Neil Young Performs ‘Ohio’ in Preview Clip from Upcoming Tour Film

There’s a new preview clip and perhaps a title change for the upcoming Neil Young concert documentary, which is set to premiere as previously announced at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 12.

Previously billed as ‘Life,’ the documentary now appears to be operating under the title of ‘Neil Young Journeys.’ The new film closes out a trilogy of collaborative visual releases from Young and filmmaker Jonathan Demme. The director has been lensing Young’s more recent work in a variety of settings, most recently with the excellent ‘Trunk Show’ film, released in 2009, which combined both electric and acoustic performances captured during 2007.

The preview clip from ‘Neil Young Journeys’ features an excerpt of a moving solo electric performance of the CSNY classic ‘Ohio,’ intercut with news footage of the National Guard on campus at Kent State University in 1970, the tragic events of which would inspire the writing of ‘Ohio.’

The Toronto screening represents a homecoming for Young, who was born there in 1945. The concert footage featured in ‘Neil Young Journeys’ was filmed also filmed in his former stomping grounds, specifically across two nights at the classic Massey Hall concert hall.

The film also features footage of Young’s Ontario road trip, in which he drove a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria to visit Omemee, a small town where he spent a good portion of his early years. Although bulldozers and time have removed some of the familiar landmarks from his youth, Neil says that the visuals of those places live on in his head.

Notoriously a tech-head of sorts, Neil Young was in San Francisco recently as a keynote speaker for the Dreamforce conference, sharing details on how he has incorporated the Salesforce CRM application into the ongoing construction of his Lincvolt project, for which Young has ambitious goals. “We want to build a zero admissions automobile that eliminates roadside re-fueling entirely,’ he writes on the project website.

Watch Neil Young Perform 'Ohio' in the Preview Clip for 'Journeys'