Who else would start a live album this way? ‘They all sound the same,’ shouts Neil Young off mic, at the beginning of 1997’s Year Of The Horse. Then, as if replying to himself in a moment of revelation, steps up to the mic to add, ‘It’s all one song.’
The crowd cheer and Young, backed by his most trusted noise merchants Crazy Horse, tear into a howling, floor-to-the-floor version of ‘When You Dance I Can Really Love’.
One song? With all due respect Mr Young, we beg to differ.
Since his early says with Buffalo Springfield, throughout his solo career and the plethora of collaborators and bands that have backed him, Young has been a reliably restless and brilliantly contrary presence and written hundreds of songs that range from heartbroken ballads to political diatribes, from tales of folk legends to tributes to electric cars.
He’s been a folky troubadour, a wild rocker, an electronic pioneer, rock’n’roll revivalist, country singer and then some. Whittling his songs down to a top 15 is no mean feat, but here are some of the greatest solo tracks from the man they call Shakey.
The 15 greatest Neil Young solo songs
15. 'Sugar Mountain' (B-side, 1970)
What better place to start than with one of Young’s earliest songs? According to legend, ‘Sugar Mountain’ was written on Young’s 19th birthday, while on tour with his early band The Squiers.
Young later claimed that he wrote 126 verses and edited them down to the four which made it on to the recording used on the B-side of ‘Cinnamon Girl’. ‘Sugar Mountain’ was Young’s farewell to youth, a campfire singalong-like surge of nostalgia, somehow written by a teenager.
Joni Mitchell was one of the many who were moved by Young’s ballad and wrote her classic ‘The Circle Game’ in response.
"I thought, you know, if we get to 21 and there’s nothing after that, that’s a pretty bleak future," Mitchell told a crowd in October 1970. "So I wrote a song for him, and for myself, just to give me some hope."
14. 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart' (After The Gold Rush, 1970)
Young showed his softer side on this doleful waltz, the third track on After The Goldrush. According to his CSN&Y bandmate Graham Nash, Young wrote it for him after his break-up with Joni Mitchell.
"It’s a beautiful song and it was incredibly important for me to hear what Neil had said because he was dead right, it is only love that can break your heart," Nash later told Uncut. "We are strong, mankind, but these love things can really trip you up. He was only 24 when he wrote that."
13. 'Old Man' (Harvest, 1972)
Back in 1970, Young bought a ranch in Northern California for $350,000. He’d later recount in Jonathan Demme’s 2006 documentary Heart Of Gold being shown around by Louis Avila, the estate’s 70-year-old caretaker.
"Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep," said Young. "He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there’s this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, 'Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?' And I said, “Well, just lucky, Louie, just real lucky.' And he said, 'Well, that’s the darndest thing I ever heard.'"
Inspired by his relationship with Avila, Young wrote the Harvest track ‘Old Man’, a bittersweet meditation on love and aging that finds empathy across the generation gap.
12. 'Don't Be Denied' (Time Fades Away, 1973)
Young’s first solo tour post-Harvest was beset with problems. A debilitating spinal condition had required surgery, so Young had been laid up for much of the latter half of 1972.
Once back on his feet, Young put together a new band, The Stray Gators, calling upon old Crazy Horse sparring partner, Danny Whitten, after the guitarist assured Young he was clean.
It soon became apparent that Whitten was still using and Young was forced to sack him, giving him $50 and a plane ticket back to LA. Whitten overdosed on a combination of diazepam and alcohol that night. Young was distraught but the tour went ahead.
The shows soon went off the rails, with a frazzled Young self-medicating and frustrated with his band and the audiences. The shows were recorded and compiled for a doomy and fleetingly brilliant live album, 1973's Time Fades Away.
Its key track is the swaggering ‘Don’t Be Denied’. Written in the wake of Whitten’s death, the autobiographical verses detail his parents’ separation, his torment at the hands of school bullies, Buffalo Springfield’s early days and his disillusion with fame. The chorus simply repeats the title with increasing intensity as the song becomes a defiant anthem.
