Neil Young

Featured Album

Essential Albums

  • Harvest Moon
    Harvest Moon
    Harvest Moon

    One way to hear Harvest Moon is as an echo of 1972’s Harvest—a leap made easier by the fact that many of the same musicians played on both. But Harvest was made by a recently divorced 26-year-old still negotiating his creative path, and Harvest Moon by a multiplatinum legend who’d secured the privilege of doing more or less whatever he wanted. The same person, maybe, but separated by a Rubicon of experience. So, while the feel of the albums is similar—gentle, plaintive, romantic—the experience is different: one, a catalogue of romance according to youth, and the other according to the reflections of middle age. The poignancy isn’t just in the latter album’s tenderness—the string sections, the country lilt, the pedal steel guitar—but in the way that Young slips between past and present: how a memory of then becomes a vision of now (“Unknown Legend”), how circular time stirs feelings we think we’ve forgotten (“Harvest Moon”). The effect is like looking at a hologram, or a trick image that changes when you tilt the card back and forth: The object is fixed, but what you see in it flickers—and both feel equally real. The album’s most touching moment is on “Old King”, where, in the course of eulogising a beloved dog, Young mentions having kicked him when he was bad: a moment of violence neutralised by time and made strangely beautiful by the fact that Young knows it won’t ever happen again. The connection to Harvest is explicit, but the album also fits in a set of what you could call Gentle Neil: Comes a Time, Old Ways, Prairie Wind, Homegrown. At the time, Young was coming off some of the noisiest, most radical shows of Crazy Horse’s career (captured on Weld) and had been recast as the progenitor of a generation of underground bands like Nirvana and Sonic Youth—a distinction you couldn’t quite give to David Crosby, all due respect. It must’ve been nice, being on the edge of 50 and lionised by people half your age. But, being Neil Young, he did what Neil Young does: change, again.

  • Tonight's the Night
    Tonight's the Night
    Tonight's the Night

    1975

  • Harvest
    Harvest
    Harvest

    Graham Nash tells a story about visiting Neil Young at his ranch in Northern California in 1971. Young asked Nash if he wanted to hear something, Nash said sure. Young led Nash down to a lake, where the two men got into a rowboat and started rowing. Nash said Young had been a mystery to him his entire life, so having to row out to the middle of a lake to have a conversation made sense. It turns out Young had outfitted his house and adjoining barn with enormous speakers, and the two men sat on the water and listened to Harvest. The album gave Young his biggest commercial success, and in “Heart of Gold”, a song that defined the faded beauty of ’70s folk rock and Young’s only No. 1 single. But its sparseness and sense of withdrawal also served as a pivot away from the civic-mindedness of the late 1960s and as the foundation for indie artists like Elliott Smith and albums like Nirvana’s Unplugged, whose strength seemed born more of fragility and isolation than anything else. Linda Ronstadt, who sang backup on both “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man”, described Young as a sketch artist whose roughness in the studio belied his ability to find the essence of a song and grab it by the throat. You don’t need to listen to it in a rowboat, but you understand why Young might have wanted it that way: Not only is Harvest about the fantasy of keeping it simple, it’s about the fantasy of keeping it simple alone, or at least away from the shore. So give him space to grieve the friends he’s lost (“The Needle and the Damage Done”), and understand, at least in an artistic context, the cruelty of “A Man Needs a Maid” as the complaint of a guy who’s done the people thing and is sick of it. Classic as the album is, its relative delicacy and orchestral colouring make it feel like an outlier in Young’s catalogue. He famously wrote that “Heart of Gold” put him in the middle of the road, which was fine for a little while, but then got boring, so he steered into a ditch—a quip that gave rise to the unofficial titling of his mid-’70s stretch of Time Fades Away, On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night as the Ditch Trilogy. It’s a good line. But what makes it interesting isn’t the metaphorical contrast between road and ditch, it’s the revelation that, in Young’s mind, he was always travelling—a prophecy the 50-plus years that came after bore out.

  • After the Gold Rush
    After the Gold Rush
    After the Gold Rush

    100 Best Albums After the Gold Rush is probably the first multiplatinum album to be recorded in someone’s basement, but more importantly, it sounds like it. Having peeled away from the formalities of Crosby, Stills & Nash with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Young settled into the style that defined him for the next 50-plus years: intuitive, direct, a little messy but with a reliable line on what often felt like deeper creative truths. Factories, he called recording studios—places where you churned out your album in one room while another band churned theirs out the next room over. Where documentary film had the unvarnished simplicity of cinema verité, Young said, well, he was gonna do the same for music. The heavy songs are pretty (“Southern Man”, “When You Dance I Can Really Love”) and the pretty songs feel as comforting and eternal as an old shoe (“Only Love Can Break Your Heart”). And in a moment when the optimism of the ’60s was dissipating into the realities of the Vietnam War and ecological ruin, Young took the now-familiar step of engaging his surroundings by withdrawing to somewhere safer, quieter, more sober, more despairing (“After the Gold Rush”)—a hermeticism that gave us everything from Elliott Smith to Bon Iver. James Taylor and Joni Mitchell could keep their sophistication—Young was gonna rhyme “burning” with “turning” and “fly” with “sky” all day long. When the hotshot teenage guitarist Nils Lofgren fielded his request to play piano by saying he didn’t know how, Young said great—that’s exactly the kind of pianist he was looking for.

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About Neil Young

In an effort to understand the long, idiosyncratic career of Neil Young, remember that in 1983, Geffen Records sued him, effectively, for not sounding enough like himself. Even in his early days with Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, he was a mercurial presence, injecting the communal optimism of the hippie era with darkness and skepticism (“Ohio”, “Broken Arrow”) and pushing the conventions of folk rock to noisy extremes (1979’s Rust Never Sleeps). To the extent that he represents the spirit of the '60s, it’s in his uncompromising commitment to his own journey, no matter how surprising (1982’s electronic Trans or 1991’s guitar collage Arc). The Geffen lawsuit wasn’t just absurd for its efforts to litigate creativity; it was absurd because almost no artist in popular music has ever been as stubbornly themselves as Neil Young. Born in Toronto in 1945, he moved to Los Angeles in the mid-'60s, where his music—from introspective solo albums like 1970’s After the Gold Rush or 1975’s Tonight’s the Night to group workouts with Crazy Horse—helped define the sound of post-Beatles rock ’n' roll. If he fits so comfortably into so many musical lineages—country, grunge, folk, noise—it’s only because he’s covered so much ground and with so much unerring conviction; when his biographer Jimmy McDonough asked him if he’d ever want to go into outer space, Young said only if he knew he was going all the way. And if he gets under your skin, he just might be doing something right. As he sang way back in 1966, on Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul”, “I was raised by the praise of a fan who said I upset her.” And he’s been following that muse ever since.

HOMETOWN
Canada
BORN
12 November 1945
GENRE
Rock

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