Neil Young has admitted he once bought thousands of copies of his own album and used them as shingles on the roof of his house.

Young, who recently launched his high quality digital Pono music player and service at SXSW in Austin, revealed that a “mastering error” on the 1978 album ‘Comes A Time’ left him dissatisfied with the release and forced him to take the existing copies off the market.

Asked if the story was true by Rolling Stone, Young replied: “The tape got damaged when it went through the airport or something. I had to go back and use a copy of the master — it was a copy, but it had better-sounding playback than the other one. No, no, I made a barn roof out of them. I used them as shingles.”


Pono maintains Young’s interest in high quality audio and will consist of a digital music service (PonoMusic) and 128GB portable device (PonoPlayer) capable of storing 1-2,000 high resolution songs. The PonoPlayer is described in a press release as a “purpose-built, portable, high-resolution digital-music player designed and engineered in a ‘no-compromise’ fashion to allow consumers to experience studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible, bringing the true emotion and detail of the music, the way the artist recorded it, to life.”

Watch a video about the service below: