When I was a kid first getting into classic rock, Neil Young was “the weird one.” The Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, they all had their legions of fans. Young, did, too. But they were the loners, the wanderers. My elders would quip about his voice, or the darkness simmering underneath his writing. For every beautiful, enduring folk-rock hit, he had a whole array of gnarled music unafraid to lean into some harrowing adult shit — not foreign amongst his peers, but rarely conveyed with so much unflinching honesty. Out of all the Boomer icons, Young was the dark horse.
You get to know Young for yourself, and you find someone with incredible range and incredible consistency. Few artists were as bulletproof-great as Young was for as long he was; fewer still could claim the ongoing cycles of relevance he has shown, with multiple rebirths and resurgences. Beyond setting a standard for his contemporaries, he went on to become the Godfather Of Grunge, and then a hallowed icon for whole swathes of indie music across generations. And through it all, he was always Neil. Whether ragged and brooding at a pump organ, spinning golden melodies around winsome harmonica peals, kicking up cacophony with Crazy Horse, or singing through a vocoder, there were so many iterations of Neil Young — and yet, you always knew it was unmistakably him.
It’s not just the songs, but the multiplicity of Young that looms large for artists generations removed: yes, a master songwriter, but also a one-of-a-kind guitar hero massively influential on so many different facets of rock music. An activist and maverick, setting not only an example for musical nuts and bolts, but how to carry oneself as an artist. I’ve spent the last three months talking to artists about Neil Young, and this was the most common refrain — that Young never bent to the will of others, always followed his muse no matter how erratically it darted, and showed how to navigate the music industry and use one’s platform with dignity.
Young turns 80 this Wednesday, Nov. 12. To mark the occasion, as we did for Bob Dylan’s 80th in 2021 and Paul McCartney’s 80th in 2022, we asked 80 artists to pick their favorite Neil Young song. Below, you’ll find one artist for every year Neil’s been on this Earth, all speaking on the vast inspiration he still provides so many decades on. Happy Birthday, Neil!
My favorite Neil Young anecdote is about him making the album Trans in 1982, which featured a bunch of synthesizers and vocoders, and his label Geffen suing him because they said the album was “uncommercial and unrepresentative” of him. Can you imagine a record label suing their own artist for being too experimental? Listen to the song “Computer Age,” it’s awesome.
I can also share that when Armand Van Helden and I were working on Duck Sauce’s “Barbra Streisand” and we were messing around with the idea of saying someone’s name in the song — someone very distant from house music — we had a short list of three or four names including Barbra’s. Neil Young’s name was on that list too. The syllable count didn’t work though.
On The Beach was the first Neil album I discovered on my own. When I was growing up my mom really wanted me to be into Christian rock. Every time she bought me a Christian rock CD, my dad would leave a different one under my pillow. The first couple were Harvest and After The Gold Rush. I never heard On The Beach until I was in my early twenties.The title track is just vibey as hell. It’s the definitive underdog Neil song.
Our song “True Life” originally interpolated lyrics from “Cinnamon Girl” — I heard them there while I was writing the music and we kept them in while Rachel [Brown] was working on it. His lawyers wouldn’t let us use it, which is what led to the whole “Neil, let me sing your song” bit.
“One Of These Days” from Harvest Moon is a perfect song. I first heard this song when I was a teenager at a New Year’s Eve party. It was played right before “Auld Lang Syne” and I was surrounded by friends; freaks from all different backgrounds. It’s a perfect ode to friendship. The sentiment always makes me tear up — the simplicity and truth of the statement “One of these days/ I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter/ To all the good friends I’ve known” paired with the Linda Rondstadt and James Taylor harmonies. This song is one of Neil’s most underrated gems.
I had been living in New York for four years when Silver & Gold came out. I was trying to write some of those first National records when I was playing this song all the time. When the National got together, the chemistry was already a weird mixture of people’s tastes and record collections. Places like Neil Young were where we all overlapped.
It comes right after “Razor Love,” which would also be in my top five of all his songs. On “Without Rings,” he’s singing in a lower register. It’s just him and guitar, it’s almost like a demo. Apparently he wrote this song and “Good To See You” hiding on his bus when he was on tour with Crazy Horse. When you hear it, you can tell he was spent and lonely. It’s a poem about somebody he’s not sure he’ll ever reconnect with. There’s not really a chorus, just one change right in the middle. It’s fragments of thoughts, just scraps of feelings with weird metaphors. You can tell it was almost stream-of-consciousness, or not fussed over.
Even the title. He could’ve titled it from a million different word combinations in the song. “Without Rings” is just from the middle of the verse at the end, and the line around it is so haunting: “Sharpshooter without rings around you.” Like he can’t find this person at all, but it’s also so violent. The whole song is just packed with these incredible lines.
I know I’ve copied it, or at least been inspired by it. The way he talks about the “pictures in my mind,” where he goes up briefly in the middle and it sounds like he’s gotten really emotional and then settles back down. I think I ripped that “pictures in my mind” idea off in “New Order T-Shirt.” I mean, I rip that off a lot.
Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind is so haunting and raw. I feel like Silver & Gold is that for Neil Young. It’s like he was exhausted from a whole phase of his life.
When I was a teenager, I had acquired the very well-regarded Decade compilation. That’s where I first heard “Winterlong.” “Winterlong” is a beautiful word. I believe the history of it goes back to the 1300s. Middle English, somewhere around there. I don’t think it’s a word that’s used that often in modern vernacular.
The opening chord sequence is kind of a 1950s progression — not so much from the R&B or rock ‘n’ roll side of things, but more from the doo-wop world. C to an A minor to an F to a G. It starts off in a place of almost resignation. Then the vocalist enters. “I waited for you winterlong/ You seemed to be where I belong/ It’s all illusion anyway.” That first couplet is sort of the implied chorus. The whole gist of the song. The chorus really only happens, in my opinion, one time at the end of the song.
There are a lot of great songs from the late ’50s and early ’60s where the chorus only happens once — you think you hear it a lot but you never really hear it until the end. Throughout “Winterlong,” it’s been heavily suggested but we haven’t heard it yet. Eventually there’s a tag that’s our first hint we’re going to get to the bottom of all of this, we’re going to get some resolution. We don’t hear that same chord progression. We drop that A minor so the chorus gets tightened up and all the pathos is wrapped up in the “I waited for you winterlong” over and over. I think “Winterlong” is one of the greatest pop songs ever — right up there with “Duke Of Earl” or a Roy Orbison song or “The Great Pretender” — for the casual ease with which it delivers this sophisticated, elegant arrangement. You almost feel like you’ve lived the chorus a few times until you actually get there.
I play it almost every night in the Pixies. We’ve been playing the song for almost 40 years. I don’t know that we’ve ever done the song any justice, but I do it every night because I want to ring the bell finally. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t, but I’m always trying. I’m obsessed with the song, I can’t stop playing the song. In my mind I’m always fantasizing: “What if this is the night Neil decides to walk in and I’m doing that song?” I hope that’s the time we ring the bell really hard.
I have so many favorite Neil Young songs; I love to listen to Decade front to back on a fall day. One summer, my older brother and I only listened to Harvest every day while driving through rural North Carolina. To see Neil play “Words (Between The Lines Of Age)” live on his Gretsch White Falcon!! That is something to witness. Also, somehow I found myself at the Bridge School benefit with my Morning Jacket playing “Harvest Moon” with Neil. But there is one song and moment in particular I’d like to talk about that encapsulates one of my favorite things about him.
It’s 2010. I am at the Ryman Auditorium with one of my best pals, Cameron. We have seen Neil Young together many times with Crazy Horse and CSNY. Yet this night it is Neil completely solo. He has multiple pianos, his pump organ, electric guitars, and acoustics.
A few songs into the show, he picks up that legendary black Les Paul. He begins with some feedback, then a simple E minor chord. He is being patient with this song. The chords ring and bounce around. It’s only just three chords: E minor, D, and A minor, but they somehow are always enough. They cycle and move into each other, always leading, always pushing, and landing with satisfaction on each other in an endless loop. It is “Cortez The Killer”!
I wasn’t expecting this song to be played without a band, but man, am I happy it is. He’s still waiting, letting it sink in, no rush; it’s like small waves hitting the beach, then rolling back and slowly getting larger each round. He begins to pick out the signature guitar melody. It’s related to the melody of the song, but in a way that only a guitar can play it… it’s a skeleton of a melody that is already inside and implied in the chords, a halfway point between chords and the actual song. It’s just a musical sprout! Growing naturally! For the first time ever seeing this song, I can hear every nuance of his playing of these few notes; they blossom, they choke, they scream a little. It’s like they are actually alive. I notice my heart beating, I feel my feet in shoes, I look at Cameron, and we are both wide-eyed. What can you say about that sound that actually conveys its true meaning?! To me, the sound he makes with that guitar is akin to thunder or an earthquake. It’s geological/geothermal/meteorological/mythological!!
Neil’s guitar is loud, sure. His songs have power of volume, totally, but the real power I always hear inside of this is musical patience. Just letting things happen vs. forcing them to. To me, he appears to be completely in the moment on stage. Therefore, in each moment he instantly decides what the next one will be like instead of having a real decisive plan ahead of time. It’s always so exciting to watch. I always try and summon this type of mindset as much as possible, but I am not even in the same league as Neil onstage!
One of the years that we were asked to play the Bridge School benefit, I’ll never forget watching Neil just play the first few chords of “Sugar Mountain” for quite some time before he began to sing. It didn’t feel long; it felt like he was lighting incense in a church as the parishioners arrived. Once he began, of course, all of the times I’ve heard that song came rushing back to me. I remember turning 20 and my friend playing that song for me. This song only using two patient simple perfect chords! I wonder if Neil thinks about being 20 every time he plays it too. Maybe that’s part of the long intro: remembering. If remembering happens, then deciding, OK….”Oh, to live on Sugar Mountain.”
My favorite is “After The Gold Rush,” which I reference in “Nights Of Armor.” It’s just so beautiful. I appreciate when a song is a story but kind of abstract. I had the CD of After The Gold Rush in my car and I’d just let it play through. Sometimes I’d let it get to the end and just hit play again. It’s been on my mind a lot. The lyrics are so interesting. It’s vaguely about spaceships, and the beginning is super medieval, but the middle just sounds like a guy on drugs. I never thought about it, but I guess it seeped into It’s A Beautiful Place — it’s about some of the same things we were talking about on the album.
