best neil young biography

Neil Young is one of the most influential songwriters and guitarists of his generation, known for recording such favorites as "Old Man," "Harvest Moon" and "Heart of Gold."

Who Is Neil Young?

Neil Young arrived in the U.S. in the mid-1960s and co-founded the band Buffalo Springfield. He earned fame both as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSN&Y) and as a solo artist, writing and recording such timeless songs as "Old Man," "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)," "Rockin' in the Free World" and "Heart of Gold"—a No. 1 hit. Nicknamed the “Godfather of Grunge” for his undeniable influence on that genre, Young is also a strong advocate for environmental and disability issues, as demonstrated by his co-founding of the Benefit for Farm Aid and the Bridge School Benefit Concerts. More than 50 years into his musical career, he continues to record and tour on a regular basis.

Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Canada. Four years later, his parents, Scott and Edna, who went by the name Rassy, moved to the small rural town of Omemee, where Young and his older brother, Robert, spent their early youth. Despite the idyllic setting, however, Young’s boyhood was a complicated one. Suffering from epilepsy, Type 1 diabetes and polio, by 1951 his health had deteriorated so far that he was unable to walk.

With time, Young was able to overcome his ailments, and with his mother’s encouragement, he began to nurture an interest in music, learning to play both the ukulele and banjo. However, his parents’ marriage, which had been strained for some time, did not recover, and in 1960 they finally divorced. Following the split, Robert stayed with his father in Toronto and Rassy relocated to Winnipeg with the teenage Young, who by this time was far more interested in his musical pursuits than he was in academics. Over the next few years, he would play with several bands before forming the folk-rock group the Squires in 1963. Intent on a career as a musician, he dropped out of high school and started performing at clubs and coffeehouses in the area, first with the Squires and later as a solo act.

Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse

In Los Angeles, Young ran into Stills, and soon thereafter, Young, Stills, Palmer, Richie Furay and Dewey Martin came together to form the band Buffalo Springfield. They released their debut, self-titled album in December 1966, and it managed to crack the charts. The single “For What It’s Worth” even became a Top 10 hit. The band soon attracted a large following and was acclaimed for its experimental and skilled instrumental pieces, inventive songwriting and harmony-focused vocal composition. The music-listening public got its first introduction to Young’s talents on such tracks as “Broken Arrow” and “I Am a Child.” However, by 1968, strain in Buffalo Springfield led to Young striking out once more on his own.

Young signed with Reprise Records in 1969 and released his self-titled debut to mixed reviews, though it hinted at the originality and willingness to experiment that would define his body of work. But Young followed up just a few months later with Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere , on which drummer Ralph Molina, bass player Billy Talbot and guitarist Dan Whitten, collectively known as Crazy Horse, backed him up. With their raw sound serving as the counterpoint to Young’s distinctively melancholy and untrained voice on such standout tracks as “Cinnamon Girl” and “Down by the River,” the album climbed up the charts to No. 34, and eventually went gold.

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

Meanwhile, Young had reconnected with Stills, who had formed a new group with David Crosby of the Byrds and Graham Nash of the Hollies. Young joined the trio, which was renamed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and they began to perform and record, playing the legendary Woodstock Festival in August 1969. The band’s subsequent tour and album release, 1970’s Déjà Vu , catapulted them to fame—so much so that they were at times referred to as the “American Beatles.” However, Young’s relationship with his bandmates quickly became contentious, and he left the group to focus more exclusively on his solo work.

'After the Gold Rush,' 'Harvest'

The move quickly paid off, with his 1970 album After the Gold Rush breaking into the Top 10 and featuring such Neil Young classics as “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “Tell Me Why” and “Southern Man.” (The latter, a condemnation of racism that angered many Southerners, would inspire Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” in which Neil Young is called out specifically.) Young outdid himself the next year with Harvest , a hallmark work that contains the songs “The Needle and the Damage Done,” “Old Man” (inspired by the aging caretaker of the ranch he had recently purchased in the Santa Cruz mountains) and “Heart of Gold,” which is Young’s only No. 1 hit to date.

But just as he reached this early peak, Young was faced with one of the more difficult periods in his life. At the end of 1972, Young and his girlfriend, Academy Award-winning actress Carrie Snodgress, had a son, Zeke, who was born with cerebral palsy, and Snodgress had to set aside her acting career to care for him. A few months later, shortly after being fired by Young before their upcoming tour, Crazy Horse guitarist Dan Whitten died of an drug overdose. These events were compounded by a string of relatively unsuccessful projects, including the 1972 film Journey Through the Past , the live album Time Fades Away and 1974’s On the Beach .

Young and Snodgress split up in 1975, the same year that Young released his album Tonight’s the Night , which had been recorded shortly after Whitten’s death and reflected Young’s frame of mind with its dark character and themes, as well as Zuma , a hard-edged album featuring Crazy Horse’s new lineup, with Frank Sampedro replacing Whitten on guitar.

'Long May You Run' to 'Live Rust'

The second half of the decade would prove to be a more positive one for Young, who teamed up once more with Stephen Stills to record Long May You Run , which reached No. 26 on the charts and went gold. In 1977, he released the more country flavored Stars ’n Bars as well as the triple-LP compilation Decade , which featured a handpicked selection of his work up to that point.

Things got even better the next year, when Comes a Time broke into the Top 10, he married Pegi Morton (who was a waitress at a restaurant near his ranch and would inspire many of Young’s songs in the future, most notably, “Unknown Legend”) and embarked on a tour with Crazy Horse called “Rust Never Sleeps,” during which they showcased songs from an upcoming album. Released in 1979, Rust Never Sleeps echoed the structure of the concerts, alternating between quiet, acoustic tracks and aggressive electric numbers. Among its highlights is one of Neil Young’s best-known tracks, the anthem “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” A double LP recording from the tour, Live Rust , was released later that year, reaching No. 15 on the charts.

'Hawks & Doves' and Label Clashes

Young began the 1980s by indulging his experimental urges, not always to the best results. His first album of the new decade, Hawks & Doves , was more or less a collection of acoustic and country-flavored songs recorded several years earlier, and his sometimes politically right-leaning sentiments alienated some of his audience. He followed with an abrupt about-face in 1981, releasing the hard-edged Re-ac-tor , before mixing it up even more with Trans , incorporating synthesizers and vocoders into his songs and further confusing fans and critics and underwhelming his new label, Geffen.

