Neil Young has devoted most of his recent public appearances to discussing the PonoMusic Player, but there's also new music to talk about -- and plenty of it.

First up is the album Young recorded at Jack White's Nashville studio, which he insists will be out "very soon." Predicting a possible spring release for the LP, titled 'A Letter Home,' Billboard quotes Young as saying the covers set is "not ready for prime time yet" and adding, "It's not really a release yet, but it's a very unique record. It's like a time capsule. It doesn't sound like anything you've heard that was made recently. And some great songs, some beautiful music...They're songs that I love, songs that changed my life, songs that made it so that I understood what someone else was saying to me, songs by greater writers."

While 'A Letter Home' finds Young recording other people's songs, he assured reporters that he's still very much a songwriter himself. "I have new songs that I'm working on, and I haven't stopped doing that," he insisted. "I do it when I feel like it and I'm collecting them. And sometimes I play them live before they come out as a record, and because of the way everything is people hear them before they come out, on the Internet. But I still feel like I'm gonna make records of them."

And he's been giving some thought to what kind of record he'd like to make, too. "I'd like to make a record with a full-blown orchestra, live -- a mono recording with one mic," Young revealed. "I want to do something like that where we really record what happened, with one point of view and the musicians moved closer and farther away, the way it was done in the past. To me that's a challenge and it's a sound that's unbelievable, and you can't get it any other way. So I'm into doing that."

Finally, Young says he's in the "final editing stages" of his new book, 'Special Deluxe,' which he says will be out this year and described by saying it "focuses on my life as regards to my transportation, as regards to my love for cars. So it's a history through automobiles, and it's a history of automobiles and it's a history of the environmental impact of automobiles. And it's a projection into the future of automobiles. It has its own agenda that develops over the book."

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