About seven years ago I had a 13-hour solo drive from the South (North Carolina) back up to upstate New York. Surprisingly/embarrassingly at the time, I had only then discovered On The Beach and ended up listening to the record on repeat, uninterrupted on that long drive. Somehow I just couldn’t get enough, even after 13 hours on loop. The song I repeated the most was “Motion Pictures (For Carrie).” I felt such a connection to that song. The themes of disillusionment with the big city and longing for a simpler life. I had just left NYC for the secluded Catskill Mountains with my partner Sam Evian. We had big dreams to build our own recording studio in an old barn on our property and “Motion Pictures” gave me hope and the encouragement to keep reaching for new beginnings.
“Cinnamon Girl” is my favorite Neil Young song. Melodic and whimsical, a great guitar riff that rocks in earnest. Puts me in mind of the more adult-sounding Beatles records, say “Paperback Writer.” But it’s “I Am A Child” that fascinates me most. The sonic space at the heart of the recording gives the impression you could ride a motorcycle through the middle of the song without affecting the artist’s performance. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall that night — or day. Some mighty self-assured record making was on display.
For many years my immediate answer would have probably been “Powderfinger.” I have also long believed Side 2 of On The Beach to be one of if not the greatest side-long sequences in the history of rock records. But, right now, in this very moment, I’m feeling inspired to say that “Razor Love” is my favorite Neil Young song. It’s just chillingly good. So simple, so vibey, so perfect. And to casually drop a stone-cold devastator like that on his 30-something’th album, 30-some-odd years deep in a career that, at that point, could have so easily been on auto-pilot. It’s pretty fucked up, to be honest.
In this performance, he plays the song on an organ, slowing it down and turning it into a lament that gives it so much more power. Part of the reason I love it so much now is, as a songwriter, it’s a tremendous reminder that a song is never finished, or doesn’t have to be if you don’t want it to be. To completely reimagine something with different instrumentation, different tempo — to me, this is almost like the real version of the song.
This version cuts through to an emotion that gets clouded by the trappings of the full band playing it. The original version almost sounds like a bunch of dudes covering it, because I knew this one first. The normal version feels clunky to me, in a way — a reminder to examine whether what you’re adding is amplifying the emotion or not. It’s probably one of the first Neil Young songs I knew. He was always on in the house, and it takes me back to my childhood living room. My parents just moved out of that home, and anything that can sort of draw you back to those early days is a powerful thing.
We all want to sit next to Neil at some old shitty diner and have him tell us that we’ll be alright. Like an uncle who just completed the Ninth Step with buckets of advice for the wounds we’ve collected. This is the tune. Gentle and relaxed like the perfect kind of back rub.
My favorite Neil Young song is “Razor Love,” off his 2000 album Silver & Gold. I like how the lyrics are projected toward someone else. They are intimate and knowing, like a doctor prescribing and then hand-feeding someone who has fallen ill. When Neil sings “silhouettes on the window,” his voice barely makes it to the top edge of his throat. He sounds vulnerable and small in a way that is rarely captured in his discography. It makes me melt. It feels so human, like his tiny heart is in the palm of my hand.
Neil Young’s career features lengthy, god-tier songs centered around vicious guitar solos. It all started with “Down By The River.” Growing up, I always heard about bands like the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers that focused attention on their lead guitar players, but Neil’s guitar playing on “Down By The River” (and all of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere) made me realize he was an underrated guitar hero, arguably overshadowed by his incredible songwriting. With someone like Jerry Garcia, the conversation is usually about guitar. With Neil, it’s typically about songwriting, when I think Neil is one of the standout guitar heroes to come out of the ’60s.
“Down By The River” set the groundwork for the best Neil guitar solos. The first single-note solo is as iconic as any big, recorded musical moments of the era. I love the choice of simplicity and feel over technical finesse. I love how Crazy Horse stays in the pocket with ease as Neil’s solo is ramping up. There’s no rush to the end. The song takes its time, moving between sections with absolute composure. His guitar playing is raw, noisy, sloppy, emotive, and sounds like he’s battling Old Black, trying to fully talk through it. Neil is the anti-guitar hero. “Down By The River” is a perfect start to that.
I’ve covered “Helpless” since the first Perfume Genius tour, so I feel the closest to that one. I can relate to how he sings and how his voice sounds — it’s strange, it’s high, atypical in some ways and really beautiful in others. He also has a way of writing lyrics that are very abstract but feel very personal and emotional, which I think is very hard to do, especially if you’re going to have it be understated and not really flowery.
Being stuck somewhere else, or being inaccessible. There’s chains across the door and asking someone to try and reach you still. I don’t know if I’ve literally tried to unpack what the song is about, but I felt something and then sang it. He’s talking about still going somewhere in his mind. You’re still there, but you’re not where you are.
One of my favorite Neil Young songs, without a doubt, is “After The Gold Rush.” Years ago, I walked into a concert of Neil’s at a theater in Portland while he was in the middle of that song. He was seated at a small, antique-looking pump organ type instrument that sounded amazing. That’s when I realized what the song is about — aliens, UFOs, almost a second coming in spaceships. In 1975 I wrote a song called “Silver Lights” about the exact same subject. Hearing it live, I could really hear the lyrics. It was mind-blowing, and I’m sure the haze of weed in the room made it feel even more intense.
Neil and I have never discussed it. I’ve played a few Bridge School Benefits with him, and he’s performed it there. I just think that song is something else — extremely special and from a very deep place. I don’t know why I’ve never talked to him about it. When you’re standing in front of Neil Young, he can be intimidating — so intense and so real. Scorpios are like that, and Neil is a Scorpio. I’m a huge fan, and I consider us friends. Happy birthday, brother! I’m only a couple years behind you, so I guess I shouldn’t be too scared.
I’ll never forget the first time I heard “Train of Love” — it was on KCRW in 2007 and I was immediately captivated by its melody. I was taking a road trip up north to visit my childhood friends in college when I heard it. It led me to deep dive into Sleeps With Angels and it’s one of my favorite Neil Young albums of all time.
It was nostalgic for me when I first heard it. I’m from a small town, the same as Neil’s from a small town in Canada. It’s the idea of missing that small town and wanting to go back home and take it easy. It’s relatable. He was in LA, at the beginning of his fame, sick of it and finding it somewhat meaningless at times, I think.
I’m nowhere near as famous as Neil Young, but I’ve felt that same thing being in a big city and trying to chase being in a band, being popular, and coming up short sometimes and feeling like you just want to go back. But it’s never really the same, obviously. You want to go home again, but you’re different, the place is different, and it can never really happen. That’s heartbreaking on its own, and it always draws me in.
In high school I got a CD copy of Harvest and I listened to it endlessly. I was surprised by how rough and mellow and strange that record is, in terms of the way that it sounds compared to Buffalo Springfield or the CSNY stuff. The treatments to those songs are super bare.
He’s just a guy with a voice and a guitar — he comes across that way to me, like he sees himself in the oral tradition of folk music as opposed to a master songwriter or something. Which he is, obviously, but there’s nothing super opus-y about what he does. He’s just expressing himself, but then does also have these big ideas about withstanding all the shit the world throws at you over time.
When I was younger, “I Believe In You” struck me as so honest. The lyrics are fucking brutal. A little selfish-sounding. There isn’t another song that deals with that idea: convincing someone to love you and realizing that’s all you wanted and then you’re done with them. It’s a very interesting kind of love song to write.
Today, “Borrowed Tune” is my favorite. It’s a diaristic song done so well. I don’t like that style of songwriting usually. I’ve never found a use for it in my own songwriting. You can’t be too romantic about this guy who’s wasted in his hotel room watching people ice-skating outside. He’s too fucked up to be a part of the rest of the world, writing a song that’s a ripoff of a Rolling Stones song. He takes it and makes it his own.
Tonight’s The Night is such a fucked-up sounding record. It’s a concept record about getting fucked up because your friend is dead, living this nightmare of world fame in the ’70s. That’s the cool thing about Neil records. It’s like, “Come on, hop in this old Cadillac that’s about to explode and we’ll go to this strange bar where everyone’s a cartoon character.” His records, to me, feel like you’re going on this weird journey with him.
I love Ragged Glory. I’m sure I stole it from my dad and listened to it a bunch; I stole all my dad’s CDs. I’ve only gotten to see Neil once, and he opened with “Love To Burn.” I was blown away, entranced. I became fixated on that record again.
My parents loved Neil Young and played him all the time when I was a kid. I loved his aesthetic of less-is-more. The way he plays guitar is more finding the feel. His words are beautiful, honest — there’s a lot of scenery in them, but it doesn’t seem like it’s trying to be overly poetic.
“Harvest Moon” is one of the few songs in this world that will bring tears to my eyes every time. My dad and his partner were listening to this song together last summer, and he turned to see her crying. He laughed and asked her why she was crying — he is a stoic man, only showing cracks of his own emotions exactly on his own timeline, while she, deeply in contrast, is a real crier. She said she couldn’t imagine how it must feel to have that song written about you.
“Because I’m still in love with you/ I want to see you dance again” is the most perfect summation of enduring love.
Way back in 2013 I spent a large chunk of the winter living in a largely deserted seaside town on the Isle Of Wight, just off the coast of Southern England. I had just met Emma Swift, and it was our first attempt at living together. Among her LP collection was Neil Young’s album On The Beach, and the off-season dismalia of living in a damp house that had once been the residence of Charles and Emma Darwin was the perfect context for getting to know Neil’s 1974 exercise in nihilistic inertia.
The mid-1970s saw a lot of 1960s heroes running aground, as their momentum expired in a shower of broken marriages and boozy horror. Oddly, this — for me — smouldered Neil Young’s finest hours into being. Where Lennon, Dylan, and Lou Reed all sank into bitter darkness, Neil (funny how he’s always known as Neil, whilst Bob Dylan is always Dylan) seemed to achieve a Zen kind of stillness. Looking out onto a wasted world through reasonably wasted eyes, Neil achieves an eerie calm, like the shoreline under a cloudy dusk. The album is downbeat, yes, but not a bummer — unlike say, Blood On The Tracks or Walls And Bridges.
Sitting in that scuzzy rented kitchen in Freshwater Bay, gazing out through a distorted window that probably drove the Darwins to despair (they only lasted six months in the house), I would play On The Beach over and over. Like Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde, Neil’s coastal epic evokes a hermetic world of its own. It connects to his other records, sure, but is somehow eerily apart from them. It was appropriate that, two doors along the lane, Lewis Carroll had been working on Through The Looking-Glass in mid-Victorian times. Neil Young, too, can conjure up reflections and refractions of his own: To me, the lost souls and sinister misfits that populate On The Beach are denizens of a mid-1970s looking-glass world which, once again, is echoed in our own planet of criminal despots.
