Neil Young

[Aegir]

Though I never really considered myself a Neil Young fan, over the past few weeks I've been realizing that I like quite a few of his songs.

Cowgirl In the Sand, Heart of Gold, Harvest Moon, Ohio, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, Down By The River, et cetera

And recently found out he was in Buffalo Springfield, too; however, I'm pretty sure the only BS song I've heard was written by Stephen Stills.

[Jason]

He's one of those artists whom I really want to get into and love, but his music just doesn't move me that much. A few songs I can think of, but not many. I won't dare say he's overrated because the whole world loves him for his music and innovation.

[Daniel S.]

I just bought Decade, so I'm beginning to get into his stuff too. I really like it, but I love the Byrds and Moby Grape so Buffalo Springfield and CSNY would be another link in the chain. Right now I'm listening to Cowgirl In The Sand.

[I. Spaceman]

If I had the old 30-page thread which had detailed analyses of every album, I'd repost it here. But I don't.
Suffice it to say that Neil is, besides Bob Dylan, the finest singer/songwriter to walk the planet.
But you have to go past the damn hits.
Buy Tonight's The Night and On The Beach. Now.

[Sheriff John Stone]

Neil Young is on the cover of the current issue of Rolling Stone. Good article also...

[henrymoon]

The more Neil Young stuff you play, the more you'll get into him. It happens on all sorts of levels: the guitar - expressive, primitive, percussive, but steeped in emotional engagement; the voice - plaintive, complaining, passionate, compassionate; the songs - intense, incisive, inclusive... And most of all, the guy himself: he's made it to sixty through a cussedness inherited from his late father, a successful sports writer. The magnet with Young is his integrity - though he may change his mind now and again, he'll always do it for the right reasons. The more you listen, the better the picture you get of a shy guy who doesn't shy away from life... and he becomes inspirational.

[cabinessence]

I like a lot of Neil stuff,  am indifferent to a fair amount too. He's awfully prolific (a huge amount on disc; as much completed that he's suppressed or still tinkering with endlesslly: assembling his tracks seems of a piece with his obsession with Lionel Train sets), and all over the map stylistically, signs of an unfettered and brave rock and roll explorer, a Cortez eager to travel as well as conquer...BUT that means lots of unevenness as well as eclecticism(imo)  and attendant vast patches of 'self-indulgence', I haven't even mentioned his occasional penchant for "pure commercial product", great, awful and bizarrely perverse by turns. Which parts of the whole are genius and which crap is very much in the ear of the listener, each era and individual disc having its partisans, much as is the case with Dylan and Bowie, kindred souls.

I want to put in a small word for a record that's kind of slipped through the cracks, the modest, immaculately made,1978 folk-country offering Comes a Time.  It got pegged by some as a  commercially safe "run for cover" move when it was released, a pale Harvest carbon copy. It didn't even turn the trick of being a hit.

It has aged very well I think. Though very acoustic and gently melodic and Nicolette Larson-enhanced. make no mistake, this is as off beat and individual as anything of his. It's the Neil of "Sugar Mountain" and "I am a Child" and "Expecting to Fly", heavily marked by a root Canadian folkie coffee house sound (the moving cover of Ian & Sylvia's "Four Strong Winds" gives us his basic inherited coordinates as an acoustic musician: a brand of folk aqquired in the 50's, shared by Ian, Neil, Joni and Gordon Lightfoot too, as indebted to Don Gibson country stuff and  local (deeply depressing and fatalistic) sea shanties as to what the Village crowd was playing). If it were just that sort of music, this record would be merely worthy and ultimately dull. Luckily there was a large dose of something mildly mind altering in his system (it may be constitutional) that makes this record seem (to one receptive as I am) like Neil's opium dream shadow play of his life and works to date, a shimmering head trip mirage always on the verge of vanishing, very evanescent.  It's subtly but very thoughtfully programmed as a set list overall, and the opening number is perfectly chosen to  set this mood and pose an open ended concept.  "Goin' Back" itself goes back stylistically to that whole Tim Buckleyesque 'how to hold onto a dream' aesthetic of Neil's early soft stuff: a rapturously visionary number, beautifully arranged, evoking that Ur-Young lyric (of "I am a Child"): "Like a smoke ring day when the wind blows". This one's lyrics are equally trippy

In a foreign land there were creatures at play
Running hand in hand
Leading nowhere to stay
Driven to the mountains high
They were sunken in the cities deep ...

Not your average easy listening top 40 singer songwriter schlock whatsoever. The songs that follow may have listener friendliness exuding from every pore, but if you slow down to their lulling tempo you may find that a siren's song, danger behind the sweetness, has been seducing you. Tunes like "Look out for My Love"  are as scary-real as anything on Tonight's the Night or On the Beach. But I can't peg the LP as an unplugged Crazy Horse cocaine-paranoid screed  either, there's just too much damn variety, Neil's career long eclecticism gathered together (and perfectly curated) in miniature.