The year 1983 was a tough one for Young, whose poorly received rockabilly offering Everybody’s Rockin’ was the last straw for his label, who filed a $3 million lawsuit against him for producing what they termed "unrepresentative" music. Meanwhile, his ex-girlfriend Carrie Snodgress was also suing him for child support and he was coping with the disabilities of his and Pegi’s two recently born children, Ben (cerebral palsy) and Amber Jean (epilepsy).

Unwilling to sacrifice his independence and artistic integrity to please his label, he eventually reached a deal with them in which he would take a pay cut for his next few albums. This led to the heavily country Old Ways (1985), featuring guest appearances by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings ; the New Wave–tinged Landing on Water (1986); and the 1987 album Life , all of which were only mildly successful but fulfilled his final obligations to Geffen.

Bridge School and Farm Aid

However, during this period, Young’s priorities had shifted to the care of his children. An avid model-train collector, Young created a 700-foot model train track within a barn on his property as a way to interact with his son Ben and developed special controllers for the train set, allowing him to control switching and power using a paddle system. (The controls later formed the basis for a company called Liontech, formed in 1992. In 1995, when the Lionel company was facing bankruptcy, Young put together an investment group to purchase the train company so he could continue his research and development.)

In 1986, Young’s experience with his children's cerebral palsy and epilepsy led him and Pegi to help found the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California, whose mission is to provide education for children with severe disabilities. The school has since been supported in part by annual benefit concerts that attract hundreds of thousands of music fans and feature a vast array of major artists, including Bruce Springsteen , Beck, Pearl Jam, No Doubt, Paul McCartney and countless others. The shows are organized by Pegi and Neil Young, who typically headlines as a solo act or with Crazy Horse and CSN&Y. No stranger to benefit shows, Young participated in the 1985 Live Aid concert and has worked with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp to organize the Farm Aid concerts since 1986.

Godfather of Grunge

Making his return to Reprise Records in 1988 with blues/R&B-focused This Note’s for You , the album featured a title track of the same name that took aim at commercialism in music. Though initially, MTV refused to play the accompanying video in response to Young’s apparent slight, it eventually won Video of the Year at its annual awards. That same year, Young reunited with Crosby, Stills, and Nash for American Dream , which, although it charted at No. 16, was panned by critics.

However, Young’s next offering, the edgy acoustic and electric album Freedom (1989), was a return to form after a decade of musical wanderings. He also achieved his second-biggest hit with the track “Rockin’ in the Free World,” which climbed to No. 2 on the charts. Perhaps more important, it further endeared him to up-and-coming acts such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Nirvana, several of whom contributed tracks for a tribute album released the same year titled The Bridge , whose proceeds went to the Bridge School. It also underscored Young’s influence on this new crop of musicians, eventually earning him the title the “Godfather of Grunge.”

As the premier elder statesman in this new era, Young continued to record and explore, reuniting once more with Crazy Horse to record Ragged Glory (1990) and releasing the noise-laden live album Weld (1991). The following year, he returned to his folk roots with Harvest Moon . Featuring songs such as “War of Man,” “Unknown Legend” and “Harvest Moon,” it was one of Young’s more accessible albums and was a critical and popular success, reaching No. 16 on the charts and eventually going double platinum.

Once more in the good graces of the music-listening public, Young nevertheless continued to expand into various arenas, composing the Oscar-nominated song “Philadelphia” for the 1994 Jonathan Demme movie of the same name, as well as releasing Sleeps with Angels , Young’s response to the death of Kurt Cobain , who had ended his suicide note with the lyrics “it’s better to burn out than to fade away,” from Young’s “Hey Hey, My My.” The following year he was backed by Pearl Jam on his highest charting album since 1972, Mirror Ball , and was also inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the first time. (He would be inducted again two years later with the other members of Buffalo Springfield.)

Rounding out this happy decade for Young, Crazy Horse backed him up for the 1996 album Broken Arrow and he supplied the sparse, moody soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s western Dead Man , which starred Johnny Depp . Jarmusch in turn made Young the focus of a 1997 documentary, Year of the Horse .

9/11 and Health Scare

Entering the next decade, Young released his 24th studio album, Silver & Gold . In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, he recorded the patriotic “Let’s Roll” and then followed with the albums Are You Passionate? and Greendale , a concept project with an accompanying film about a fictional town in California that allowed Young to explore the environmental themes about which he has remained passionate throughout his life.

However, Young’s steady output was briefly interrupted in 2005 when he suffered a near-fatal aneurysm that required brain surgery. While recovering, he finished work on the reflective, acoustic-based Prairie Wind . A quiet work that addresses issues of mortality in the wake of his illness and the passing of his father, it hearkened back to some of his most popular recordings and reached No. 3 on the charts.

Far from mellowing out, in 2006 Young released the angry protest album Living With War , which was inspired by the war in Iraq and featured such tracks as “Let’s Impeach the President” and “Shock and Awe.” After a series of retrospective live albums in the second half of the 2000s, Young released the first installment of a much-anticipated collection of his work— The Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972 —a nine-disc box set that covers the first decade of his lengthy career.

Autobiography and New Frontiers

The 2010s were much like any other period along Young’s path, filled with reflections on the past, an eye toward the future and a focus on the issues about which he is most passionate. His projects from the decade include 2010’s Le Noise , the folk standards and patriotic album Americana , the 2012 double LP Psychedelic Pill , the environmentally themed Storytone and 2015’s The Monsanto Years , his 35th album.

During this period, Young also published his frank autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace . Despite stating in its intro that he needed to take a break from touring, the longtime musician had already returned to the stage by the time of the book’s release.

Though Young and his wife Pegi divorced in 2014, they continue their work to support the Bridge School, and Young remains heavily involved with Farm Aid, the Global Poverty Project and MusiCares, as well as championing various political and environmental causes.

In August 2018, it was reported that the veteran rocker had secretly married actress Daryl Hannah. In January 2020, he became an American Citizen.

Meanwhile, the veteran rocker continued churning out music with the albums Peace Trail (2016), Hitchhiker (recorded in 1976, released in 2017), The Visitor (2017) and Colorado (2019), the latter backed by Crazy Horse. Young also intended to tour with Crazy Horse in 2020 until the coronavirus pandemic torpedoed those plans, prompting the artist to instead perform a series of "Fireside Session" digital concerts.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Neil Young
• Birth date: November 12, 1945
• Birth City: Toronto
• Birth Country: Canada
• Best Known For: Neil Young is one of the most influential songwriters and guitarists of his generation, known for recording such favorites as "Old Man," "Harvest Moon" and "Heart of Gold."
• Astrological Sign: Scorpio
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• As I get older, I get smaller. I see other parts of the world I didn't see before. Other points of view. I see outside myself more.
• Hey hey, my my, rock 'n' roll will never die.

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Hear Scott Simon's Full Interview With Jimmy McDonough

Jimmy McDonough's authorized biography of Neil Young. hide caption

"Shakey" was a nickname Neil Young's pals gave him after they watched some home movies he had made. "His camera was none too steady," says Jimmy McDonough, who used the nickname as the title of his new biography of the rock and roll icon. "If you know the cat," he tells Scott Simon for Weekend Edition Saturday, "the nickname fits… nothing is too solid about the guy."

Young's enigmatic, mercurial and sometimes-destructive nature is the main theme of this book of more than 800 pages. "Whatever happens around the guy, you can't count on it continuing," McDonough says.

The author was a huge fan from his early youth, when he was exposed to Young via the mid-'70s albums On the Beach, Tonight's the Night, and Zuma. "They inspired me to explore art," he says. "I vowed then that I was going to meet this man."

And so he did, years later when he interviewed Young for The Village Voice. "Something clicked" between them, McDonough says, and Young later asked him to write some liner notes for an upcoming album.

Getting Young to sit down to talk for the biography proved tough, however. Young kept promising, but not delivering. It took McDonough three years to meet with Young, but when he finally did, he got many hours worth of tape.

Young, who was born in Toronto and attended high school in Winnipeg, Canada, loaded up a hearse with musical gear and drove to Los Angeles in 1966. There, he met up with Stephen Stills, whom he had known in Canada, and they founded the seminal California band Buffalo Springfield. Tension among band members, particularly Stills and Young, led to the group's early demise.

Nevertheless, after releasing a couple of solo albums, Young joined up with Stills again to form Crosby Stills, Nash and Young, a group he has been drifting in and out of for more than 30 years, even as he developed his solo career.

Young has always bounced from musical form to musical form, but in his early career he limited his bouncing within the country-rock/rock and roll continuum. In the '80s and early '90s, he confounded many of his fans as he lurched wildly from the strange electronic experimentation of Trans to the greaser rockabilly of Everybody's Rockin' to the feedback-noise of Arc.

He's settled down a bit since. Even so, he continues to turn unexpected corners. His latest album, Are You Passionate? includes the super-patriotic post-Sept. 11 song "Let's Roll." It's a number that makes some listeners question whether this is really the songwriter who wrote the anger-filled "Ohio" about the Kent State massacre some 30 years ago.

In his art as in his life, "There's a consistency to how inconsistent he is," says McDonough. "I've never met a guy with so many contradictory impulses."

Young once said that rock and roll is "where God and the Devil shake hands." McDonough says he's not sure whether he agrees with that statement. But he does know that Young represents "an odd collision of restraint and abandon that makes for a hair-raising biography and some great music."

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Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream Paperback – Illustrated, July 30, 2013

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Neil Young: 70 things you need to know about the Canadian rock icon

One of the greatest rock icons of all time — and a musician who has played by his own rules his entire life.

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He is one of the greatest rock icons of all time, and a musician who has played by his own rules his entire life.

And this week, Neil Young turns 70.

To celebrate the big day, we have gathered 70 fascinating facts about the Canadian legend, from his earliest money-making schemes to his close scrape with death, and from his fascination with model trains to the verse he calls "the lamest [he] ever wrote."

Along the way, we also trace the winding path of his prolific and groundbreaking musical career, from its earliest days to the latest releases.

Neil Young was born in Toronto, Ont., and his middle name is Percival.

Young is most strongly associated with Omemee, Ont., and Winnipeg, Man., where he lived with his mother later in his childhood, but he was actually born at Toronto General Hospital on Nov. 12, 1945. His full name is Neil Percival Young.

When he was 5 years old, he contracted polio and nearly died

Young contracted polio in the summer of 1951, at the age of five, and when he returned home from the hospital he had to re-learn how to walk.

"I remember him trying to get from one part of the living room to another by hanging onto furniture to keep his balance," wrote his brother Bob in a letter excerpted in Neil's biography  Waging Heavy Peace . "He was unsure of what had happened with his battle with polio. 'I didn't die, did I?' he said. It was a serious question."

Canadian music icon Joni Mitchell contracted the disease during the same epidemic.

He had a newspaper delivery route

When he was about 10, Young had a newspaper route. He would get up at six every Sunday morning and drive to the corner of Brock Road and Highway 2 where the papers were dropped. He delivered the Globe and Mail, the newspaper where his father was a columnist.

But his largest source of childhood income was selling eggs

Young's largest source of childhood income was selling eggs from his 50 backyard chickens, which were kept in a henhouse that his neighbour Don Scott helped build. Foxes were a problem, so sometimes he would sleep by the chicken coop in a pup tent to protect them.

Young's first instrument was a plastic ukulele

At the age of 10 or 11, Young began developing a serious interest in music, including rock, country, R&B and doo-wop. He first began to play music on a plastic ukulele.

His first kiss was with a little girl named Marilyn, and he was grateful

His first kiss was on a bridge with a little girl named Marilyn, whom he walked home from school. "What a thrill!" he writes in  Waging Heavy Peace . "Thank you, Miss Marilyn."

When his parents divorced, it had a significant impact on his life

When Young was 12, his father left his mother, and they were later divorced. This was a troubling time for Young, who moved to Winnipeg with his mother. His brother Bob stayed with his father in Toronto.

His first two bands were the Jades and the Squires

His first band was called the Jades, which he formed at Kelvin High School in Winnipeg. His first stable band was the Squires, who had a local hit with the song "The Sultan".

Rick James. Yes, that Rick James

In the mid-1960s, Neil Young was in a band fronted by disco legend Rick James — long before his "Super Freak" fame — in Toronto. They were called the Mynah Byrds. "We did some wild things. It's all very hazy to me now. I'm glad I made it through that stage. It got a little dicey. There were some drugs going on," Young told Howard Stern in an interview. "I remember singing one song for about a day and a half."

When Young wrote 'Sugar Mountain,' a song about the loss of youth, Joni Mitchell responded with the more hopeful 'The Circle Game'

After he left the Squires, Young began working folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he met Joni Mitchell.

Around that time he wrote his hit "Sugar Mountain", about the loss of youth. Mitchell wrote her song "The Circle Game" in response.

"He had just newly turned 21, and that meant in Winnipeg he was no longer allowed into his favourite hangout which is kind of a teeny-bopper club, and once you're over 21 you couldn't get in there anymore," remembered Mitchell before performing the concert at Albert Hall in London in 1970.

"So he wrote this song that was called 'Oh to live on Sugar Mountain' which was a lament for his lost youth … And I thought, 'God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future.' So I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called 'The Circle Game'."

Speaking of 'Sugar Mountain', it also contains what Young calls 'one of the lamest verses I ever wrote'

On the bootleg album  Live on Sugar Mountain , Young says that one of the verses in the song is "one of the lamest verses I ever wrote." He says he decided to put it in the song "just to give everybody a frame of reference as to, you know, what can happen."

So which verse was it? "Now you're underneath the stairs/ And you're givin' back some glares/ To the people who you met/ And it's your first cigarette."

In 1966, Neil Young moved to California in a hearse and co-founded Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills

In 1966, Young moved to the United States with his friend and bass player Bruce Palmer. They drove to Los Angeles in Young's black hearse, which he named Mortimer.

There, they co-founded Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and Dewey Martin.

To this day, the Stills-penned song "For What It's Worth" — which was actually inspired by a crackdown on young people hanging out on the Sunset Strip — remains one of the most important civil rights anthems of all time.

'Old Man' was written about the caretaker at the Broken Arrow Ranch, which he bought in his 20s

The 1972 song "Old Man" was about the caretaker of the Northern California Broken Arrow Ranch, which Young purchased in 1970. (He paid just $350,000 for 140 acres.)

James Taylor played banjo on the song, and Linda Ronstadt contributed vocals. The caretaker's name was Louis, and in the movie  Heart of Gold , Young tells the story:

"There was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep. 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.' And I wrote this song for him."

Young has a son who has cerebral palsy and is quadriplegic, and he gave Young great strength

Young has three children: Ben and Amber Jean with his ex-wife Pegi, and Zeke from an earlier relationship with actress Carrie Snodgrass. Ben was born with cerebral palsy and is quadriplegic and unable to speak.

Young says that having a son with a severe disability gave him great strength.

"There are so many kids with challenges that are so great, and yet they just keep trying. So if I come up against something that's hard to deal with, I can handle it," he says in  an interview . "And it's because of him."

Both Young and his daughter have epilepsy

Both Neil Young and his daughter Amber Jean have epilepsy. Young said, "Epilepsy taught me that we're not in control of ourselves."

In 1986, Young co-created The Bridge School, and has hosted a star-studded annual benefit ever since

In 1986, Young and his then-wife Pegi founded The Bridge School in San Francisco, a centre that ensures that children with severe speech and physical impairments can fully participate in their communities.

Every year since, with the exception of 1987, Young has hosted a concert to benefit the school, and dozens of top musicians have performed, among them Pearl Jam, Florence and the Machine, St. Vincent, Elvis Costello, No Doubt, Metallica, Tom Waits, the Kronos Quartet, Josh Groban, Arcade Fire, Foo Fighters, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Lou Reed and more.

The rock icon is a diehard toy train collector

Young is an avid toy train collector, and created an elaborate set with his kids that included hundreds of feet of track, redwood stumps for mountains, moss for grassy fields, and trains that made accurate train sounds.

The set was a bonding experience for Young and his disabled son Ben, who could control the trains, lights and sounds by moving his head.

When the model train company filed for bankruptcy, Young created an investment group and purchased it so it could keep chugging along.

"It's good for everybody," he says of his remarkable creation. "The fact that it's good for Ben and good for disabled kids only makes it better for everyone else."

When Neil Young plays guitar, he sometimes feels icy cold inside

Sometimes when Neil Young plays his guitar, he feels cold and icy inside. "It's very refreshing. Every breath is like you're at the North Pole. Your head starts to freeze. Your inhalations are big — more air than you ever thought there is starts pouring in. There's something magical about it," he said in an interview. "Sometimes when it happens, you wonder if you're gonna be okay. Can you handle it?"

In the early '90s, he was declared 'The Godfather of Grunge' — and the admiration was mutual

In the '90s, as bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden made waves around the world, Neil Young was dubbed "The Godfather of Grunge" for his gritty sound. But the admiration clearly went both ways. In his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame speech in 1995, he specifically named Kurt Cobain. "I'd like to thank Kurt Cobain for giving me inspiration to renew my commitments," he said.

In 1994, Young was nominated for an Oscar

In 1994, Young was nominated for an Academy Award for his song "Philadelphia" from the film of the same name. Bruce Springsteen won the award for "Streets of Philadelphia" from the same film, and it was presented by Whitney Houston. In his acceptance speech, Springsteen said, "Neil, I gotta share this with you."

Young co-founded Farm Aid, and in 1985, put on a groundbreaking fundraiser concert

Young was one of the founders of Farm Aid, a benefit concert held Sept. 22, 1985, in Champaign, Ill., to benefit family farmers in the United States. Other organizers included Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. Among the performers were Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Lou Reed, Billy Joel, B.B. King, Roy Orbison and many more. They raised over $9 million.

Today,  Farm Aid  continues to host huge annual concerts and support family farmers, and Nelson, Mellencamp, Young and Dave Matthews are all on the board of directors.

To date they have raised over $48 million.

Young grew up going to church, but  found peace in paganism

Despite a religious upbringing, Young finds religion in nature — not the church. 

"When I was six, I really didn't know what God was. But I did know about Sunday school. I was reading a lot about God, but I was bored. I couldn't wait to get out of Sunday school. God was secondary to the whole thing," he said in an interview.

"But as time went by, I got more and more angry, to the point where I didn't like religion. Hate is a strong word. But I just kept getting angrier and angrier ... until finally I wasn't angry anymore. I was just peaceful, because I thought: This is not fruitful for me. I rejected the whole thing and found peace in paganism.

"Jesus didn't go to church. I went way back before Jesus. Back to the forest, to the wheat fields, to the river, to the ocean. I go where the wind is. That's my church."

Young nearly died from a brain aneurysm

In 2005, Young experienced a brain aneurysm that almost took his life.  According to his publicist , after performing with The Pretenders at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York, Young experienced "visual field disturbances" and was taken to hospital, where an MRI revealed the aneurysm.

But rather than go under the knife right away, Young returned to Nashville to record for a week before the surgery, which was deemed "a complete success."

The surgery also forced Young to cancel a scheduled appearance at that year's Juno Awards. "I grew up [in Winnipeg] and was really looking forward to the show as well as spending some time with my old friends and family," Young said in a statement. "Thanks to my doctors, I'm feeling a lot better now so I hope I can get a rain check."

Then he nearly died again from a rare complication

Later, however, Young nearly died from a rare complication from the surgery. "They go into your brain through an artery in your thigh. Later, when I was out of the hospital, my leg exploded. I was out on the street and it just popped," Young recounted in an interview. "My shoe was full of blood. I was in some serious trouble. I was about 50 yards from the hotel and I just made it."

He loves vintage cars — and his first love was a 1953 Buick Skylark

In  Waging Heavy Peace , Young talks about the 1953 Buick Skylark that he had loved since childhood.

"It was brand-new and made a large impression on me," he writes, "with its beautifully designed grille, tail-lights and an overall shape that featured a kind of bump or ripple in the lines at about the midpoint, accentuated by a chrome strip that mirrored it."

His collection of cars — which expanded to at least 35 — has included a baby-blue '49 Cadillac convertible, a '53 Pontiac hearse and a '34 Mulliner-bodied Bentley coupe.

But his pride and joy is the revolutionary LincVolt

Young's pride and joy is the  LincVolt , an old Lincoln Continental adapted to run on electricity and ethanol — and represents an 86 per cent reduction in emissions.

"Our goal is to inspire a generation by creating a clean automobile propulsion technology that serves the needs of the 21st Century and delivers performance that is a reflection of the driver's spirit," reads the  website  for the company, which Young co-founded.

"By creating this new power technology we hope to reduce the demand for petro-fuels enough to eliminate the need for war over energy supplies, thereby enhancing the security of nations throughout the world."

So far, Young has driven the car over 40,000 miles across the U.S. and Canada.

Rolling Stone put Young high on their list of best guitarists of all time

In 2011,  Rolling Stone  put Young at number 17 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists.

Phish guitarist Trey Anastasio wrote: "If I was ever going to teach a master class to young guitarists, the first thing I would play them is the first minute of Neil Young's original 'Down by the River' solo. It's one note, but it's so melodic, and it just snarls with attitude and anger. It's like he desperately wants to connect. Neil's playing is like an open tube from his heart right to the audience."

David Foster said Young's singing on 'Tears Are Not Enough' was 'flat'

Young was a member of Northern Lights — a gathering of great Canadian musicians that included Bryan Adams, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, Burton Cummings, Anne Murray, Paul Shaffer and dozens more who recorded the 1985 charity single "Tears Are Not Enough". (It was the northern answer to the star-studded hit "We Are the World".)

Producer David Foster had Young re-record his line, saying his delivery was "a little flat," to which Young famously quipped, "That's my sound, man."

Young suffers from tinnitus

Young blames his tinnitus — a condition that causes painful ringing in the ears — on mixing too loudly with low-quality digital sound.

He only has one Grammy Award for music

Relative to other icons, Young is slim on Grammys, with just two under his belt. One was for best boxed or special limited edition package; the other, his first for music, didn't come until 2011 for best rock song ("Angry World").

Young has won 11 Juno Awards, including artist of the year in 2011 and best male artist in 2001. In 2000, he was also inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame. He has also been appointed to the Order of Manitoba and the Order of Canada.

But he's been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — twice

Young has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: once as a solo artist in 1995, and then as a member of Buffalo Springfield in 1997.

In his 1995 induction speech, a young Eddie Vedder called Young "a great songwriter, a great performer, a great Canadian."

Young thanked his mom, his band Crazy Horse, his producers, his manager and the people in the music industry who helped him out.

"Things have been good for me for a long time, so if I look kind of sad, it's bullshit," he said. "Forget it. I'm good. It's something about my songs, everybody thinks I'm kind of downbeat."

There is a spider named after him

In 2007, an East Carolina University biologist discovered a new species of trapdoor spider and named it Myrmekiaphila neilyoungi after the singer, his favourite.

He co-created the Pono music player

In 2014, Young officially launched his Pono music player, an iPod-like device with one key difference: high-quality audio. The tiny player has drawn some big–name backers, including Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, David Crosby, James Taylor, Tom Petty, Sting and a slew of others — and a Kickstarter campaign that aimed to raise $800,000 in a month raised $1.5 million in the first 24 hours.

He was no stranger to drug use

Young admits to having used drugs, from pot to cocaine. At one point he was  arrested  along with Eric Clapton on suspicion of using marijuana, and in a film shoot his relationship with cocaine became all too clear.

He was set to play with the Band as part of the legendary Martin Scorsese doc  The Last Waltz , but when he came out onstage and began performing, he had a large chunk of cocaine sticking out of his nose.

"He performed with a good-size rock of cocaine stuck in his nostril," the Band drummer Levon Helm wrote in his memoir,  This Wheel's on Fire . "Neil's manager saw this and said ' no way  is Neil gonna be in a film like this.' They had to go to special-effects people, who developed what they called a 'travelling booger matte' that sanitized Neil's nostril and put 'Helpless' into the movie." 

He also lost one of his bandmates to an overdose, and his death inspired one of Young's best-known songs

Guitarist Danny Whitten, a member of Young's band Crazy Horse, lost his life to heroin on Nov. 18, 1972, and his death affected Young deeply — both because he lost a friend and because he felt partly responsible. The song "Needle and the Damage Done" is also about Whitten.

"[We] were rehearsing with him and he just couldn't cut it. He couldn't remember anything. He was too out of it. Too far gone. I had to tell him to go back to L.A. 'It's not happening, man. You're not together enough,'" remembered Young in a 1975  interview  with Rolling Stone.

"He just said, 'I've got nowhere else to go, man. How am I gonna tell my friends?' And he split. That night the coroner called me from L.A. and told me he'd ODed. That blew my mind. F--king blew my mind. I loved Danny. I felt responsible. And from there, I had to go right out on this huge tour of huge arenas. I was very nervous and insecure."

In recent years, Young has ditched the drugs and booze, and has gotten to know himself

"The straighter I am, the more alert I am, the less I know myself and the harder it is to recognize myself. I need a little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere," he writes in  Waging Heavy Peace .

"I did it for 40 years," he elaborated in an interview with  the New York Times . "Now I want to see what it's like to not do it. It's just a different perspective."

He's been on the cover of Rolling Stone more times than any other Canadian musician

Young has been on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine more times than any Canadian musician, a total of seven times — twice with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and five times as a solo artist.  Along with dozens of top musicians, he also appeared on the cover of a special anniversary edition of the magazine.

When his bus caught fire and burned out, he gave it a proper burial

When his beloved customized tour bus, Pocahontas — which he called "the most outrageous bus in history" — caught fire and burned out, he had its remains taken to his ranch and buried in a eucalyptus grove.

Young has pulled his music from all streaming websites

In 2015, Young pulled all of his music from streaming websites — not because of the poor paycheques, but of the poor audio quality.

"I don't need my music to be devalued by the worst quality in the history of broadcasting or any other form of distribution," the Canadian rocker said in a post on his Facebook page. "I don't feel right allowing this to be sold to my fans. It's bad for my music."

The internet has changed the way Young tests new songs — and not for the better

"Any experiment I try onstage is thrown up on YouTube, where people who think they know what I should be doing start shooting holes in it before it's even finished," he writes.

"This is the single most daunting challenge the internet has provided, along with all the good things. The stage used to be my lab, where I could experiment in front of a live audience and see how it reacted and – more important – how I felt while I was doing it … now I try to work things out in private while I develop ideas. That way I have a chance to present the first time to a large audience. Unfortunately, that is not as adventuresome for me."

Young has only had one number one single

Despite his rock icon status, Neil Young has only ever had one number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S. and Canada, and it was 1971's "Heart of Gold". He's never had a number one song in the U.K. 

According to Billboard, his top-selling album was  Live at Massey Hall 1971 , which was released in February 2013.

The Lynyrd Skynyrd hit 'Sweet Home Alabama' is a response to Young's song 'Southern Man'

The Lynyrd Skynyrd hit "Sweet Home Alabama" scolds Young for his song, "Southern Man", which criticizes racism in the southern U.S.: "Well I heard mister Young sing about her. Well, I heard ol' Neil put her down/ Well, I hope Neil Young will remember/ Southern man don't need him around anyhow."

Interestingly, Young has said he likes the song, and has covered it himself. Of his own song,  he wrote : "My own song 'Alabama' richly deserved the shot Lynyrd Skynyrd gave me with their great record. I don't like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue."

Young's former label, Geffen, once sued him for not sounding enough like Neil Young

In 1984, his longtime label, Geffen Records, sued Young for $3 million — in effect for not sounding enough like himself. Young counter-sued for $21 million. Eventually, both suits were dropped. ''The truth is I fought with him because I wanted him to do better work,''  Geffen said afterward . ''I was taking too much of a fatherly role in his life.''

Young has a luxurious Hawaiian oceanfront estate — and it can be yours for just $24.5 million

The tropical paradise features a whopping 830 feet of ocean frontage, a 1920s mansion and two guest cottages boasting nine bedrooms and eight baths, as well as two greenhouses, a terraced vegetable garden, a pool house and more.

Located on the Big Island, the three-acre estate also features lush fruit trees, including coconut, papaya, mango, pomelo and more.

His song 'Let's Roll' was a tribute to 9/11 heroes

Young's patriotic anthem "Let's Roll" was inspired by the heroism shown during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Specifically, it's about the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 who overpowered a group of al-Qaeda hijackers. The plane landed in a field in Pennsylvania, killing all on board, but the passengers likely averted a much larger disaster, as investigators suspect the attackers were heading the plane toward Washington, D.C.

In addition to being a legendary musician, Young is a film director

Unbeknownst to many music fans, Young has a side career as a film director, writer and, more recently, documentary producer. He directed or co-directed several films including  Journey Through the Past  (1973),  Rust Never Sleeps  (1979),  Human Highway  (1982),  Greendale  (2003) and  CSNY/Déjà Vu  (2008) under the name Bernard Shakey.

CSNY played the notorious 1969 free concert at Altamont, and Young was terrified

The Rolling Stones are most closely associated with the notorious 1969 free concert at Altamont Speedway, where there were multiple deaths and scores of injuries, but Young was also there with CSNY — and was very nervous as they drove through the audience, heading for the stage.

"The pickup crawled through the crowd. The yelling continued. I was trying to disappear into the glove compartment of the truck's dashboard," he  wrote in  Waging Heavy Peace . "It was surreal, and Fillini should have been there to film it."

You'll never see his songs in product ads

Young has never allowed his music to be used for commercial endorsements, and he even wrote the song "This Note's For You" to criticize the practice. "Ain't singin' for Pepsi/ ain't singin' for Coke," he sings. "I don't sing for nobody/ makes me look like a joke."

And he really doesn't like it when politicians use his songs

This year, Donald Trump used Young's hit "Rockin' In The Free World" at a campaign rally and the musician was none too pleased.

"I do not trust self-serving misinformation coming from corporations and their media trolls. I do not trust politicians who are taking millions from those corporations either. I trust people. So I make my music for people not for candidates," he said in a statement.

Trump fired back, calling Young "a total hypocrite" and claiming that Young had come to him looking for money for a project.

The song, incidentally, was never meant to be a patriotic anthem; rather, Young intended it as harsh criticism of the George W. Bush administration.

Young knew Charles Manson, and even recommended him to his record label

Young knew Charles Manson before his murder convictions, and says he was such a good songwriter that he even recommended him to his record label, Reprise. 

"I said he's good. He's just a little out of control," remembered Young in an interview (see video below). "But when he got turned down, that would really piss him off. He didn't take rejection well."

Young's song "Revolution Blues" is also about Manson. "I played it for Crosby and he said don't sing about that. That's not funny."