The album’s title track is not necessarily the strongest melody on the record; certainly not the strongest in Neil’s canon. Nonetheless, it has to be my favorite song on my favorite of his records. Breathe in the atmosphere of the song, and you’re inhaling so many feelings condensed: regret, indifference, independence, and a bizarre trust in a good outcome. “The world is turnin’/ I hope it don’t turn away.” You can smell the ocean, the sluggish saline air and the flashes of ozone. It’s ultimately a song of strength: Get out of town, keep pushing, shrug your shoulders, and walk on.
But those seagulls are still out of reach. They’re a menace, anyway…
Neil Young’s “Expecting To Fly” is a legendary demonstration to me of melancholy in songwriting and production, the sweetness and sadness. I love the mysterious and floral string arrangement and the classic ‘60s reverbed-out drums, dreamy and psychedelic. His voice conveys a tender vulnerability and sense of loss — the way the vocal melody in the chorus flows up and down, portamento sliding, wandering and swaying in the wind like the feather in the lyrics. But also there is a sense of wonder in this romantic instrumental arrangement that feels green and wistful. It has an overall magical cohesion in performance, writing, arranging, and production. A beautiful ballad and it always stays with me.
I heard a lot of Neil Young growing up, as he was my dad’s favorite and a constant presence shaking the floors from the basement music room at my house. Harvest and After The Gold Rush were particular favorites around the house. As a boy, it took me a little longer to warm up to the songs from Neil’s infamous “Ditch Trilogy” of albums (Time Fades Away, On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night), as they went over my ten- to thirteen-year-old head, but I loved Zuma. “Cortez The Killer” was the first song I ever learned to play on bass (before I learned how to play guitar).
A little later, I did indeed fall in love with the Ditch albums, with Tonight’s The Night being one of my all-time favorite albums and “Ambulance Blues” being perhaps my all-time favorite Neil Young song.
Listening to the song is itself like a journey as you follow Neil’s train of thought through a portal that begins with a long-lost beloved folk music club and into an underworld of post-Manson Laurel Canyon malaise into the disillusion of the ’60s hippie dream. The song flows with its own logic (or lack thereof) assisted by the hacksaw fiddle of Rusty Kershaw with the almighty Ben Keith on bass and Ralph Molina on hand drum.
Released in the wake of Watergate and Nixon’s resignation, “Ambulance Blues” feels spacious in an almost post-apocalyptic way, as Neil stumbles through the wasted remnants of what might have been. But probably never could be.
“You’re all just pissing in the wind.”
Choosing a favorite Neil Young song, for me, is a difficult task.
There are so many to love for so many different reasons.
A true songbook’s worth. So, I’m just gonna pick two.
One of my favorites, “Cowgirl In The Sand.”
I have always loved the slinkiness around the groove and the sharp edges of the guitar tone.
That lead guitar has to be on my all-time favorite guitar solos list.
I love the way Neil plays with such raw emotion and intuitiveness.
It doesn’t sound composed, but felt in the moment.
It totally inspires me.
Another favorite, “New Mama.”
When I moved out to New Mexico, I became obsessed with learning the opening guitar line.
There was a little banco in the corner of my kitchen that overlooked the front yard and the sky beyond.
I would sit there struggling to learn finger picking for the first time, watching the electric sunsets. A dreamland.
“New Mama” made me feel like a brand new player all over again: that feeling of really wanting to nail something just out of reach.
Also, the feeling of finger blisters.
I think the vocal melodies are so unique and dreamy.
It’s full of twists and turns. A major resolve here, a minor resolve the next.
An electric piano comes in just for one verse, and then: a vocal harmony break.
I admire how the song just serves up an ancient feeling and then leaves again.
There is no format or songwriting rules to follow.
I think that is part of what makes Neil so brilliant.
On The Beach, a life-changing album for many. It’s the album where, as a young girl, I realized Neil Young wasn’t just an old dude for old dudes. This tune in particular rocked my world.
For a song portrayed through the eyes of an older, nostalgic soul, the sense of misery and despair seeps through in a way that a seemingly unaware child can somewhat comprehend. It was the first song where I heard the sensation of coldness.
However, it doesn’t leave you out in the cold. There’s glimmers of hope. Moments of light shine through in violin melodies, or lyrics like “And there ain’t nothin’ like a friend/ Who can tell you you’re just pissin’ in the wind” (because that’s real friendship).
Neil has always taught us about the balance of the dark and the light — we need both to appreciate and understand the two of them. I owe a lot to Mr. Young.
It’s one of those moments in life one remembers. A moment trapped like a bug in amber. More luminous and precious with time. I was 16, sitting on the sawdust-covered floor in the sculpture department of the fine arts boarding school I had won a scholarship to attend.
Before I speak of the moment, something that cannot be overstated is the lack of exposure I had to recorded music as a kid. I was raised on a homestead with no TV, and I don’t even recall a radio being regularly listened to. I was raised on silence and books. And my dad’s songs.
My dad was a songwriter, and we performed live each week at local honky-tonks and lumberjack joints — a combination of his originals and covers. I grew up singing “Peaceful Easy Feeling” without ever having heard of the Eagles. I sang “Heartbreak Hotel” without having heard Elvis sing it.
So all those years later, having just learned a few chords on guitar, sitting there on the floor covered in sawdust, it’s hard to describe the shock of hearing Neil Young’s voice as it shot through me like a live wire. The thin voice turned inward. I sensed — or imagined — he was gazing at his shoes while singing. Or perhaps with his eyes closed. He sang inwardly — to himself. To his own heart and body and nervous system, it seemed to me — and it had the effect of transferring that feeling to me. I felt the loss tear into me with the first lines:
“I caught you knockin’ at my cellar door/ I love you, baby, can I have some more?/ Ooh, ooh, the damage done.”
That was it. I knew I had to do that with my life. I had to find a way to arrange words and single notes in such a way that they could be an imprint of my insides — so someone else could feel my blood and my guts and where my nerves frayed, like Neil did.
What Neil did was not casual. It was personal. It wasn’t to be liked. It was to exist.
My friend Melissa, who’d put the cassette on, noticed I’d gone silent mid-sentence as the song unwound and took over the room.
“You alright?” she asked.
I could not put it into words. I saw a road open up for me. Something new was possible. Performing did not have to be about being performative. It could be about the topography of an inner landscape.
I would be a singer-songwriter.
I studied that song — the syncopated guitar part. I used it like a tailor uses a pattern — something to follow. I wrote “Little Sister” off that pattern:
“Hey little sister, I heard you went to Mister so-and-so, knock, knock, knocking on his door again last night. Said you needed it bad—you know that ain’t right…”
Thanks, Neil. Happy birthday.
Keep on rocking in a free world.
We have been so fortunate on several occasions to get to play with Neil, and it is so beautiful to get to see him disappear into the void UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL… the way he closes his eyes, DIGS IN, and merges with the universe… reminds me why I play music and how great it can feel when we merge with music and god and all thought is gone. I remember standing next to him feeling the shock waves as he stomped and slammed, wailing into some kind of gigantic bass harmonica he had slung around his neck as we paid tribute to Lou Reed at Bridge School 2013. I remember feeling something knock up against me as I was singing the chorus of “Forever Young,” opening my eyes and there was Neil, singing at the same mic as me, that big grin on his face! But perhaps my favorite was getting to sing “Harvest Moon” with him, the first song of his I ever heard, the song that changed my life and cracked open the door to what is possible in this world just a little bit wider, to let the moonlight in, and we danced.
“Three guesses to tell me who this is.” The first time I heard Neil Young’s 1983 album Trans was in a sun-soaked room in Prospect Heights, cooking breakfast with my partner at the time. They put on “Transformer Man,” goaded me on, and I squinted, stumped, trying to eliminate the obvious yet obviously wrong: Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Laurie Anderson, Brian Eno. I was saved when I recognized a familiar guitar riff peeking out between the post-chorus and bleeding guitar solo of “Little Thing Called Love.” Whether a seed planted out-of-time, or celestial transmission from a future self, it is the unmistakable melody that would later underpin 1992’s iconic “Harvest Moon.”
The songs on the album swing from boldly experimental to quintessentially Young, but my first impression still rests on “Transformer Man,” and how immediately it perplexed and captivated me. I was content to imagine it simply as a bold creative pivot, or a blithe ode to the toy figurines (coincidentally born the same year as the album), until I learned about this period of Young’s life. In the years leading up to the album’s release, Young’s son Ben, who was diagnosed with cerebral palsy at birth and non-verbal, was under constant medical supervision. Young transmutes this experience through production techniques pioneered by his new-wave and art-pop contemporaries, using a Sennheiser VSM201 vocoder to mediate his iconic singing voice. Carried by lyrics such as “Your eyes are shining on a beam/ Through the galaxy of love/ Transformer man/ Unlock the secrets/ Let us throw off the chains that hold you down,” robotic synthesis becomes a vehicle for his expression of fatherly love and human tenderness, while underscoring his breakthroughs in communication with his son.
Though it’s in many ways an outlier in Young’s catalog — one that may have contributed to an eventual $3.3 million lawsuit filed by Geffen Records for his “uncharacteristic” creative departure — “Transformer Man” exemplifies his relentless innovation as an artist, and Young described it at the time as being one of his “favorite,” “most sensitive, acoustic songs.” It meditates on technology, communication, and the future of music through a profoundly human lens, hinting at a wider consciousness that feels almost prescient — awestruck by limits of language, which, even with the help of machines, can reach only so far in the vastness of the cosmos.
I first heard Neil Young’s “Helpless” from a DVD of The Last Waltz at a friend’s house after school. This was the version with the infamous “coke bubble,” and as my friends seemed to be focused in on this somewhat funny rock ‘n’ roll moment, I couldn’t have cared less. I was transfixed by his aura, the raw energy of his scraping vocal, the yearn and the tear of his whole being coming out of that performance. It was one of the major hammer on the nail moments that solidified what I wanted to do with my life.
Later that night we threw a house party but I snuck off with my buddy’s guitar and hid in the bathroom where I taught myself that song and sang it over and over and over. It made me feel like somehow in the collective consciousness, he heard me, that I was right there onstage with him, sitting cross-legged in a bathtub, singing “There is a town in north Ontario” while my friends took Jägerbombs downstairs.
Harvest is one of my favorite albums, and I was introduced to it after learning “Heart Of Gold” for a Laurel Canyon tribute show on a cruise ship!