11. 'Tonight's The Night' (Tonight's The Night, 1975)
With Young still shaken by Whitten’s death, another blow came in June 1973 when Bruce Berry, a friend and roadie for CSN&Y, died of a heroin overdose.
Months later, Young began sessions for the planned follow-up to the huge-selling Harvest at LA’s Sunset Sound studios. When they didn’t work out, he relocated to Studio Instrument Rentals, which had been started by Berry. The atmosphere became something like a prolonged wake.
"We all got high enough," Young later said of the sessions, "right out there on the edge where we felt wide open to the whole mood. It was spooky. I probably feel this album more than anything I’ve ever done."
‘Tonight’s The Night’ summed it up, a tribute to Berry that sounds more haunted than mournful. Young strains and sings bum notes, while there’s a compelling wildness to the playing that feels like catharsis.
10. 'Like A Hurricane' (American Stars 'n Bars, 1977)
Appropriately, given its title, ‘Like A Hurricane’ captures Young’s guitar playing at its elemental best. Young spends a couple of verses attempting to describe a feeling of intense desire through words before expressing himself through great swathes of distortion and tempestuous swarms of wailing guitar.
Incredibly, the first attempt of the song is the one he released, as he recounted in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, "The master recording I used for the final version was the run-through when I was showing the Horse how the song went.
"That is why it cuts on the beginning. There was no beginning. There was no end. It is one of those performances you can never repeat, the cherry, the original expression of the song, the essence."
9. 'Revolution Blues' (On The Beach, 1974)
Young’s eagerly-awaited first solo studio album since finding huge success with Harvest and as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, On The Beach was a ragged and wild album from an artist determined to follow their muse, whatever the commercial cost.
With his relationship with wife Carrie Snodgrass on the rocks and his appetite for drink and drugs spiralling out of control, Young recorded what he later called, "One of the most depressing records I’ve ever made" – it’s also perhaps the greatest.
On ‘Revolution Blues’, Young sounds wild-eyed and possessed as he inhabits a lyric from the perspective of a Charles Manson-like serial killer – just listen to the menace with which he spits, ‘Well I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.’
8. 'Harvest Moon' (Harvest Moon, 1992)
Following the coruscating noise-fest of 1990’s Ragged Glory, Young’s mellow side came to the fore on Harvest Moon, a sequel of sorts to Harvest. Its title track is an absolute peach, a reflection on the strength of a long relationship based on first-hand experience.
"'Harvest Moon' is a song I wrote for Pegi, my wife of many years," Young posted on his website in 2021, "who gave me two beautiful children and helped bring up my first child Zeke. She was a dancer and floated around when she was happy."
It’s the sound of nostalgia itself, a bittersweet country waltz flecked with warm pedal steel and graced with a melody so simple and direct, it sounds like it always existed.
7. 'Powderfinger' (Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)
One of Young’s most intriguing lyrics, ‘Powderfinger’ appears to be a narrative from the perspective of a young man feeling he has no choice but to defend his family, even if that means paying for it with his own life.
Again, the charged guitar passages say as much as the lyrics – particularly the spine-tingling solo that follows a verse in which the protagonist shoots the incoming enemy.
When pressed on the meaning, Young told SPIN in 1995 that the lyrics alluded to feelings of angst and anger, adding, "I’ve seen things in my life that I’ll never forget – and I see them every day. And I see strength that I can’t understand and weaknesses that I can’t deal with."
6. 'After The Gold Rush' (After The Gold Rush, 1970)
The delicate and plaintive piano ballad which gave Young’s breakthrough album its name was inspired by a dystopian science fiction movie written by two of Young’s neighbours, actor Dean Stockwell and actor and writer Herb Bermann.
While the film was never made, Young’s song captured its essence, according to Stockwell, who said that it, "relates to the screenplay in an artistic way, not directly, in dialogue or anything."
"'After The Gold Rush' is an environmental song," Young said, years later. "I recognise in it now this thread that goes through a lotta my songs that’s this time-travel thing… When I look out the window, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way this place looked a hundred years ago."
5. 'Ambulance Blues' (On The Beach, 1974)
If a single song captures the burnt-out brilliance of On The Beach, it’s ‘Ambulance Blues’.
