Neil Young's album calls for Bush impeachment

Neil Young, who has periodically touched on political themes during a four-decade career, plans to release a hastily recorded new album ruminating on the war in Iraq and directly calling for the impeachment of US President George W. Bush.

The 10-song album, Living With War will probably represent Young's most overtly partisan work since the song Ohio, recorded and quickly released by the group Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young as a response to the Kent State shootings in 1970.

Elliot Roberts, Young's longtime manager, said the album would be "more about soldiers" and "what it's like to all of a sudden be 18 and on the line."

The titles on the album include Let's Impeach the President, which features Bush's voice overlaid above a 100-voice choir singing, "Flip flop."

Another is Lookin' for a Leader. The album also includes an a cappella version of America the Beautiful, sung by Young with the choir.

Roberts that he did not know exactly what had inspired Young to record the new songs, which were written and recorded in a span of roughly two weeks, but that "I know he watches the news."

He added that he believed the album's sentiments would resonate broadly, adding that "it's not a political Democratic versus Republican feel."

The album comes at a time when major record companies and radio stations appear to have developed a degree of comfort with bluntly political material.

The latest song from the band Pearl Jam, World Wide Suicide, which accuses the president of taking soldiers' sacrifices for granted, recently logged three weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard modern-rock airplay chart.

And Green Day's 2004 album American Idiot which addresses themes of alienation, but also includes lyrics like "Sieg Heil to the president gasman," has emerged as a blockbuster, selling more than 5.4 million copies so far, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

Young expressed varying views on politics over the years. In the 1980s he openly supported former US president Ronald Reagan, but he has since become a fairly consistent critic of Republican administrations.

His 1989 song Rockin' in the Free World implicitly criticized the first president Bush. In Greendale, a film he directed to accompany his 2003 album of the same name, Young sings lyrics nodding to the Patriot Act -- "We'll be watching you/ No matter what you do" -- against images of former attorney general John Ashcroft.