Neil Young, “Before and After.”

Neil Young has never been afraid to confound, for better or worse, and his latest project presents a novel way of presenting material that, to varying degrees, hasn’t been heard much, if at all, over the years.

Before and After gives us 13 Neil Young songs from throughout his long career – from Buffalo Springfield classics almost six decades on to relative obscurities from as recently as 2021 – in an almost entirely acoustic, almost entirely solo performance designed to meld into a more-or-less seamless 48-minute whole.

To quote Before and After’s promotional material, “The tracks on this album play continuously … It is a music montage with no beginnings or endings, so the feeling is captured as a whole piece.”

Young, who switches from guitar to piano to pump organ and back again, brought out most of these songs for the first time in a long time, or ever, on a short West Coast tour in July, which included a stop at the Greek in Berkeley.

Whether that single-suite “whole piece” approach makes any of these songs (or all of them, Young would presumably hope) any more compelling than they would be individually is up for debate. The overall effect may well go down most smoothly with the listener looking out the window on a rainy day, holed up in the house, when a low-key, literate miniconcert would sound just right. As presented here, these disparate songs share a feeling.

But even if you imagine the usual between-song breaks common to vinyl LPs and CDs, the songs themselves would stand up just as well. They are of interest for various reasons, including how they’ve been reimagined, and for what they had been in the first place.

One song checks both of those boxes: “If You Got Love,” recorded for Young’s 1982 album, Trans, but not included on it. An uncharacteristically poppy, almost Latin-flavored song in its original incarnation, as part of Before and After it’s been recast as a sort of light dirge, powered by Young’s pump organ and harmonica.

Another song that gets a significant reworking on Before and After is “Mr. Soul,” which first appeared on 1966 album Buffalo Springfield Again as a hard-charging guitar workout. Here, as part of the musical montage, its ominous pump organ drone slows things to a near crawl.

Most of these 13 songs rate as obscure, and some of them are wonderful. “My Heart,” originally on 1994 Crazy Horse album Sleeps With Angels, is presented here as a beautiful piano-based number, with vibraphone flavoring. The Buffalo Springfield pair of “Burned” and “On the Way Home,” with Young and his acoustic guitar, are slower takes on songs more pop-friendly than most that would follow. And the closer, “Don’t Forget Love,” from 2021’s Barn, is a piano-based beauty offering a ray of hope on the way out.

“When the storm comes and the lights go out, don’t forget love,” Young sings. “When the rains give way to sunshine, don’t forget love.”

Getting the least radicalized treatment here is the title song from Comes a Time, which was largely acoustic and somewhat countrified when it came out in 1978.

For most recording artists, a move like including 13 songs on one “track” would seem gimmicky. From Neil Young, who has released albums of singer-songwriter introspection, Hendrix-like fury, techno-rock, full-on country, Sun-style rockabilly and horn-fueled rhythm and blues, it’s simply another way to stretch that imagination muscle.

Follow journalist Sam Richards at Twitter.com/samrichardsWC.