Over nine meandering minutes Young flits between nostalgia for his ‘old folky days’ of playing coffeeshops in Toronto, vignettes about waitresses crying in the rain, a woman he’s calling ‘Mother Goose’ whom he’s betrayed, takedowns of music critics, a poetic summary of CSN&Y’s relationships (‘You’re all just pissin’ in the wind’) and a savage putdown of an unnamed charlatan who could very easily be Richard Nixon.
Young’s performance sounds off the cuff – guitar notes are missed, his vocals are inconsistent – and the band sound as if they may be hearing the song for the first time, but there’s a magnetic magic to it all that keeps reeling you in.
4. 'Down By The River' (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)
In early 1969, Young found himself bedridden by a case of the flu which left him feeling "delirious half the time" and "pretty high in a strange kind of way." In a feverish state, Young picked up the guitar he kept by the side of the bed.
By the end of that day, he’d written three of his most enduring songs – ‘Cinnamon Girl’, ‘Cowgirl In The Sand’ and ‘Down By The River’.
These songs formed the bedrock of his next album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his first with Crazy Horse, the backing band to whom he’d turn whenever he felt the need to cut loose and make an unholy racket.
The brooding ‘Down By The River’ offers plenty of scope for that, with the lumbering groove of Billy Talbot’s bassline and Ralph Molina’s solid drumming providing a solid foundation for Young and Danny Whitten to embark upon vicious duels that reflect the intensity of the lyrics.
3. 'Cinnamon Girl' (Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)
Another from the most productive sick day of all time, ‘Cinnamon Girl’ is a straightforward rocker, a simple, melodic tune based on an irresistible, crunching riff but in Crazy Horse’s hands it takes off.
The wildness that the Horse unleash in Young comes to the fore in remarkable guitar solo which finds hammering away at one note as the band hunker down around him.
As for the inspiration behind the song? Young explained in the sleevenotes for the 1977 compilation, "Wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Ochs’ eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife" – clearly the fever had really taken hold at this point.
2. 'Cortez The Killer' (Zuma, 1975)
Another epic jam from Young and Crazy Horse, ‘Cortez The Killer’ settles straight into a slow-moving, dreamy jam session. Three-and-a-half minutes later, Young begins singing, telling the tale of conquistador Hernán Cortés, who conquered Mexico for Spain in the early 1500s, while paying little regard to historical accuracy.
Frankly, it doesn’t matter – as with so many Crazy Horse jams, it’s the feel of the thing that counts. Young seems lost in a revery for times lost gone, of gods and rituals and reflecting on man’s tendency for destruction.
Meanwhile, Crazy Horse are absolutely cooking behind him, even though they lost power in the studio halfway through, "We didn’t know and just kept playing and playing," Billy Talbot later revealed. "We lost a verse, but Neil said it was a good verse to lose."
1. 'Hey, Hey, My, My (Out Of The Black)' (Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)
Young begins his 1979 album Rust Never Sleeps with ‘My, My, Hey, Hey (Out Of The Blue)’ an acoustic lament for and celebration of rock’n’roll itself.
‘Rock and roll is here to stay’, he sings, before suggesting that for rock stars, ‘It’s better to burn out than to fade away’. It’s worth suggesting perhaps, that Young was just 32 at this point.
‘The king is gone but he’s not forgotten,’ he goes on, referring to the relatively recent death of Elvis Presley. But the next line looks to crown a new king (‘This is the story of a Johnny Rotten’), again emphasising that though rock’n’roll might be immortal, the main characters are replaceable – whoever they are.
The album ends with an electric performance of the song, given the inverted title of ‘Hey, Hey, My, My (Out Of The Black)’. This time, Young is backed by Crazy Horse and the mood has totally changed.
The riff has transformed into a suitably corrosive and menacing beast, the drums thump relentlessly and Young squawks the lyrics like a man possessed. If one song is capable of summing up the yin and yang of Young – the introverted folkie and the Godfather of Grunge, it’s this one.
All pics Getty Images
Top image Neil Young in a Warner Brothers rented house in Chelsea, West London, 1970