[donald]

The real deal. Genuine.  Stubbornly independent.   Defies categorization.  Waltzed in and out of CSN..didn't need em.  Prefers a waitress to a movie star.  Into old cars, not as a motorhead, but because of their personalities.  Can rock as good as anybody and write a beautiful ballad at the drop of a hat.

My favorite stuff after all these years?  Zuma.  Tonights the Night.  Freedom.  This Notes for You.

If you're  indecisive or have a hard time making choices, dont ever try to make a personal compilation mix of this guy.  It would drive you nuts!

[I. Spaceman]

This Note's For You? Wow!
You're the only booster of that album that I've kown, which automatically makes you cool.

[donald]

I recommend This Notes For You.  Its really good and shows yet another facet of Neil.

Its sort of like being fond of late 70's BB stuff.  You have to develop a taste for it and forget about what other BB albums sound like or are supposed to sound like.

Neil meets the Blues Brothers!

[I. Spaceman]

Neil meets the Blues Brothers!

*puts gun to own head*

Does that mean Are You Passionate is Neil meets the Commitments?

[Joel5001]

The real deal. Genuine.  Stubbornly independent.   Defies categorization.  Waltzed in and out of CSN..didn't need em.  Prefers a waitress to a movie star.  Into old cars, not as a motorhead, but because of their personalities.  Can rock as good as anybody and write a beautiful ballad at the drop of a hat.

My favorite stuff after all these years?  Zuma.  Tonights the Night.  Freedom.  This Notes for You.

If you're  indecisive or have a hard time making choices, dont ever try to make a personal compilation mix of this guy.  It would drive you nuts!

This Notes For You and Freedom, but no Ragged Glory?

[I. Spaceman]

Sleeps With Angels kills all those puppies.

[Boxer Monkey]

Nothing beats "Zuma."

[I. Spaceman]

If it didn't have that crap CSNY cut at the end, that spoils the whole thing. I love Zuma but it's country rock lite in comparison to Tonight's The Night.

[Boxer Monkey]

Yeah, but you can't listen to "Tonight's the Night" all the time. "Zuma" is a little more versatile.

[dude ll doo]

Love "Time Fades Away" , because a) it's live,  b) it took a lot of guts to play those songs to a bunch of kids expecting  "Gold Rush" and "Harvest" tunes, and c) it rocks ferociously.

[I. Spaceman]

Yeah, but you can't listen to "Tonight's the Night" all the time. "Zuma" is a little more versatile.

Well, I do, but I'm fodain' batmerda.

Time Fades is incredible too, for all those reasons you mentioned, Doo.

All his damn albums are great up to Old Ways. Deal with it.

Can I hear the love for American Stars? His most underrated album, even more than Trans.

[al]

Stars and Bars is the sound of Neil letting go, sod the neuroses, damn the torpedoes, lets get ripped and sing some dirty songs. Then on side two he throws in 'Will to Love', my current favourite Neil Young song. Oh, and Like A Hurricane. ANd people were disappointed with it back then, fools....

Tonights the Night is THE Neil Young LP. Tired Eyes, Albuquerque (that looks more like it...)...but Zuma has Cortez and Pardon My Heart and Barstool Blues...

They were all 5 star albums up to and including Rust. The man at his best.

[I. Spaceman]

Well, you know we completely disagree about his later outpt, but what about Side 1 of Hawks And Doves? That may be my favorite Neil album side.

[al]

Side 1 of Hawks and Doves is great, no arguement there. The slide started with side 2. It was the beginning of his 'what the hell. I'll do this next' phase. Fair enough, he'd been the pop star, sensitive singer songwriter, crazed doom trilogy man, Rock God - it was time to break the audience perceptions. It didn't always work. Side one is a 5 star side, side two is a one. Reactor was a contractual obligation and sounds like it. Southern Pacific is great, (got a nifty red triangular single of that!), a couple of others are OK, T-Bone is Neil taking the piss. Trans makes sense when you read the recent biography, as do the other 80's albums - his attention was on his son, the music was secondary. And it shows, but in retrospect he did the right thing, his son comes first. Even if the music wasn't always great it always made me smile, and I've always stuck with him - despite Are You Passionate, after which any sane person would've abandoned him to the old rock stars home. Is till treasure seeing him for the first time on the Trans tour though, with him and Nils wandering around the stage with their vocoders sounding like they'd completely lost the plot! I prefer those songs to the average piffle the album is filled out with (Little thing called love, like an Inca etc).

