As a founding member of pioneering sixties band Buffalo Springfield, as a spirited addition to supergroup Crosby, Stills and Nash, as a guitar god centerpiece to garage band Crazy Horse, and as an unconventional but undeniably melodic solo acoustic artist, Neil Young has constantly expanded his musical horizons.

With his latest project, Greendale, which he describes as a "musical novel," Young has expanded his musical repertoire beyond anyone's imagination, even his own. He claims the project, which has grown into a full-length DVD, a recently released album, and a traveling stage show with actors and sets, was unpremeditated. Greendale began with Young's decision to shake up his routines. He stopped working out for the first time in 20 years, changed guitars, set up a 16-track recorder instead of a 48-track, sent home his long-time sound engineers and worked with their assistants. As the songs emerged, it became obvious that something unprecedented was happing in Young's decades-long career; the same characters were appearing in multiple songs. He contacted Crazy Horse, kept recording ("I didn't fix anything," he says. "All the screw-ups, all the mistakes, everything's on there. . . You can't fix it, it's real."), and filmed the video with his family and friends around the California town where he lives. What they ended up with was what Young calls "a song you can look at."

With Crazy Horse, Young took the show on tour this summer, presenting his devoted fans to a musical, visual treat that is altogether new and surprising, and undeniably awesome. Like many typical Neil Young songs, Greendale is a tangle of stories that drift through time and perspective and deliver strong yet subtle environmental and social messages. It is this integrity and commitment to truth that has kept Young passionate about Farm Aid for 18 years. In addition to being a founder and director, Neil Young has also become Farm Aid's resident gadfly, willing to look deeper and think harder in order to understand and bring to light the problems facing family farmers.

*Some language taken from "The Latest From Neil Young" by Jon Pareles, Nytimes.com, June 15th, 2003, courtesy of Neil Young's publicist.