has the gift of infinity to it. It allows us to travel back those 50 years, and also hopefully believe that the journey has been a good one. That all we have done--both the ups and the downs--add together into a life well-spent. And the songs also feel like you had a telescope into the future when you wrote them, and that you knew so many things most of us would someday have to learn on our own.

The songwriters I have loved the most, the ones I feel were teaching me lessons on how to see the world and hopefully live more fully in it, were always the prophets of that new age which began for us in the 1960s. Whether it was you, Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, the 13th Floor Elevators' Tommy Hall, the Beatles, Townes Van Zandt, the Rolling Stones or whoever, that at the same time the music was so thrilling the songs themselves floated like secret missives into my mind. It's where I learned almost everything that guided me into all my tomorrows. In the end, those songs have always felt like instantaneous information passed in subliminal secrecy. They do not need to be explained, because they arrive beyond mere thought. It comes in immediate waves of wonder. I still can't claim to understand how it happens, but I know without a single doubt that it does. Because it has made my life.

Along with the album, the film included with the YOUNG SHAKESPEARE release is surely a surprise of surprises. It's slightly hallucinatory to watch an entire solo concert in 1971 for the very first time now, almost like we slipped into a small time machine and made the journey back to a moment when everything was really kicking into high gear for you--and us. With the Vietnam War raging and President Nixon and his minions just heading into the Watergate capers, America felt like things were running off the rails at an even brisker clip than ever. Things weren't right, but it was hard to pin down exactly where the dark clouds were coming from. But dark they were. So to watch you onstage as you perform alone "The Needle and the Damage Done," "Ohio," "A Man Needs a Maid" and "Down by the River" is to feel much of the weight of what we all felt. And at the same time as ""Don't Let It Bring You Down" and "Dance Dance Dance" flip the coin for a look at the other side, and the home photos bring everything to life, the 50 years ahead supply a strength we can all use now.

Life really does seem to even itself out, which is where hope comes in. What I have learned more from music than anything else is it's all in the holding on. Faith, whatever Cracker Jack prize it comes as, can always be found at the bottom of the box. And watching these timeless songs performed live in what is really still their infancy is to know without doubt that the road ahead holds a promise worth always seeking. We will get there. At the end of the evening, when you return to the stage to perform "Sugar Mountain," a song you had not yet released then, you say you hadn't put it on an album because you didn't like it very much. I was immediately transported back to a Crosby, Still, Nash & Young concert in Houston at the end of 1969. Another very strange and disconcerting year. But that night in Houston when the other three band members left the stage and you pulled out a stool and played "Sugar Mountain" by yourself, I can still clearly see, all these years later, your performance. It stopped me in my tracks as I felt like at the end of my teen-aged years that a part of life was ending. I felt a massive sense of loss, and a large amount of fear of what could be ahead. You sang that you could no longer live on Sugar Mountain when you turned 20 years old. That arrow hit me in the heart that cold Houston night. Still, I knew it had to be and made a promise to myself I would not be afraid of the future. No matter what. YOUNG SHAKESPEARE reminds me of the strength this music has always given me, and entering my seventies, when I have lost so many friends, I know there is no way forward except with a belief that now, and whatever time I have left, a great song and warm heart will light the way. And maybe, just maybe, I'll always try and hold on to some of the colored balloons.

Bill Bentley