Neil Young ended his first full concert in nearly a year by tearing several strings off his guitar and chanting “Take America Back!” over the closing bars of “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The 80-year-old was at the Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater in Bridgeport, Connecticut on Tuesday night, co-headlining with the 93-year-old Willie Nelson. For the eleven songs before it, almost nothing about the evening suggested it would finish that way.
That contrast is the story. This was billed as a warm-up, a low-stakes tune-up before Farm Aid, and for most of its running time it behaved like one.
The year Neil Young nearly sat out
Young was not supposed to be difficult to see in 2026. He had a full European summer booked, and in February he scrapped it. “I have decided to take a break and will not be touring Europe this time,” he wrote at the time, in a statement reported by Ultimate Classic Rock. “Thanks to everyone who bought tickets. I’m sorry to let you down, but this is not the time. I do love playing LIVE and being with you and the Chrome Hearts. LOVE Neil be well.” Far Out Magazine reported that he explained the decision as “listening to my body.”
What followed was close to a year of near-silence on stage. His only live appearance before this month was a surprise acoustic set in May at a Vancouver benefit marking the 90th birthday of his friend, the Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. That appearance is why some coverage of Tuesday’s show describing it as Young’s “first 2026 show” needs a small asterisk: it was his first full concert of the year, not his first time on a stage.
The other thing that changed is that he has a new record out. Second Song, his second album with the Chrome Hearts and his 50th overall, arrived on September 18 — recorded in analog at Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, following 2025’s Talkin’ to the Trees. The Chrome Hearts are drummer Anthony LoGerfo, bassist Corey McCormick, keyboardist Spooner Oldham and guitarist Micah Nelson, who is Willie’s son.
A quiet set, and a bow that worried people
Roger Friedman of Showbiz411, who was in the room and shot the footage that has since circulated, described Young’s set as “low key” and almost entirely acoustic — a dozen songs weighted toward the hits. “Long May You Run,” “Human Highway,” “Comes a Time,” “Old Man,” “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and a newly arranged full-band “After the Gold Rush.” Friedman noted the band spent the night fighting what he called an unforgiving sound system, and that hearing Young’s most popular material presented this plainly was an odd sort of treat after fifty years of watching him.
Young also gave two songs from Second Song their live debuts. Here the sources diverge slightly: Consequence’s report says in its text that the debuts were “Comes a Time” and “Earth Girl,” but the setlist printed in the same article marks them as “Casting Me Away From You” and “Earth Girl.” The setlist is almost certainly right — “Comes a Time” is a 1978 song Young has played for decades, while “Casting Me Away From You” is a track he wrote and recorded as a teenager in 1965 and re-recorded for the new album.
Earlier in the night, Young had walked on during Nelson’s set for a rare duet on “Are There Any More Real Cowboys?”, the 1985 song of Young’s that Nelson covered. Accounts of Nelson’s own set differ on length — Consequence counts 21 songs, Friedman counts 18 titles — but both describe a 93-year-old performing seated and entirely undiminished.
Then came the moment that made people nervous. After “After the Gold Rush,” Friedman wrote, Young rose from the piano, looked briefly dazed, took a bow and walked the band off. The audience, expecting more, was left wondering whether ten songs was all they were getting.
What he didn’t say
They were not. Young and the Chrome Hearts came back out for a two-song encore, and the temperature changed completely.
He opened it with “Living with War,” the title track of the album he wrote in 2006 in protest at the Iraq War under George W. Bush. He has played it only a handful of times in the twenty years since, and Tuesday was reportedly its first outing since 2014, in a new acoustic arrangement and a live debut for this band.
Then “Rockin’ in the Free World,” which Friedman described as erupting after eleven mostly soft songs, and over which Young repeatedly chanted a line that is not in the song: “Take America Back!”
He did not say from whom. That is worth stating plainly, because the gap is where most of the argument about this performance is now happening. Friedman’s own review put the song in the context of current American foreign policy and then left the question open — “use your imagination” — which is a reviewer’s reading rather than anything Young said on stage. Young named no target, no party and no person.
What is not ambiguous is that he chose to end a gentle greatest-hits set by reviving a protest song he had effectively shelved, and destroying part of his guitar in the process.
There is more of this to come. Young and Nelson play the second of their two co-headlining dates at the TD Pavilion at Highmark Mann in Philadelphia on September 24, with Ty Myers opening both. Both men then appear at Farm Aid 2026 on September 26 at the Veterans United Home Loans Amphitheater in Virginia Beach — the festival they helped found in 1985 — on a bill that includes John Mellencamp, Dave Matthews, Margo Price and Nathaniel Rateliff, and which CNN is due to broadcast live.
If Bridgeport was the warm-up, Saturday will have a considerably larger audience.