The song that stuck with me the most from that record was “A Man Needs A Maid.” It was quite controversial when it was released, the charge being that Neil was promoting male chauvinism. To me it reads as dark humor, a tongue-and-cheek commentary addressing how this guy has been socialized to be so insecure about expressing his emotions in a healthy way that he considers hiring a maid and living alone, foregoing any self-examination of his own behavior that could have led to the demise of the relationship. I think of it as a cautionary tale of what can happen when you alienate yourself from your emotions — you end up alienating everyone.
The end of On The Beach is my favorite type of Neil Young. He’s so raw, bleak, and emotional. You can hear the way he plays guitar so clearly. It feels like he’s sitting right in front of you. “Ambulance Blues” specifically seems about nostalgia and the death of the ‘60s, reminiscing about the early part of his career. Much like the second half of that record, it’s cynical. It doesn’t seem centered on anything, but the instrumentation of it — the harmonica, his strumming — goes along with how melancholy it is. It just sinks me every time.
I got into Neil Young in high school. I was assigned a report in English class to pick a song and decipher the lyrics. I picked “Old Man,” since that was a big Neil Young hit. A lot of that stuff from Harvest got my attention earlier on. He’s so good at telling stories — he can shroud them in metaphors, but sometimes he’s so direct and cuts right to it. I got really into On The Beach during the COVID lockdown. It was winter in Chicago, and I kept playing it front to back. It just caught me at the right moment, Neil looking back on his twenties.
His guitar playing goes hand in hand with his songwriting and his emotion. You can really hear it on Rust Never Sleeps and the louder Neil Young tracks. His tone and soloing are so iconic, and such his own thing, but it’s not like he’s showing off and trying to shred. He’s not trying to be the best guitarist in the room, but he’s cutting the deepest. I think that’s why he was important for grunge. As a player, I’m always asking how do I make this part feel like something? I try to think: “What would Neil do?”
There was a long time where my musical taste could best be described as a family-tree-like diagram descending from the members of CSNY. Then I grew up a little, cut my hair, and stopped smoking as much pot. Tasked with commemorating Neil Young’s 80th by honing in on a single favorite of one of his many songs, I am beginning to regret that decision. There isn’t a dud on a single record (besides “A Man Needs A Maid” — literally hate that one) from 1969’s self-titled through 1980’s Hawks And Doves. I can’t believe the balance this guy struck between pulling on your heart strings with simple country writing about complex feelings and basically inventing grunge. Seriously, wtf? But if I had to pick ONE — well, I guess it would be Zuma‘s “Don’t Cry No Tears.” It’s tough and tender all at once, an emblem of Neil Young’s singular power of holding two things seemingly in opposition and allowing them both to be utterly true.
More than anyone else, Neil Young makes it sound easy. His best stuff (and there is a lot of great stuff) is sloppy, pretty, tough, and funny all at once. While there is a wide swath of styles, sounds, and subject matter, I guess the stuff that speaks to me most directly are songs like “Roll Another Number (For The Road),” “Albuquerque,” or “Tired Eyes” from Tonight’s The Night — these are ugly, melodic, simple, live, and, again, funny.
But at the same time, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “I Believe In You,” or his great cover of “Oh Lonesome Me” from After The Gold Rush are so immediate, simple, and beautiful (and a little sloppy) — they hit me just as hard. Along with the great “On The Beach,” those records, more than anything else I’ve ever heard, just make it sound so effortless and fun.
Supposedly David Briggs mixed Tonight’s The Night in a truck outside the bar where they were recording just after they’d finished each take, while the band ate hamburgers and drank tequila. Doesn’t sound like they got lost in the details at all. That said, I guess the Neil song I think expresses the most I like about him is “Mellow My Mind” from that album. Happy birthday Neil!!
Neil Young’s producer David Briggs famously said, “The more you think the more you stink.”
“Albuquerque” is Neil fully in the moment, capturing all the song needs in just a few takes. You can hear a mic bonk at 2:18. Does that make the song any worse? Absolutely not. Capturing a song before you overthink it is such good philosophy for recording and is something I try to apply in the studio. So often the first time you sing or play a part is the best time you ever will, and demos are usually more interesting than polished recordings. I never grow tired of “Albuquerque.” It’s the perfect late night road trip song. Peak Shakey. Loose, raw, and lonesome.
Nailing down my favorite Neil Young song is an impossible task, so here’s one with a bit of sentimentality attached to it. “Don’t Let it Bring You Down” is the kind of nostalgic tune I associate with long drives from my childhood. After The Gold Rush was one of the first records my dad ever bought and consequently one of the first LPs I ever owned, since I stole from his collection as soon as I was old enough to appreciate the gold in it. I figured out how to play it when I first started messing around with different tunings. I think it’s probably the only Neil Young song I ever bothered to learn — they never sound right without that falsetto and my register is way too low. I’d butcher them.
It’s impossible for me to choose a favorite Neil tune. That said, the first Neil record I bought was After The Gold Rush. So I’ll choose that song.
He paints a perfect picture of despair, rejoicing, ruin, escape, and fear in a lullaby for a breaking world. It’s like a goodbye when it’s too late. He may have peers but there’s no better songwriter that ever lived. It’s not possible.
I first heard “Out On The Weekend” in my college dorm room, late one night when everything felt really still. My roommate was playing records, and when Neil Young’s voice drifted in, something about it just froze the moment. It wasn’t flashy or dramatic, just right. When he sings, “Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/ Can’t begin to say,” that lyric really hit me harder than I expected. I didn’t even fully understand why at the time, but those words put language to something I had been unable to name at that time in my life — that low, lingering disconnect you sometimes feel but aren’t sure why or how. It’s just there.
My roommate and I didn’t talk much during the song, but I could tell it landed for both of us. That track made the room feel heavier, quieter — like it understood something we didn’t know how to say. I’ve carried that song with me ever since. It’s tied to a time of figuring things out, of seeing how music can cut through noise when you need it to most.
Neil Young will never stop blowing me away. One song of his that I have listened to too many times to count is “Bandit.”
Something about the way he sings, “Someday/ You’ll find/ Everything you’re looking for,” takes my breath away every time. Another lyric from that song that brings me to my knees AND I can relate to more and more every day is:
Made out like a bandit for so many years
What are you working for?
One more big score
What are you tryin’ to prove?
Try to get closer but not too close
Try to get through
But not be through
I’m so lucky I got to briefly blow through his orbit at Willie’s 81st birthday at Third Man Records, where we both sang. He came up behind me at rehearsal and sang, “Somebody had to set a bad example…” — a line from a song Miranda and I had written that was on the Pistol Annies’ first album. He was wearing a Neil Young And Crazy Horse shirt, and at first I thought it was someone on his crew, but then I whipped around and, nope, it was Neil himself. He wrote about liking Pistol Annies in his book, and to me, that’s cooler than any award I could ever get.
I first heard Neil Young after my high-school girlfriend got me a copy of his album Harvest for my 17th birthday, which of course starts with his incredible song “Out On The Weekend.” I’ll never forget the way the song hit me that first time. Not only is the song perfect, but there’s something flawless to the sound of “Out On The Weekend” — and to all of Harvest — that’s hard to pin down.
I remember being so moved by how good the drums felt coming out of the speakers, beneath that acoustic guitar, and then that iconic harmonica line comes in and… oh man, I’m gonna have to put it on right now. There’s a rare power to “Out On The Weekend” that’s incredibly cinematic, too, where it reminds you that you’re the lead character in the story of your life — and it could perfectly soundtrack both the beginning or ending of your film — like you’re simultaneously arriving while also moving on.
So anyways, maybe it’s a sort of baby-bird effect, but I think it’s special that the first song I ever heard by Neil Young is forever my favorite.
A happy 80th birthday to the global treasure that is Neil Young. From “Ohio” to “Big Crime,” Neil Young has always stood on the side of righteousness and the planet is a better place 80 years on with him in it.
Rage Against The Machine was playing ahead of Neil Young & Crazy Horse on some festival shows in the mid-’90s. I’m a huge fan of “Hey Hey My My” and that huge riff. But he was always playing it at the end, so we were always gone on the bus by the time he played it. He came into our dressing room where a couple guys from Crazy Horse were smoking weed with a couple guys from Rage Against The Machine. I don’t think Neil knew who I was, but I just walked up to him with my selfish idea: “Hey Neil, you should open your set with ‘Hey Hey My My.'” Because then I’d get to see it, but I was also thinking it’d make a great set opener. Neil looked at me with a look like, “Son, I’ve been writing setlists before you were born.” He didn’t even respond to me. He just moved past me. I was chagrinned.
Cut to side of the stage. I’m getting ready for his usual opening song, “Down By The River.” And he opens the set with “Hey Hey My My.” It’s awesome, and I’m trying to tell everyone around me “Hey, I suggested this!” Nobody believed me.
Lots of love to you Neil. Here’s to many more years. Thank you for being a righteous crusader for rock ‘n’ roll and justice.
When I first met Neil, I didn’t really know who he was. Of course, I was familiar with Crazy Horse, CSN+Y, and his other musical projects, but it was through our collaboration on Human Highway that I discovered his deep interest in filmmaking. At first glance, it might have seemed like we stood on opposite ends of the musical spectrum. But as I got to know him, I came to appreciate his pre-hippie-era aesthetic — a post-atomic, beatnik critique of humanity’s place on planet Earth — and his stream-of-consciousness approach to art.
Neil turned out to be a true visionary, one who shared Devo’s concerns about where the planet was headed. That sensibility came through most vividly in his films. He even used music I had written for an Ionesco play as part of the score for Human Highway, the surreal and unforgettable film he directed. Neil cast the members of Devo as characters in the movie, and it became the first time my music was used as a film score outside of a Devo project, an experience that helped spark my lifelong love of composing for film.
It’s an honor to celebrate Neil Young’s 80th birthday. Over the years, I’ve become an admirer of all of Neil’s work — as a musician, filmmaker, and artist. His vision and values deeply influenced my own. The themes he explored, questioning humanity’s impact on the planet and urging awareness, became foundational to Devo’s philosophy.
The Neil Young song that means the most to me is “Ohio.” It might seem an obvious choice, but I was a student at Kent State when the National Guard shot and killed four student protesters. Neil’s immediate, unflinching response to that tragedy captured the raw emotion of that moment and gave voice to what so many of us were feeling. That song shaped my worldview and inspired the formation of Devo. “Ohio” remains an anthem — a reminder to stand up, question authority, and stay aware of what’s happening around us. Ironically, it feels as urgent today as it did then.
So happy 80th, Neil — and thank you for the inspiration.
Long may you run.
I’m not usually the type of guy who enjoys the sound of one man and an acoustic guitar. I like a lot of rock music, but that particular sort of folk sound usually doesn’t do it for me. But there is something about the way he’s singing in that song. I think it’s informed by the subject matter. There’s a real pain and empathy, and a little bit of anger — there’s always a little bit of anger with Neil Young. It’s such a complexity of emotion. You can tell he wrote this song experiencing somebody he cares about either losing their life to addiction or no longer being a functional musician. You can see him exploring the effect drugs have had on the people around him. It’s so complicated and real.
It was one of the songs where I first really started hearing him in my adult life. I’m a son of the crack era in the South Side of Chicago. I saw a lot of people’s lives get transformed by that level of drug. You saw the life leave people’s eyes. There are plenty of rap songs about that. If you look at Nice & Smooth’s “Sometimes I Rhyme Slow,” it’s a rap song but it’s over a similar acoustic guitar riff. There’s something about that tone — a little bit of grieving, but also understanding what you’ve lost a person to and knowing they often don’t come back.
I think about it and I want to know what those chords are, how they’re touching this thing in me. I wouldn’t want to cover it, it’s too personal. But, shit, I might now that we’re talking about it. Maybe “The Pipe And The Damage Done.”
It’s not my favorite Neil song but one I always feel gets overlooked. The last song on side two of Re-Ac-Tor… go figure!
My friend Brett Ralph was a senior at University Of Evansville when I was a freshman. I trusted his music recommendations and still do. He made me the most incredible mix tape of Neil — song sequence and artwork. It’s still the ultimate Neil compilation to me. This song was on that tape, and it showed another side of him that he expanded on years later.
“Shots” is so unhinged, in execution and production. More than once, it sounds like the song is fading out and then — surprise! — another verse. His fuzzed-out tone has so little sustain, you can hear him really fighting against it. Vocals drift away from the microphone so there are often barely audible words amongst the fuzz.
Even the production sounds weeks-deep into a misty binge of booze and drugs and private sorrows. Massive fader moves and bomb/machine gun/ battle sound FX aplenty.
The drums march onwards and never fall into a straight beat. It’s not a build up to anything, it just marches. Not like a machine — the whole song is desperate and beaten down. But it gets up and marches on nonetheless. Just like in war, huh.
But most of all, what gives legs to all this, is a great tune.
Being a guitar player, that entire On The Beach album but “Walk On” specifically has one of my favorite Neil Young tones. It’s ending a very dark era, but that song immediately comes in with so much optimism even though it’s a send-off to multiple people. The guitar’s just glowing. “Walk On” has influenced my playing all the way up until now. For me, that’s the pinnacle of his sound.
I was a home-school kid, so I missed out on a lot of music. I missed out on grunge, I missed out on Nirvana. Neil was really my first introduction to that kind of guitar sound, even before I knew what it was. It sounded different — earthy, worn-in. I play a Firebird electric into a Fender amp. I realized all these years later that’s such a Neil Young thing, that electric setup, even though I don’t make music like him.
The most Neil Young thing I’ve ever done is my recent collaboration with Chat Pile, because it has the acoustic folky thing but also the ragged electrics. That’s where his shape-shifting comes in. I think Neil was the best at going back and forth between gentle and heavy, being able to blend the two. I think “Walk On” is the perfect example of that, the optimism and the heaviness. It’s a perfect blend of every part of Neil in one song.
There was a quote I read years ago that said Neil Young was one of the few artists to make it out of the ’70s with their dignity intact. He was one of the best to ever do it. He was always moving, but it all fits together. He’s also the most influential artist in indie music, still. Right now, as far as my world and who I see making music, Neil Young is far more influential than Bob Dylan. He keeps coming back. You can look back on some of the indie music from the ’00s, Neil Young was super influential. Now I see all these bands popping up, and I can trace him as the reason guitar is kind of cool again. He is so soulful, physical, but not technically crazy. I think he’s the best way to play guitar.
I remember the first time I watched Neil’s soundcheck at the Wang Theatre in Boston. It was my first show opening for him and I was trying to stay out of sight. I stood backstage off in a dark corner for two hours as he checked every guitar in the circle, his banjo, every piano. Like a kid in his own music store, trying everything for a little while. I got the nod that I would be up next to check.
Neil saw me and walked towards the stage door. “Hi, William. We’re so happy to have you here with us. Thank you for doing this.” “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” was still ringing in my ear. He then opened his arms and brought me in for a hug. Everything’s been a blur since.
Protest songs are so important for artists to write. They continue to be in 2025, just as “Ohio” was important to call out gun violence in the 1970s. I feel like artists have this responsibility to be a mouthpiece for the working class citizen, speaking up about injustices. Neil Young has been a glowing example of that, and what music is capable of doing culturally. Being a vehicle that can move society forward.
I covered it in 2020. It was the end of the first Trump presidency, and we were seeing the Black Lives Matter movement and brutal force to stop these peaceful protests. We’re seeing similar things now: brute force showing up to cities like Chicago. “Ohio” was written about a peaceful protest where they used brute force. This is an issue continuing to happen in America. Choosing to say, “I’m going to call this out,” in a song, and then having that song stand the test of time, and something people continue to use to get through times like this — that’s the power of music in my opinion.
I got to open for him in Indianapolis in 2019. My best friend had just found out her dad had cancer. He was in the hospital the night I was opening for Neil. One of the last texts I got to send him was Neil opening with a solo piano “After The Gold Rush.” I think he passed away the next day. I’m not the only one who sees how transcendent his music is. In that circumstance, the lyrics of it almost felt like someone passing into another realm. It was this solace for my friend’s dad to hear that song as he’s grappling with his death. The “After The Gold Rush” I recorded was a tribute to my friend’s dad.
This song found me at the right time. I’d just moved to LA and didn’t have any friends. “See the lonely boy out on the weekend/ Trying to make it pay/ Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/ Can’t begin to say.” Musically, I think I was at a place where I needed to hear a song be so good, and so sparse in terms of arrangement. It feels powerful to know great songs can be very simple but express a feeling.
I was very influenced by Neil. Harvest resurfaced for me at that time. “Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pick-up/ Take it down to LA.” It’s kind of hard for me to listen to music on tour, but when I get off I’ll go back and listen to classic albums like Harvest. It resets things for me. This is what’s possible. This is timeless. I’m always just trying to soak it up as much as I can as a songwriter. It’s important to listen to the things that can achieve the highest level music can achieve. I think his music will last forever and new generations will keep finding it. I try to be as much of a student of his as I can be.
I want to start by saying my words will not do justice here, because Neil Young’s work exists for me in some extra-verbal space. It feels like a link to my musical lineage, a link to my parents’ time on Earth and the music they loved and played together and shared with me, AND a link to my musical peers through our present-day love for Neil and how his influence shows up in our own songs.
So many songs come to mind through the memories and people I associate with them, but I feel “Dreamin’ Man” is the song that I love for me. “I’m a dreamin’ man, yes, that’s my problem/ I can’t tell when I’m not being real… I’ll always be a dreaming man… I know it’s alright.”
Musically and lyrically it’s one of my favorite eras of Neil, conjuring the romantic imagery and felt experience of being there, or being in my version of there. But the part that got right to my heart was when I found it was what I understood to be him processing his creative nature, or me processing mine. It was such a comfort to me, and helped me accept and trust those parts. I could totally be attributing my own feelings to this, but that is also a great thing about his songwriting. Specific but gave me room to put myself in it. Have listened to it many times as well as all of Harvest Moon on long drives, often in Iowa or Illinois at sunset.
Thank you, Mr. Neil Young! Happy Birthday!
I came to Neil Young through the grunge world. Then I listened to his Unplugged album, and that’s when I discovered “Unknown Legend.” It stood out as such a different thing after listening to that heavier rock material. Suddenly there’s this guitar line that’s so haunting and cinematic. It was a different side of him I hadn’t heard yet. I wasn’t fully into country music yet aside from old-school stuff. It opened a door for me, to a vein of songwriting I hadn’t explored yet.
Coming from that grunge world and entering into the country world, he filled this gap. When we recorded our first album, we were recording in a studio he’d recorded in. That meant something to us. We covered “Unknown Legend” once when we were filming something in the desert. When we used to be in cover bands playing four or five hours around Nashville, sometimes you throw one in there that’s for you. “Unknown Legend” was always for us — we loved playing it, and we knew the honky-tonk crowd probably wasn’t going to get it, but we didn’t care.
Everything is so cinematic in that song. Not all songs are like that. Not all songs take you to a place where you can close your eyes while you’re performing it and live it. That song does it for me. I can see that woman. I know that woman. I know what that bike looks like. I know what the coffee tastes like at the diner. It’s such a perfectly detailed song.
When I moved to Philadelphia in 2008, someone kindly lent me a Califone suitcase record player so that I wouldn’t be stereo-less, and the first thing I bought to play on it was Neil Young’s Decade. I bought it ’cause, some weeks before, I had been rolling around in the back of a minivan peaking on acid when “Cowgirl In The Sand” came over the speakers. I do believe I started screaming “AHHH! WHAT IS THIS?! THAT GUITAR TONE! AHHHH!” and everyone was laughing at me: “COME ON, YOU KNOW, IT’S NEIL…NEIL YOUNG.”
But I didn’t know. I had no idea about Neil. So, my first task as an unemployed resident of Philadelphia was to get acquainted with his catalog. And though it’s not my favorite song of his (Top 3? “Expecting To Fly,” “Transformer Man,” and “Wonderin'”‘), “Cowgirl In The Sand” is the song that comes hard and fast to mind hearing that it’s his eighth decade birthday. I’m transported. I smell the unseat-belted-interior of that dangerous and hilarious minivan. I see his sweet ‘n’ salty guitar tone drawing a crudely sexy picture using only the three colors of a stop light. I taste the spiky acid coursing through my basically-still-a-child body. And I feel alive again in a way that doesn’t care about death.
It’s nearly impossible to choose, but there’s one recording of “Cowgirl In The Sand” from Carnegie Hall 1970 that haunts me. I was walking in knee-deep snow in Cambridge, MA in 2021 when I first heard it, and I’m transported there every time I hear the jangling intro. I love the way the audience isn’t exactly sure what song it is, and that they hold their applause until the first lyric. I love when Neil writes about powerful women, and the power they have over him — unknown legends, all of them. “It’s the woman in you that makes you want to play this game.” “You have to be toe to toe,” my friend Judith always says about love. I love Neil’s voice hanging in the Carnegie air. And the way the song is over just as soon as it’s begun. Three verses. Three choruses. Over and through. I want to be a cowgirl.
The late ’80s and early ’90s were a great time for the big singer-songwriters: Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty, and definitely Neil Young. I love Neil’s early ’90s run of albums, Harvest Moon and Ragged Glory, especially. I think “Unknown Legend” is one of the coolest and dreamiest songs I’ve ever heard. Neil’s voice is so gentle and sounds good when it strains a little bit. I love how simple all the parts are in that song. There’s no crazy shredding or anything. It’s just a nice ride. I got to see him at Forest Hills last year and it was so awesome.
Of course the first things that came to mind were “Cinnamon Girl,” “The Needle And The Damage Done.” Neil Young is one of my favorite artists and a huge inspiration for me. When we think about Neil Young, I think we sometimes forget about albums like the Dead Man soundtrack. I didn’t hear it until the very early ’00s. Then I listened to it constantly for six months, all day every day.
When I learned the story of how he recorded this largely by improvisation, I was blown away. Neil Young is such a guitar hero to me. Think about the guitar solo in “Cinnamon Girl” — it’s eight bars of one single note and it’s somehow so cool. There’s so much punk energy in Neil Young.
The Dead Man soundtrack is so atmospheric. It’s almost one meditation, one space it inhabits. It really floored me how much somebody could do with one or two instruments, incorporating field recordings and spoken word. It’s an experimental record, and it’s so calming and grounding and beautiful. It puts you in a landscape; it stands alone without the movie.
It communicated something to me about what being an artist can look like. He’s not completely defined by this traditional song format I’d been accustomed to hearing. The genius of his guitar-playing went far beyond the context of rock ‘n’ roll. He has such a strong voice as a guitarist, and that made me listen to the rest of the catalog with a lens on the guitar work in a new way.
It’s very easy to connect the Dead Man soundtrack to my first solo record, which is called Electric Guitar: One. But in other ways, he’s an inspiration for how he embodies this anti-establishment character in very productive ways. We still look to Neil Young for his take on what’s happening in the industry, in the world. It remains somehow uncorrupted by the capitalism of the music industry. He’s punk at heart, and that’s why we’ll always love him.
I got to sing “Comes A Time” with Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers for the yearly benefit CD for Bridge School, where other artists cover Neil’s songs. It’s such a gorgeous song. I love Neil’s expansiveness as an artist, but especially his folky side. That song always makes me nostalgic in some way, and it was such an honor to get to sing it with other musical heroes for such a great cause.
I’m a Canadian, so for us it’s like Neil and Joni are our god and goddess of songwriting, and of course they had their own relationship of inspiring each other. His output is so vast. Songs like “Helpless” are in the Canadian soundtrack. I grew up listening to that, listening to Neil. He’s in my DNA as a writer. “Comes A Time” is one I’ve sung at jams, at campfires.
What I find so interesting about his work is it lends itself to other people singing his songs. It’s so different album to album — one of the things I admire most about him is he’s never resting on his laurels or chasing a trend. He’s always following that inner muse. Not everybody’s going to love every single thing he does equally, but it doesn’t matter. That kind of artistic freedom is galvanizing and it teaches you what to strive for.
His melodies feel timeless, as if they already existed. A hidden canon feeling, that pool of songs that got handed down in oral tradition and nobody knows who wrote it originally. “Comes A Time” is one of those songs that sounds like it could’ve been distilled over generations singing it. But it just came from his imagination.
There are few benefits from growing up in a mostly classic rock-less house. Most of the time it’s a huge hurdle to overcome. But perhaps the most important thing I was afforded by having parents who didn’t really care to listen to the traditional ’70s kinda stuff in the home was having a real blank slate when it came to discovering those groups later myself. I began dabbling with Neil Young because it was recommended to me by friends I made through hardcore, and because they were friends I made through hardcore they themselves were obsessed with slightly more obscure tracks, which is maybe a lie to begin with because how could anything made by someone as monumental as Neil Young be obscure.
But the first Neil Young record I really listened to deeply was Trans. I had very little context for it but I loved the songs, the odd push and pull from simple rock to driving dance-oriented stuff with vocoder. But one song that always stuck out to me from that record was one of those simple rock songs, “Hold On To Your Love.” It feels very Neil in a way that I later understood, that kind of country bassline with the simple, clean guitar and the lyrics that are somehow both so lovely and depressing. “Hold on to your love / Though you may feel tired and blue,” a timeless and true statement. And I think that’s what I like about Neil, his ability to always fight for love in the face of neverending doubt and evil. This song, one I found early in my appreciation, perfectly encapsulates that for me.
The loneliest song I’ve ever heard, feels like picking up a guitar at 3 a.m. half drunk and singing to your newly empty home.
Young is the master of the perfectly imperfect. Some hesitant hand percussion like horse hooves clomping, swaggering slide guitar, and bleary harmonica. The defiance we love him for is here though he sounds on the precipice of some huge terrifying unknown. “But wouldn’t buy/ Sell, borrow, or trade/ Anything I have/ To be like one of them/ I’d rather/ Start all over again.”
As Neil’s lone #1 hit, “Heart Of Gold” became the main reason the Harvest LP ended up in most everyone’s parents’ record collection and every record store used bin for decades, but then that meant people would accidentally hear songs like “Words” and “The Needle And the Damage Done” from time to time — not such a bad side effect. Neil would classically avoid the song live, and would dismiss its significance and meaning in interviews. It’s a short acoustic country shamble with soaring steel guitar, catchy sing-along melodies, and lyrics that seem both bewildered and hopeful.
My most vivid image associated with the song is from a basement hardcore show I saw as a teen where a band called King Pickle covered it as part of their blazing 20-minute set. The singer wound it up, mischievously singing the “Keeps me searching for a heart of gold” line but then the ferocious-looking, shirtless, lanky, mohawk-crowned bass player lurched up to the mic and screamed “AND I’M GETTIN’ OLD!” Desperate violent time-travel. Like lightning. I can still feel the spit and heat. As I write this, I’m reminded that Neil couldn’t have been a year or two older than that bass player when he wrote the song.
It’s hard to convey how much Neil Young’s music evoked a mythical America to someone growing up in suburban, southeast England. The first clue that I was going to love his music came with “Heart Of Gold,” all over the radio in 1972 when I was seven years old: “I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood.” Straight off, I could picture tall trees, a wild, glamorous landscape. There was also his voice, which sounded a little like Kermit’s nephew Robin, but somehow its smallness added to the overall widescreen feel. His acoustic guitar playing always sounded like carpentry.
I grew up and discovered Young’s extended, slightly surreal yarns, which went back to “Broken Arrow” and “The Old Laughing Lady” (I know the grouchy contrarian doesn’t like it, but I love his Jack Nitzsche-arranged first album). The first one could be about something as minor as the break-up of Buffalo Springfield or something as vast as the fate of Native Americans; “The Old Laughing Lady” might be about death, or an old laughing lady. Always, there were evocative trigger lines: “Think I’ll pack it in and buy a pickup”; “I’ll stop when I can/ Find some fried eggs and country ham”; “The riverboat was rockin’ in the rain.” Travel, old cars, diners, escape. “You got to move/ There’s no time left to stall.” There was no escape, really — that was the lesson of songs like “Albuquerque.”
All of this comes together in “Ambulance Blues,” spread out over nine minutes. There’s pictorial, old Americana imagery — “Waitresses are cryin’ in the rain” — and, like the gorgeously crumpled “Borrowed Tune,” there’s peculiar fourth wall stuff (“It’s hard to say the meaning of this song”). He just picks up a paper midway through the song and reads out a story from the entertainment section; he then finds room for a dig at music critics’ “hook and ladder dreams” while he’s “keepin’ jive alive” (really?). Throughout the song Young is pushed along by wheezing harmonica, and a sawing fiddle that couldn’t make its way through a redwood if the song was nine years long, rather than nine minutes. The ultimate line of wisdom comes from the farmers’ market, and it’s maybe the best deployed cuss word in any song, ever – “You’re all just pissin’ in the wind.”
When me and Pete Wiggs first went into the studio in 1990, our original idea was to do a cyclical, 98bpm version of “Ambulance Blues” in the style of Soul II Soul, if they’d come from semi-detached Croydon rather than inner city London. Luckily for us, we thought cutting “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” in the same style might be a more realistic aim.
I guess it’s the obvious one innit? The gateway drug for a lot of people to get into Neil Young. That’s what it was for me, so I guess that’s why picking anything else feels strange when it was the first spark that lit the Young fire for myself.
A lot of my memories of this song are from listening to it in the tub. “Harvest Moon” hits a bit harder when you’re submerged in hot water, your legs hanging out over the sides and your eyes closed.
I guess it’s ’cause the song already feels so warm, like you’re wrapped up in a blanket. There’s no rush to it. Nowhere to be apart from where you are in the song.
The lyrics are simple, but they’re not literal. The image he paints is there for you to see, but you can make up your own mind about what’s really on the canvas.
Happy birthday Neil — that’s a lot of candles to blow out. Luckily, from the way you sing, seems like you got the lungs to do it.
My favorite Neil Young song is “Out On The Weekend.” It’s just so real and straightforward. This song and record generally have such a sparse instrumentation and tight production style that’s really relatable. That’s one thing that always stands out about it to me. I also think this song taps into something really poignant for a lot of guys, this kind of “male loneliness” thing. “See the lonely boy out on the weekend / Trying to make it pay / Can’t relate to joy, he tries to speak and/ Can’t begin to say.” He’s searching for something different and fulfilling, he’s got this girl he can’t stop thinking of, but there’s a kind of self-expression and joy that feels unreachable to him still. He’s not hiding away in some graveyard, writhing in agony — he’s just this ordinary guy who hangs out on the weekends. But he’s grasping for some ambiguous enlightenment or gratification that feels unreachable. It’s a simple, understated story that feels more poignant because it’s about something that’s going on everywhere in plain sight. It’s hard to do that in a song.
“Southern Man” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” were the first two songs I played because I loved the riffs. I had just gotten an electric guitar — against my band’s wishes since we were an all-acoustic group called Longdancer. We were signed to Rocket Records, Elton John’s label (we were the first signing). We were a bit like Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, but I was determined to play electric. “Southern Man” was a great song, with excellent lyrics and riffs.
We were completely obsessed with CSNY, listening to each member’s work as well as the band’s music and analyzing every note. Then we got a phone call from someone at our label. We had been supporting Elton on tour and now have started playing our own shows so we picked up a small Swedish PA system made by Ackuset. Neil evidently wanted to play at the Speakeasy in London, an incredible hangout for musicians in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and asked if we could bring our PA and set it up.
Neil came, and we sat right at the front, watching him sing and play through our system. It was extraordinary — our label knew how obsessed we were, so this was a gift. Experiencing Neil Young performing, just four feet away in such a tiny space, was unbelievable. We all had our jaws on the floor, saying, “What the hell, why are we here?”
If there is one downbeat I’ll never forget, it landed around 9 p.m. on December 3, 2012, a minute or two after Neil Young and Crazy Horse first strolled onto the stage of Brooklyn’s Barclay’s Center, as they lurched into their opening number, “Love And Only Love.” My research has since shown me that it was preceded by a brief guitar intro from Neil himself, but in my memory, it happened all at once, a proper “let there be light” moment if ever I knew one, when in an instant, the price on the ticket became the best ninety bucks I ever spent.
It was the biggest sound I ever heard – not the loudest (I have stood about 100 yards from an EA-18G taking off), but the biggest, the most significant, the most powerful. What could be the font of such power, that these four men could so casually turn it on and off like a faucet? As with any sublime mystery, it’s impossible to know for sure, but after pondering it these past 13 years, here’s my best guess.
The bigness of it was equal to the heaviness of it, its heaviness equal to its gravitas, and gravitas doesn’t come cheap. It has to be earned with time, time measured not in months or years but decades. Among the many reasons that 1990’s Ragged Glory (on which “Love And Only Love” serves as penultimate track and de facto grand finale) is Neil’s finest album is that his actual biological age at the time of its release (45) finally caught up to the age that he always seemed to be — has it not been enduringly disconcerting, hearing Neil declare his age to be 24 on 1972’s “Old Man?” Truly, the middle-aged Neil was the first Neil that really made sense, and the 67-year-old Neil onstage that night seemed to occupy a certain sweet spot. Tack onto that the 37 years since this particular lineup of the Horse made their debut on 1975’s Zuma (probably the bare minimum to establish the cozy chemistry which would allow for such guileless grooving and brotherly roughhousing), and yr pretty much rocking as hard as you can within the membership guidelines of the AARP, or beyond.
It was the frequent complaint of fondly-remembered lifelong-curmudgeon (and high-platformed Titus Andronicus denier) David Crosby that the members of Crazy Horse not named Neil Young couldn’t play their way out of a paper bag, and while he was not exactly wrong, such a claim flew in the face of the self-evident truth that these four men (Neil, drummer Ralph Molina, bassist Billy Talbot, and guitarist/sporadic organist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro) together created what could only be called the greatest ever edition of the “two guitars, bass, and drums” format with which we associate the archetypal “rock band,” not despite their limited technical abilities, but because of them. Though of course Neil is a once-in-a-century master of his instrument (comparable more to the likes of Miles Davis or Charlie Parker than any “rock” musician), the more proletariat prowess of his cohort brought a palpable humanity to this music, a certain noble frailty even, an iron will akin to that of a hunter gatherer raging against a brutal wilderness, towards a divine light perpetually just out of reach, but close enough to warrant a frothy-mouthed all-night bacchanal. The Horse kept Neil grounded in both the here and now as well as the ancient — deeply rooted in the Earth, somewhere primal, even primordial. This is the difference between merely “rocking out really hard” and achieving transcendence. Perhaps this is what Neil meant when he gave these words to Buffalo Springfield’s Richie Furay to sing on their 1966 debut, when Neil had just turned a damn near pubescent 21: “If… flying on the ground is wrong, then I’m sorry to let you down.”
It also didn’t hurt that Neil had at his disposal maybe a baker’s dozen or so of the most carefully curated and mindfully modified amplifiers known to science, which would justify and even demand a 210,000 watt soundsystem in a 19,000 capacity venue, but let us not get bogged down in tech specs, since this is rock and roll we’re discussing, after all.
But what is it about, what is the point of it all? Surely extolling the virtues of a groovy chick who can boogie-woogie all night long, one would think, but no – instead we get Neil’s own version of Genesis, a rejection of cynical gnosticism that proclaims it is indeed a force of benevolence which governs creation. “Love and only love will endure,” he sings, noting pointedly that, while hate certainly exists and is never difficult to observe, it will fade (or if you prefer, rust) with time — a more metaphysical take on the aphorism that “the arc of history… bends towards justice,” as liberal types are so fond of saying. This is rock and roll that, for once, carries a universal and essential message to match the enormity of its sound.
This magical night aside, 2012 was not my favorite year. Though followers of the Mayan calendar (including, perhaps, Neil himself, though he more typically wrote about the Incas) may have breathed a sigh of relief when the world did not end, for me, it had — at least it felt that way, as I spent most of the year slogging through my first, and thus far worst (knock on wood), major depressive episode. Though I may have (just barely) summoned the strength to record an album and complete a lengthy tour promoting it, it was an utterly joyless experience which made a distant memory of whatever belief I’d once held in the healing powers of music.
Elsewhere on Ragged Glory, Neil sings of “that city life” which “pretty soon… wears you out and you have to think to smile” — very relatable to me at the time, as I struggled to keep up appearances and hide the shameful truth that I was a walking shell of my former self.
That night, though, as they struck that thunderous chord, a great wave washed over me and I was swept away, back to some version of the wide-eyed and open-hearted person I’d been not so long before, if only for a moment. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, because, at that moment, I wasn’t thinking at all, certainly not thinking to smile. I was just smiling. Within a few weeks, I was living on my own again and beginning the work of building myself back up into a functional member of society.
The seasons of our internal climate are difficult to pin on a calendar, and the shifts within ourselves, however seismic, may not be apparent when they are happening, or even many years in retrospect. One day you just stop, look around, look within, and realize that you feel, that you have felt, different. It would be a little bit cute to say that the moment of that unforgettable downbeat was the moment that my long nightmare ended and the healing began, but… if not then… when?
I wrote a song on the band’s last album which references Neil Young. I never much listened to his music but I knew that Neil was a favorite of all the guys in my former band R.E.M. They revered him, especially Peter and Bertis, the band’s manager. He was one of the main reasons we signed to Warner Bros. Records. Sometime in the ’90s, I went to see Neil perform at the Hollywood Bowl with Tim Booth and his band James opening. Neil did an acoustic set, sat middle stage surrounded by different keyboards, and he performed beautifully. It was a perfect warm jasmine and tuberose Los Angeles night and the music was incredibly moving. Near the end of the set he did this song and I remember calling Peter afterwards and saying, “He did this amazing song about Marlon Brando and Pocahontas and it blew my mind.” Peter laughed at me and said, “Michael that’s one of his best-known songs.” Of course I had no idea. Later that week Neil performed on a soundstage for MTV Unplugged. I went and was sat next to Ringo Starr.
Years later, as R.E.M. were wrapping up our final record, I wrote “Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando And I” as an homage to my queer godfather Marlon and to Neil who was always warm and generous to me and to my band. The song contained references to the gold and brass rings which are important repeated motifs in my own writing. As for Neil and his music, however late I showed up at the party, he became a hero to me those nights in Los Angeles.
“Ambulance Blues” live from the Bottom Line on Citizen Kane Jr. Blues resonates with me as I also began music making in small venues playing acoustically, playing “all these down songs.” The song is evocative of those times even though Neil sings about the “folky days” of the ’60s and mine were in the ’90s (post-Elliott Smith). I have always liked the “depression blues” of this song — even before I heard Bert Jansch’s “Needle Of Death,” upon which “Ambulance Blues” is based. It’s a long and rambling deep song, and it feels easy to get lost in its atmosphere. And I like how it relates to that song and keeps folk music songwriting moving forwards whilst Neil looks back. Mainly I like how this song makes me feel. Sad, but pleased to be in Neil’s company.
“You’re all just pissin’ in the wind/ You don’t know it but you are.”
He has a sense of humor even when things are down in the ditch.
Favorite Neil Young song: There are too many favorite NY songs of mine for me to really choose one, but I will say that “Pushed It Over The End” from Citizen Kane Jr. Blues has always been very important to me. I’ve never really understood this song’s “meaning” but it has something in common with “Ambulance Blues,” another all-time favourite of mine. I really like Neil’s deep and rich guitar tone on these kind of acoustic guitar songs from his Ditch period. I really like how the music makes me feel. It’s full of mystery, unusual chord changes, time signature/tempo changes, and feels like he was perhaps trying to write songs about a relationship breakdown whilst watching film noir motion pictures on his TV Screen. Mr. Shipman, my brother’s A level Philosophy teacher, made a cassette tape of this bootleg and gave it to my brother in about 1995. And I am thankful every day for the tape having reached me back then. I REALLY dislike the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young recording of the same song. I cannot listen to it. That, somehow, is Neil Young in a nutshell for me!
My favorite Neil Young song is probably “The Needle And The Damage Done.” I first heard the unplugged version on YouTube. That’s how I found all of the music that I was desperate for in high school. In this song he doesn’t talk about the beauty that exists alongside darkness and loss, he creates it. I didn’t have experience with losing friends, but I did know real loneliness, and this song reflected that back to me and put it in the context of love and art. Finding his music at this point in my life showed me that romance and power were possible if you just sang about what was really happening.
“Cinnamon Girl.” I just love that riff. I think both the low and high E strings are Drop D tuning. And it’s a cool groove. Ever since I first heard it, it was like, “Who is this? That’s Neil Young?”
“Ohio” became important to me too. When I was a senior in high school, I read a book about the Kent State massacre. This is my historical and political awakening. I worked in the library. I came across a book about Kent State, full of photos, and I read about the chronology of the events in the shootings. And then I would learn years later that Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh from Devo were students at Kent State during these events.
Jerry Casale directed our last video from Down On The Upside, “Blow Up The Outside World,” during our first incarnation. So all of a sudden this book that I read is giving me context for both Neil Young’s song and for Devo. It only happened later on, years later. I was already a fan, but I didn’t make that connection. But the song sticks with me because it’s so eerie.
Neil Young is poignant without being verbose lyrically — or, in some cases, not even that poetic. But there’s a real simplicity to that notion, and it’s in this pop melody. At a certain time period, you could’ve heard this song on the radio a lot. I love pop songs. Bubblegum is the naked truth.
He embraces a clunker every now and then. And I’m not talking about his most recent output, which I struggle with a bit. I always want Neil to be Neil, and not do what I want him to do. And I don’t think he ever has, exactly.