[I. Spaceman]

I totally agree on Doves.
Re-Ac-Tor is just 40 minutes of mutant sludge, not remotely trying to match any standard of anything he'd done before. Surfer Joe And Moe The Sleaze is one of Neil's best and most underrated songs, nearly demonic. And Shots is purely riveting in the extreme, Neil's Taxi Driver. The rest is garage-barn damage, no more, no less.
On Trans, Little Thing Called Love sucks, but in the live Berlin video, it makes sense as a more uptempo rocker. Like An Inca is indeed horrible, and Hold On To Your Love is mediocre. But the REAL Trans material, as it should be listened to (and Neil wishes he would have released it as), a longish EP, is some of, possibly the most, visionary material he's ever made. Transformer Man is heartbreaking and one of his most personal songs, Computer Age, We R In Control and Sample And Hold are mind-warping computer-metal, and the whole concept holds up perfectly, if not more so, today. It wasn't Neil who'd lost the plot, but his audience. Look at em in the Berlin video, blind and wanting a sound from Neil that had no place in that time. He may be pissing on them, but they deserved it.
Rockin' was just Neil's reaction to Geffen because they wouldn't put out the superior original version of Old Ways. It's a love letter (in the Frank Booth sense) to Geffen, "Straight from my heart, fodaer!". A concept LP about the decline and fall of the record business, Neil's Day Of The Locust. A half hour of vitriol, with one of Neil's best songs, "Wonderin'", and a worrying signpost in the title track's calling out of the evil White House couple.
When he decided to "go Nashville" and ignore all his own formidable country-songwriting skills in favor of a wrongheaded and patronising faux-country-syrup heartland-warrior persona on Old Ways, he lost the plot. 2 years of State Fairs and Enormodome Barndances put him completely out of the picture, mentally, and 2 horrid attempts at getting back to the rock, Landing On Water and Life, just put him further out to sea, even in the eyes of his diehard fans.
And the incredibly plastic and phony white-man-blooze This Note's For You made him almost completely irrelevant, if it were not for the middle-finger video that earned him another 15 minutes of hip cachet. We even missed out on his psychotic feedback ballet 88 tour with The Restless and the Jap Eldorado EP, because we JUST DIDN'T CARE ANY MORE! He'd let us down too many times.
Positive reports of the acoustic 89 tour and a new song, something about rocking in the new world or something, were read, then filed in the "maybe I'll check that out" file.
Then, one Saturday night in the late months of 1989, Neil strode on the stage of Saturday Night Live, and shredded the minds of his old fans and made a whole lotta new ones, tearing into his new material with all the raw violence of the creature bursting out of John Hurt's stomach in Alien. Ending his first song, he pulled the whammy bar on his trusty guitar (sonic eardrum destroyer) Old Black all the way back and snapped all his strings simultaneously.
That's how it went down on this continent. Can you dig it?

[Evenreven]

I agree with Ian that Neil is one of the greatest songwriters ever.

Fave of the moment: Tired Eyes. One of the most heartbreaking songs ever by anybody. The imagery in the lyrics stand as half-reality, half-metaphor: "what do you mean he had bullet-holes in his mirrors?!" A nightmare - though not pure horror, but with a very human sense of beauty; always with sympathy for the outsider. And the vocal is PERFECT.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

I think “Sleeps with Angels” might be my favorite Neil album. I bought it the day I got my driver’s license. But it’s really heavy. Not something to listen to if you want to stomp your foot and smile. If that is the case I head for Zuma or Mirrorball.

“Wonderin’” is a great song. I can’t get enough of it. If not for that cut, I’d probably never listen to Everybody’s Rockin’ at all (although Payola Blues is great too!).

I’m still really enjoying “Prairie Wind”. I have heard people love it or hate it. I love it. I think the songs are really strong. Especially “The Painter”. It’s a solid album from start to finish.

Everyone seems to really like “Ragged Glory” but I have never really been that fond of it. It has a great sound and a great vibe, but none of the cuts really do it for me. I hope this doesn’t alienate me.   

Trans is overlooked unfairly. Most of the songs on it are really great. I turn to that record often. Listen to the great melodic harmony work in “Computer Age”. Really great stuff. And of course “Sample and Hold” rocks. 

One of my favorite Neil songs has never been officially released. “No One Seems to Know” is a piece of beauty, and I hope it appears on the Archives sets, assuming they ever materialize.

[henrymoon]

(How d'you do quotes?)

"I’m still really enjoying “Prairie Wind”. I have heard people love it or hate it. I love it. I think the songs are really strong. Especially “The Painter”. It’s a solid album from start to finish. "

I second that. Both points.

And while we're on overlooked gems, "Silver & Gold" is a true, hermetically sealed classic.