Neil Young: rock's legendary rabble-rouser certainly has some stories—perhaps none more intriguing than the one surrounding his new film, a musical morality tale. Jim Jarmusch gets the goods

For some musicians, making revolutionary music is a goal. But for Neil Young, it's just a beginning. Nearly four decades into a career marked by constant innovation, the 58-year-old singer-songwriter may very well have outdone himself with his most recent project, Greendale (Reprise). Described by Young as a "musical novel," it is a multimedia affair comprising an album, a touring stage show, and now a feature film, which hits theaters this month.

Like last year's Greendale album, the film--which Young shot himself on Super-8 film--revolves around the Greens, a typical American family living In a fictional small town. The story follows the events that unfold when a member of the family is arrested for killing a police officer, sparking a media onslaught that propels both the town and the family into disarray. It also charts the spiritual coming-of-age of Sun Green, a teenager whose political awakening and newfound interest in activism provide the backbone of Young's modern-day parable.

Here, director Jim Jarmusch talks to Young about the genesis of the Greendale saga.

JIM JARMUSCH: With your most recent album, Greendale, you've done something I don't know that anyone has ever done before, which is to treat your record as a text--a starting point for a larger piece of work that's at once musical, literary, theatrical, and cinematic. The film is really a visual soundtrack to the record itself. It also has a kind of Rashomon [1950] quality, with all these perspectives that surround one central narrative dealing with people's responses to authority, the infringement on rights under the current presidential administration, and our consciousness of the earth as an ecosystem that's very fragile. The town, Greendale, is like a metaphor for America gone mad. How did this all come about?

NEIL YOUNG: There really was no plan. We started the way I usually start, recording songs one by one. But the story itself and the characters unfolded as we went along. We'd finish writing a song--we actually started calling them "chapters" early on--then afterwards we would record it, and then everyone would decide what it was about. We worked really fast--with most of the songs, you're hearing the first, second, or third take. So we just kept on going without really thinking about the normal conventions of building a story; we let the music take us from one place to another. I was trying to pack a lot into this project--way too much for a story to have. But a record can handle it. Music is cool in that way: It enables you to go places that might be difficult to get to otherwise.

JJ: It's like my old motto: "It's hard to get lost if you don't know where you're going." In the booklet that comes with the album, there is an amazing anecdote about your father, Scott Young, the writer, and how when you were a kid, you once went up to the attic where he worked and asked him what he was writing about. He said, "I don't know ... Sometimes I don't write anything. Sometimes I write all day." That comment applies to your process as an artist as well. For example, you once told me that you wrote "Cowgirl in the Sand," "Down by the River," and "Cinnamon Girl" all in the same 20 minutes, while you were sick with a fever.

NY: Yeah, I had the flu or something.

JJ: I'd like to catch that flu. [Young laughs] But in a way, the form of Greendale reflects that process because you never let it rest.

NY: Exactly. There is a lot of Greendale-associated product--you know, we've been joking that Greendale on Ice is probably just around the corner. [Jarmusch laughs] But from the very beginning, I wanted Greendale to be a visual project that people would remember for being all of these things as opposed to just an album. I wanted to make something you wouldn't be able to get completely by just listening to the music. I tried to bring the same urgency with which we made the album to making the film. We kept going at the same pace for so long, hammering at it, pressing on. It was so uplifting.

JJ: The style of the film is very clear and persistent: You're working with a lot of non-actors, many of the set pieces were created on the fly, and when people speak, instead of traditional dialogue they have your voice, singing, coming out of their mouths. The aesthetic is very unusual but very appropriate.

NY: I was really trying to paint Sun Green's world, to convey some idea of what it was like for her to grow up in this town, knowing what she knew, seeing what was happening to her family, and having her own feelings about what was going on in the world. She is young, and her family won't let her grow up, so she rebels. Sarah White, the actress who plays Sun, was so good, so professional. She came to us right out of high school and never missed a beat.

JJ: Well, the narrative builds in a cumulative way where the form eventually becomes secondary to a lot of things you are saying with the work, mostly about how times like the one we're living through now can be fertile for creating opposition. It makes you wonder why, with the way things have gone in this country over the last few years--