I think it’s just what you’re supposed to do. Those are the artists that mean the most to me. They’re the artists I don’t want to sound like necessarily, but I want to embrace whatever gave them permission to do that. You should make the art where you can only get it if you come to that place. It’s not necessarily ego-driven. I think it’s almost in spite of your ego. If my ego was in charge, I wouldn’t have let a lot of my music show. It’s vulnerable. You feel fragile, judged. I think that was a core concept, and maybe a revolutionary part of what made rock ‘n’ roll, this uniquely American art form, special. This belief in individuated self-expression. That there was space for that — not just in the marketplace, but in the world.
Certain people have a built-in thing that helps establish that individuality. For Neil Young, it’s his voice. He allowed himself to sing that way, and he didn’t hide it or try to sing like someone else. There’s nobody that sounds like Neil Young.
I will preface this by saying that I am by no means a Neil “expert” and initially I was trying to think of some really left-field deep cuts that might reflect my admiration for his fearlessness. But he’s equally fearless in his moments of fragile verisimilitude as he is in the paleo grunge trenches. Even though “Expecting To Fly” shows up on the second Buffalo Springfield record I think we can safely look at this as an early if not the first solo Neil cut. If anything it’s a collab with the criminally underrated Jack Nitzsche who provides the elegant and ghostly string/horn arrangements. I love a song like this that lurches and then dives into a waltz. For a song about flying it doesn’t actually get airborne, just spectral. Massive props to Neil’s electric playing on this as well; he rides the vibrato arm of his electric in his trademark style that sounds very much like pedal steel. Still hard for me to believe young men wrote songs this ancient sounding back in the day.
When I heard “Walk On” for the first time, the mystical universe of Neil Young finally cracked itself open to me. His spindling, haunted voice, the easy way he strums out a rhythm, his trove of lyrics plain and plenty about any subject imaginable, and most of all, his willingness to jump from character to character across the short span of eight songs suddenly all made sense. “Walk On” is about living your life in the wake of deep disappointment. It’s simple, short, and captivating.
On The Beach was largely recorded at Sunset Sound, and yet “Walk On” (and “For The Turnstiles,” another favorite of mine) were tracked at Neil Young’s ranch, which adds this gooey, homespun feeling to both songs. It’s not too fussed-over — rough around the edges, yet easy to access. Neil Young is an activist, a brilliant storyteller, and a prolific songster who drafted the blueprint for so much music I love. “Walk On” is a shining example of a classic Neil-hook that catches your ear, and forces you to reckon with your reality before you even realize how deep its meaning goes. At that point it’s too late, you’re already singing it on loop.
It’s hard to pick just one favorite Neil Young song, but “Helpless” is very special to me. I have played it in my own shows on stages around the world, and it always transports me to an otherworldly, peaceful place when I sing it. The imagery is so beautiful, and the lyrics are full of nostalgia that pulls at my heart.
I still remember the moment I discovered Neil Young. I must have been around 13 years old and found a solo video of him performing “Heart Of Gold” on YouTube. From that day I was hooked on his music and was fortunate enough to see him play a few times growing up at the Bridge School Benefit concert in Mountain View, California, as well as at Outside Lands festival when he performed with Crazy Horse in 2012. Neil can communicate through song in a way no one else can, and I will always be grateful that he has gifted the world with his music and words.
As a kid it felt impossible to put into words the impact my father’s abandonment and rejection had on me. The mention of the word “father” would conjure up states of pure affect — rage, grief, admiration, longing, shame, and despair. These feelings in me stood outside my attempts at their articulation. In short, I had no way to symbolize in action or in words my father’s neglect.
When I was 23 I heard Neil Young’s “Old Man” for the first time while riding down I-75 in Atlanta in my best friend’s car. I had never heard of Neil Young and each lyric of “Old Man” felt like a stranger had found his way into my psyche and from there was singing all that I had silenced about my father. He articulated the pain of being rejected by the person you are most like in the world and the resulting refusal to desire their recognition or love. He sang what I could not confess — that in spite of the pain, and the vain attempt to render my father a ghost, I would always carry him with me throughout my life.
And I think that is the liberating aspect of art; its ability to translate and re-describe all the parts of ourselves and our lives that we feel barred from interpreting. “Old Man” allowed me to expand the frame of the experience of my father, the trauma of his neglect and the unkillable urge to still, after all the pain, see myself in him. Neil Young gave me the ability to feel all these tumultuous and turbulent emotions at once. In short, he gave me the ability to sit with all the humanity in me that my father will never know.
I got a million favorite Neil Young songs, so I’m going to pick one that’s a little less hipster because I’m the ultimate Neil Young hipster: “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks” off his 1987 album Life. The year it came out is 1987, but I first got a CD copy of this for my birthday when I was a teenager. My old best friend told me it reminded him of my music in my teens. I thought it was interesting. It had some ’80s sound, but it was sort of his return to rock. It’s on Geffen, but it’s after David Geffen tried to sue him after he was making Trans and the rockabilly album. I remember even back then he was trashing the record company in the songs.
Many years later, a little before we were opening for Neil in 2018, I found a vinyl copy of Life. “When Your Lonely Heart Breaks” crept back up on me. It almost sounds like the boy band/girl band sound that Julee Cruise and others related to Twin Peaks or David Lynch were doing. That sort of melodic oldies thing. He’s 40-plus then, maybe older. It was obviously an era where he was changing styles a lot, combining them. The subject matter is he’s talking to somebody whose marriage went to shit, like, “When your lonely heart breaks/ Don’t sit counting your mistakes.” In the second verse he’s like, “What’s your problem, she’s gone/ You’re still movin’, movin’ on/ You got memories, she got strong.” You could just imagine he and Crazy Horse had all just gone through their ups and downs at that point.
In 1987, he also recorded that film Muddy Track. He’s yelling at his band a lot. He’s filming everything, and at one point he tells the director, “If you see something going wrong, shoot that, that’s what I want.” It’s a struggling tour, and he wants people to get that. They keep rehearsing that song “Name Of Love.” He keeps threatening them when they make a mistake: “Shall we review the tapes??” I recently saw Neil in Toronto, and they did “Name Of Love.” Because I was with my friend Travis Good from the Sadies, I was able to talk to Neil without being too awkward, and I brought that up. I say that to my band all the time: “Shall we review the tapes??”
The first time I met him, I was too shy — my wife coaxed me into it. He’d played this 30-minute version of “Down By The River.” He’d bring it back down to Earth and you’d think he was about to do the final verse, and then just went off to outer space again. I got to talk to him. I said, “Neil, I’ve seen you a lot of times, but this is the best time by far. That ‘Down By The River’ was like you were underground and in outer space at the same time.'” He laughed and he said, “Oh, yeah, we can go to outer space whenever we want.”
The greatest artists have catalogs that can be lifelong companions — revealing new layers of meaning as the context provided by our own experience continues to shift with age. Neil Young is one of those artists for me — with me from the beginning, a companion, inspiration and lodestar along the path that I have attempted to walk as an artist. Many of his songs have held me at different points along the way, but at this moment it’s “On The Beach” Neil for whom I’m most grateful. Two decades into my career, approaching my forties, I’m struck by the mournfulness, the exhaustion; I understand the friction between needing to be seen and wanting to be left alone, the fear of being left behind by the world and the loneliness of being misunderstood. Even if you’re not listening closely to the words, it doesn’t matter — it’s all right there in the guitar solo. I’m so grateful to Neil for walking the path with unflinching honesty, providing a light for the rest of us to follow when the way gets dark.
“I’m the Ocean” is without a doubt my favorite song of Neil’s. The chord progression makes me feel like I’m ascending into another reality, floating up above and looking down on earth. I listen to it under the covers by candlelight and it is the song that accompanies me whenever I know it’s time to raise my consciousness to another level. Happy Birthday, Neil. Thank you for all the wonder and wisdom your music brings.
I found this very difficult. My favorite Neil Young song is “Borrowed Tune,” from Tonight’s The Night. It has the quality of the best pure songwriting whereby you feel that you are so close to the narrator as to be able to smell them. This particular narration smells of loneliness and alcohol, but with strains of hope flecked over it like splatters of turps. This song makes me laugh as well as cry. It’s a rare mark for someone as famous as Neil Young was at the time of writing that record to present something so completely unadorned and fragile to the world. It’s a record I come back to over and over, and this song always spins me out. Happy Birthday Neil.
I’m a fan of most Neil Young eras. I’ll take Neil plugged/unplugged/grunge/folk/CSNY any day. When I have to pick a favorite song though, the song “Philadelphia” pops into my head first. We maybe deserve more verbed-out piano Neil. It’s a minimal song, but that makes the emotional ache it evokes that much more effective. The song has a sort of Brian Wilson-esque wide-eyed hopefulness to it, while at the same time being so damn depressing. The “I know I’ll be alright” falsetto vocal as the song fades out is probably why this song sticks in my mind as one of Neil Young’s greatest works.
I’ve been a Neil Young fan as long as I can remember… I specifically recall listening a lot to “Harvest Moon” around the time I was making my last record Corn Queen. It inspired me to strip back the instrumentation and not underestimate what a simple lyric and arrangement can do. I hope that I can create something at some point that can outlive generations and remain as timeless as that.
I was initially taken, like most, by Harvest, but then I discovered After The Gold Rush. It’s hard to pick one song from that album, but if anything were to encapsulate a hard rap of uncut Neil Young it would be the intro track “Tell Me Why.” Although this is a song from his early period, it’s an all-rounder for me in the sense of what his music is, encapsulating the sparseness of his early sound that I don’t think ever left. I don’t know what the lyrics are about and I’m not interested in knowing, preferring my own interpretation. It’s intimate and sad and comforting and warm, and it gives me hope because there’s positivity in that.
I spend a lot of time on the road, touring obviously but also I live between Los Angeles and Marfa. I sometimes feel like a trucker. There’s something so romantic about the roadside diner, which we don’t even really have anymore. This song is supposedly about him meeting his second wife Pegi Young when she was working at this diner. I’m such a nerd that I’ve found the diner on Google Maps to see what it is now.
It’s a song that cuts across decades. He sees her when she’s a waitress and then she has this other life riding a Harley-Davidson somewhere on a desert highway, her long blonde hair blowing in the breeze. Then it jumps forward and she’s a mom with two kids and she’s waiting for the magic kiss. Thinking back to her other life: Somewhere on a desert highway she’s still riding the Harley-Davidson. It’s such a love song. I feel like he’s really seeing her, thinking about her heart and her memories.
