This record was made by Jack Nitzsche and I. It took a lot of time. I overdubbed my vocal line by line to get it in pitch. Studio singing was still very nervous for me then. Though I was not with the Springfield at the time, I brought this tape to the record when we finally got together Neil Young Decade liner notes 1977

JM: “Expecting to Fly”—overdubbed, but good? NY: That’s JACK. His dedication to feelings—getting the feelings on tape. It was a collaboration. Jack and I were working away peacefully with no distractions. “Expecting to Fly” has a sound. It’s overdubbed and yet nothing’s missing. It’s possible to overdub. But the longer you overdub, the harder it is to do. NY: Jack. What a fuckin’ character. He was just great. I think I met Jack at a press party for Buffalo Springfield. I loved the Phil Spector records that he’d been a part of. Jack had a whole scene. He was a player. “Expecting to Fly” is the best thing we did. NY: Bruce Botnick played an important part in that record. He was an artist. He would set up the board and if he didn’t like it, he would just fuckin’ erase the whole thing—the Botnick sweep. NY: We worked on it really hard. It’s probably one of the best records that I ever made. It took thirty days. That’s a long time on one song. But with Jack we got the real shit. ’Cause Jack could bring it out—he wrestled it out of me line by line, word by word … he reinforced it. My believing in me. JM: Did “Expecting to Fly” have anything to do with the Summer of Love? NY: Yeah, that must’ve been it. I remember the girls came up, I don’t know if it was Donna, Vicki, somebody came up and listened to “Expecting to Fly” over and over again on acid for hours. Got way into it. I don’t think I was there. Neil Young "Shakey" by Jimmy McDonough 2002

Later on tonight we're going to bring out Crazy Horse. I don't know for all you old Buffalo Springfield fans. You might remember a record called Expecting To Fly. Well, that record was mostly made by a person outside the group. The record was made when I quit the group for my first time. It's sort of a habit I picked up. So anyway, his name is Jack Nitzsche and he's playing piano with Crazy Horse tonight. And that's going to be something else for you to look forward to. Neil Young Music Hall, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA February 25, 1970

NY: Jack Nitzsche and I made Expecting To Fly that took, like, about thirty days for us to complete it with Bruce Botnick the engineer. We had a fantastic time. A lot of time mixing it with these old tube boards and everything. MM: When you were setting out to do that ... because you were creating a new sound ... what was the collaboration like? How do you start to go to that place? NY: Well, you know, I was very young. I think it was only the second Buffalo Springfield album, I think, that Expecting To Fly was on. He had just started talking to me about doing things myself and being a solo artist. He was like a mentor ... he's a genius. He'd did incredible ... I knew everything he'd done. All of his charts that he'd written for various things ... Spector's and stuff that were just insane charts. Neil Young WTF Podcast with Marc Maron #717 June 20, 2016

Sunset Sound is where Jack and I recorded and mixed “Expecting to Fly” with Bruce Botnick, one of the most influential and accomplished recording engineers in the history of recorded sound. Jack and I spent weeks working on the chart for “Expecting to Fly” in his house in Coldwater Canyon. Neil Young Waging Heavy Peace Sept 2012

I now had a house/cabin at the top of Ridpath Avenue near Utica Drive, way up at the end of the road at the top of Laurel Canyon. It was a crazy place up there, with a main house, a garage, and a little cabin. The shingles were all curved and mystical like a witch’s castle. Wonderful. I was renting a cabin at the top of a flight of stairs, maybe one to two hundred–plus steps. Below it, the garage was down on Utica, and a drummer, John Densmore of the Doors, lived there. The garage was constructed with the same mystical shingle work. An astrologer, Kiyo Hodel, was my landlord. She lived in the main house of the whole compound and was very cosmic. The little cabin was made of knotty pine, very rustic, and I loved it. I had a llama rug on the floor. [...] In that little cabin, I wrote “Mr. Soul,” “Expecting to Fly,” “Broken Arrow,” and a few other songs. I would listen to acetates of the mixes with my friends often there, too. (Acetates were records that you could make fast and play only a few times before they wore out and lost their sound. They would make them to take home and listen to right after we cut a song at Gold Star Studios in a little room where a lathe was set up. I still remember that acetate smell. The acetate would go in a little record sleeve and a Gold Star label would be typed up and stuck on it. Neil Young Waging Heavy Peace Sept 2012

Expecting To Fly took a long time to write, Neil said. It came from two or three different songs that I molded together and changed around and fit together. We spent three weeks recording and mixing it." Some people have said that you can't hear the lyrics too well. I like to hear lyrics and I can hear the words to it. They are buried in spots but the general mood of the song is there. That's what matters in that particular song. It's not like a modern recording. That recording is based on an old theory. The new style is to hear every instrument clearly. The old one is the old Phil Spector idea of blending them all so they all sound like a wall of sound. Neil Young Hit Parader 1967-1968