Laugh at Neil Young first and get it out of the way. With a new Crazy Horse album, a new book, and his very own high-resolution streaming platform, the 73-year-old rock legend has set himself the modest goals of reuniting his beloved band, reinventing the wheel, and rescuing music for all humanity. That’s what rock legends are for, right?

Young’s third book in seven years, To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission to Save High-Quality Audio, is part manifesto and part how-not-to manual. Cowritten with tech collaborator Phil Baker, it details the pair’s attempt to market Pono, the short-lived, high-resolution, stand-alone audio player launched in 2015 at the same moment that low-resolution streaming services like Spotify virtually killed downloads. And it follows the story through Xstream—the high-resolution streaming backend to the Neil Young Archives, ingeniously designed to automatically adjust to a user’s available bandwidth—and Baker and Young’s struggles to license the tech.

“The world is turnin’, I hope it don’t turn away,” Young sang on the title track to 1974’s On the Beach. Some have ridiculed the Canadian songwriter, arguing that Pono’s better-than-CD resolution was inaudible to the human ear (let alone an old rocker’s ear), or that sound quality is something only old people care about, anyway. But the world has perhaps finally started to turn with him.

Courtesy of BenBella Books

Consider: A month before To Feel the Music’s September publication, Apple announced it was expanding its high-resolution music offering. (As some have pointed out, though, “Apple Digital Masters” AAC files are not the same as actual hi-res, defined as anything better than a CD’s quality of 44.1-kHz/16-bit audio.) And, a week after the book hit stores, Amazon announced its own impending entrance into the high-resolution streaming market, likewise with its own definition of the term. With the falling costs of storage and bandwidth, a widespread shift to high-resolution is perhaps inevitable, even if few besides Neil Young seem to be advocating for it (and Spotify continues to dismiss it). Young doesn’t want high-quality audio to be a luxury, but the default, at no extra cost. Amazon’s announcement took Young’s dream one large step closer to reality.

“The world is gonna get it in a big way, and it’s all gonna be there,” Young told me a few days before Amazon’s announcement, sounding quietly triumphant after more than a half decade of battle in the hi-res trenches. “Everything from the record companies will get to be heard through streaming in a very big way, and I think it’s gonna change Earth.”

Dreamin’ Man

Known for aching melodies, screaming feedback, and a voice as creaky as an old acoustic six-string, Neil Young has long made the kind of music synonymous with vinyl’s warmth. He is also known for a half century of nearly mystical recording techniques, favoring rough drafts and first takes. The Telluride sessions for Colorado, his first album with Crazy Horse since 2012, took place under a full moon, another favorite practice.

But for all Young’s obsessions with instinct, he has also long possessed an equally mystic attention to technical detail. Since the ’70s, Young’s guitar rig has included home-brewed electronics like the Whizzer, invented by associate Sal Trentino, using potentiometers to control an amp’s volume knob from a foot switch without incurring signal loss. Young’s name can be found on several dozen patents pertaining to electric cars, model trains, and media distribution. The attention toward the homegrown even extended to picking special material for his LP jackets, like the earthy oatmeal paper used for 1972’s Harvest and the stark blotter of 1975’s Tonight’s the Night.