If Greendale was any indicator, Neil’s next phase of experimentation was going to be in terms of lyrics as much as it was musical genre back in the 1980s. In 2009 Neil released an entire album, Fork in the Road, about his car. Granted, it’s pretty cool car – a vintage Lincoln retrofitted to be an electric vehicle – but still is a whole album about a car. And while there’s some pretty decent songs on it, there’s not much to say about that.

The next album’s was another experiment. While Neil had done plenty of songs with just his voice and guitar before, it was always a pretty straightforward affair with an acoustic guitar. But for Le Noise, he hired Daniel Lanois to produce a solo album with him and an electric guitar drench is so much reverb and delay and looping pedals that was supposed to create a whole new cool sound. It didn’t. Le Noise is just noise. It’s an interesting idea at first, but gets old by the second song. The main problem is you can even really hear what the song is under all the effects, so it really didn’t matter which tracks I picked from this record. So I just picked the shortest.

At this point Neil hadn’t really recorded an album with Crazy Horse since the terrible mismatch of Greendale. He wanted to get the old band together, but for some reason was really worried that they would be rusty – so in order to warm up Crazy Horse, they ran through a bunch of old folk tunes. And not like obscure stuff either, but rather the songs you would learn in kindergarten and sing around a campfire. Songs like Oh Susannah or She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain (retitled here Jesus’ Chariot). Who knows why he made Crazy Horse go through this exercise. Maybe it was good for them. But recording it and releasing it as Americana was not good for us as listeners.

Now that Crazy Horse was back in fighting form, Neil released the double-CD Psychedelic Pill, while Neil always had a tendency to jam on a bit too long, this album featured two tracks between 16 and 17 minutes long, plus another, Driftin’ Back that was over twenty-seven and a half minutes long. Clearly no one cared what Neil did at this point except hardcore fans who would put up with anything Neil put out. So Neil took advantage of it and put out whatever he wanted to. This album was the height of self-indulgence.

While at the time Neil decrying the poor sound quality of MP3s and most streaming services and trying to get everyone to buy his ultra-high fidelity Pono, he decided to go down to Jack White Nashville studio. There Jack White and recreated a vintage 78 RPM recording/pressing booth. So Neil did a whole album of random covers in there with the worst sound quality imaginable. Not sure why. He titled it A Letter Home and it features some spoken word from Neil talking to (or writing a letter to) his dead mother. Again he was testing the audience’s patience as wasn’t even being as fun or interesting about it as he was during his stint on Geffen.

Later that same year (2014), Neil recorded an album with an orchestra called Storytone. That would be weird enough, but much like Living With War he couldn’t leave well enough alone, even after he released the record. He simultaneously released a deluxe edition of Storytone that contained a second disc with all the same songs, only this time recorded solo acoustic. If that weren’t indecisive enough, he later released Mixed Pages Of Storytone which featured the orchestral and the solo versions edited and mixed together.

As uncertain as he was with that album, Neil was clearly reveling in the freedom of being a cranky old man, and things were only going to get crankier going forward.