Neil Young will never, ever, ever play with Crosby, Stills and Nash again — really

"Playing with Stills and Nash in that band was really great," he said in an interview. "I wish [Crosby] the best with his life. There's love there. There's just nothing else there. [A reunion] will never happen. Never happen, no, not in a million years."

Bono once gave Young advice on how to make his music more commercially viable

"I sung all the songs in  Greendale, " Young said. "And Bono commented that the songs needed hooks that went over and over again and more people could hear them."

Needless to say, Young did not heed the U2 frontman's advice.

He split from his wife of 36 years and is now romantically linked with Splash star Daryl Hannah

In 2014, Young split with Pegi, his wife of 36 years. He has since been romantically linked with  Splash  star and environmental activist Daryl Hannah.

Former bandmate David Crosby slammed Young online, and called Hannah a "purely poisonous predator."

Crosby later apologized. "I was completely out of line. I have screwed up massively," he said. "I'm screwed up way worse than that girl. Where do I get off criticizing her? She's making Neil happy. I love Neil and I want him happy."

Neil Young is a golfer

Young is no stranger to the links, and his mother was a local amateur champion in Canada.

Upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1966, Young  reportedly  told record executive Ahmet Ertegun, "I'm a golfer. Can you get me in a country club out here?"

But his golfing interests began much earlier: as a child, Young lived across the street from a golf course and sold balls he found to the golfers there.

He also loves paddleboarding

The rock icon also loves paddleboarding — even though the paparazzi is lurking.

"I'm going out paddleboarding with my girlfriend tomorrow morning," he said in an interview. "It's a beautiful thing … I can't worry about the paparazzi. You can't see them anyway. They are taking pictures from behind trees. You can't think about that."

In 2014, he recorded an entire album live with a full orchestra

Young still takes on new musical challenges. In 2014, he released his album  Storytone , which he recorded live with a 90-piece orchestra with no overdubs.

"Be great or be gone. That's what my producer David Briggs always said. You only have one shot at a time and you can't go fix it. I knew where I wanted to go with the songs, and the orchestra had charts and an arranger and everything," he said in an interview. "We did it live in the room like Sinatra."

Neil Young played Woodstock, but you won't see much footage of his performance 

Shortly after Young joined CSNY, they played Woodstock — and Young was so furious with the cameramen on the stage that he refused to let them film him.

"They didn't have to be right there on the stage," he said in an interview. "They're cameras, hello! Use zoom, dickhead. We were playing music and there's some jerk standing there in black clothes. We're playing music, get out of there."

He is very much against agribusiness and, in particular, the multinational company Monsanto

In 2015, Young released  The Monsanto Years , a concept album that targets agribusiness — and in particular, the multinational agrichemical company Monsanto.

The project was a collaboration with Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and Micah, as well as Promise of the Real. A film documenting the recording process was also released.

The album garnered reviews from raves — including a perfect five stars from the Guardian — to faint praise.

Needless to say, Monsanto was none too pleased. "Many of us at Monsanto have been and are fans of Neil Young. Unfortunately, for some of us, his current album may fail to reflect our strong beliefs in what we do every day to help make agriculture more sustainable," read  a statement  from the company.

"We recognize there is a lot of misinformation about who we are and what we do — and unfortunately several of those myths seem to be captured in these lyrics."

Young is known for having a hot temper, and abruptly ending relationships

Young admits that he can have a quick temper, and that he has broken off many relationships with little warning.

At one point he was on tour with Stephen Stills, and decided to end it. But instead of talking with Stills, he simply left and famously sent Stills  a telegram  that read, "Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil."

His song 'Ohio' was a response to the Kent State massacre

Young has always written politically-fuelled songs, and his song "Ohio" is one of the most famous. He penned it in response to the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970, where four student protesters were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen. Young immediately released the single, even though CSNY's "Teach Your Children Well" was still climbing the charts.

In 2014, Young joined Canadian First Nations in their opposition to oil sands expansion 

"Canada is trading integrity for money," Young said ahead of his four-date Honor the Treaties tour. "That's what's happening under the current leadership in Canada, which is a very poor imitation of the George Bush administration of the United States, and it's lagging behind on the world stage. It's an embarrassment to many Canadians. As a Canadian, I felt like I had a chance to do something by bringing this together."

Young also travelled to First Nations territories to meet with the people who are most affected by oil sands development.

"I met the chief and went into the homes where the First Nations' people were living," Young said. "I also went to the tar sands and drove around the tar sands in my electric car, experiencing this unbelievable smell, this toxicity in my throat, my eyes were burning. And the smell started 25 miles away from the tar sands and got more intense. My son who has cerebral palsy and has lung damage, he was wearing a mask to keep the toxic things in the air out of his lungs."

Young's anti-tar sands stance both won accolades from environmentalists, and cries from some of his longtime fans who weren't of the same opinion.

Recently, Young also teamed up with famed Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki, donating $100,000 to his star-studded Blue Dot Tour , and pushing for environmental rights to be enshrined in law in Canada.

He likes amps that go to 12

Spinal Tap may boast that their amps go to 11, but Young's go to 12.

In  a 1992 interview  with Guitare & Claviers, he talked about his Fender Deluxe Tweed, which he called the "backbone of [his] sound."

And, despite the raw fury of his music, Young says he doesn't harm guitars in the process.

"I've never broken guitars by playing them. In fact, I'm very gentle with them. I don't think I have to break a guitar to get a violent sound."

Young once collaborated with Devo, and it was even weirder than you might think

In one of the more odd rock world match-ups, Young joined forces with Devo in Young's film  Human Highway , a comedy set in a gas station diner next to a nuclear power plant, where the employers and customers are unaware that it's the last day on earth. Young plays Lionel Switch, the garage mechanic, while Dennis Hopper was the cook. He spent $3 million of his own money on the production.

In the 1980s, Young released a rockabilly record — and it was his shortest-ever album for a reason

In 1983, Young released  Everybody's Rockin' , an album of rockabilly songs and covers that he recorded with the Shocking Pinks. It was just 25 minutes long, but it wasn't because Young was lacking material. Rather, his record label was so angry at how uncharacteristic the sound was that they cancelled the record sessions and simply released what they had.

At the time, the album was widely panned, and was a commercial flop, but the song "Wonderin'" and its vintage car-heavy video are oddly unforgettable.

He has had the same manager since the late 1960s

Famed manager Elliot Roberts has steered Young's career since the 1960s.

"Neil likes quirky people around him," said Roberts in the Neil Young biography  Shakey . "I think having quirky people around him lessens — in his mind — his own quirkiness. 'Yes, I am standing on my head, but look at these two other guys nude standing on their head.'"

He's willing to poke fun at himself

Young takes his music very seriously, but he also has a sense of humour. Earlier this year, he joined Jimmy Fallon for a duet with himself.

Young hasn't lived in Canada for 50 years, but he's still Canadian

Despite the fact that he has lived in Northern California since the 1960s, Young has retained his Canadian citizenship.

And he has released an astonishing 40 solo albums

His first was his self-titled album, released on his 23rd birthday in 1968. His most recent was  The Monsanto Years , released almost 50 years later on June 29, 2015.

On Nov. 12, 2015, Neil Young turned 70. Happy birthday, Neil, and long may you run!

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The 100 Greatest Neil Young Songs

“I’d rather keep changing and lose a lot of people along the way,” Neil Young told  Rolling Stone in 1975. “If that’s the price, I’ll pay it. I don’t give a shit if my audience is a hundred or a hundred million.” Over the years, Young has turned that unapologetic sentiment into one of rock’s most durable credos, following his ornery muse wherever it leads him. He’s been a folk-rock superstar and a synth-rock pioneer, a country singer and a rockabilly revivalist, a left-leaning environmental activist and a Reagan supporter, a guy who’s been filling arenas since the Seventies even as he drives his fans nuts with his maverick musical detours. But whether he’s the tender soul singing “Heart of Gold” or the rangy crusader giving us a concept album about his awesome new electric car in 2009, Neil Young is always Neil Young – same creaky voice, same searching lyrics, placing him among the greatest songwriters in rock history.

Young first hit the scene with Buffalo Springfield in 1966, not long before  Rolling Stone first hit newsstands. He’s been a regular in our pages ever since. We’ve covered his music for decades — hundreds and hundreds of songs spread over studio LPs, live albums, bootlegs, and tapes that Young has only recently begun to release on his Archives website. Some of them are beloved folk-rock hits; some sound like the work of a cult artist with little interest in hooks or high fidelity; some are just really fucking loud. We’ve narrowed that down to his 100 greatest songs, and tell the inside stories behind each one. Our list draws from every point in his career, proving, among other things, that Young is part of an elite group of Sixties rockers who’ve kept making great music long after their supposed glory days.

All these years later, Neil Young has neither burned out nor faded away. Instead, he’s built one of rock’s great careers by doing whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.

‘Homegrown’

The title track of a country-rock LP Young recorded in the mid-Seventies but legendarily shelved — finally releasing it in 2020 — this ode to DIY hemp cultivation doubles as an ode to self-made creative work of all sorts. “Homegrown is a good thing,” he sings, Crazy Horse laying down a red-eyed honky-tonk stomp. “Plant that bell and let it ring.” Amen, brother.

‘Walk Like a Giant’

“Me and some of my friends, we were gonna save the world,” Young sings two minutes into this 16-minute jam. But this is no sentimental Sixties lament. Instead, Young and Crazy Horse drown his angst in tumultuous grunge, capped by four glorious minutes of feedback. “The playback just blew our minds,” guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro told Rolling Stone. “We had no idea we’d done something that big.”

‘He Was the King’

“When I was a little kid, I thought Elvis was pretty hot,” Young said. This tribute offers images from throughout the King’s life — Young even throws in a “thankyuhverymuch.” Musically, it’s rollicking acoustic country rock: Young performed the song on Saturday Night Live in 2005, playing a guitar that had once belonged to Hank Williams, who influenced Elvis and Young.

‘When God Made Me’

The first nine songs on Prairie Wind were finished in the days before Young underwent brain surgery . The 10th, “When God Made Me,” came later, after one of his incisions reopened and he again lost consciousness. A series of questions posed to God, the song was so religious that it surprised even Young, who spent weeks searching for the proper conclusion: “Finally,” he said, “the word ‘compassion’ came out of nowhere.”

‘Someday’

“Someday” recalls the way that Sixties Bob Dylan classics like “Desolation Row” radically change focus while still being deeply personal. It was first played live with Crazy Horse in 1987, and recorded a year later with the Bluenotes horn section. Young later said he wasn’t happy with the version on Freedom, but it’s one of the album’s most moving moments, balancing scenes of war, death, and corruption with a final note of fragile hope.

‘Old King’

“This is a song about my dog. His name is Elvis,” Young said, introducing this bouncing folky tune on the Harvest Moon tour in 1992. “Old King” is a double elegy, for a faithful friend and a fallen legend; a dog named Elvis had, in fact, accompanied Young on tour. His loving but light-hearted memorial keeps circling around to the Old King’s absence: As Young told the audience that night, Elvis is “riding on Jimi Hendrix’s bus now.”

‘The Restless Consumer’

Young was never a fan of music videos, but he directed one for every song on Living With War. In the clip for this excoriating post-9/11 rocker, Dick Cheney’s smug face appears when Young sings “Lies!” It’s one of the best protest statements of the George W. Bush years. In a typically contrarian move, he distanced himself from the album’s avid tone, telling Charlie Rose, “I’m not happy about it now.”

‘Computer Age’

One of the early synth-rock experiments Young recorded for what would become Trans, “Computer Age” mixed weirdly pretty vocoder melodies with guitar riffs that were inspired by a Rolling Stones show he had recently attended. Young heralds the new age with irony, searching for someone to share his alienation in the streamlined tomorrow: “You need me like ugly needs a mirror,” he sings.

‘Throw Your Hatred Down’

Like “I’m the Ocean,” this track from the Pearl Jam collaboration Mirror Ball made it into Crazy Horse’s set list two years later. “I don’t think I’m preaching,” Young said of its critical lyrics. “I’m reflecting. Maybe talkin’ to myself.” The last verse takes a sidelong shot at Sixties folkie Phil Ochs’ late-career appearances, “dressed in gold lamé.”

‘Love to Burn’

“Painfully personal,” Young said of “Love to Burn,” a rugged, expansive song about keeping an open heart in a brutal world (“You gotta crawl to be tall,” he sings). The 10-minute centerpiece of Ragged Glory (reprised on the 1991 live album Weld at exactly the same length), it’s one of Crazy Horse’s finer late-period guitar excursions, thanks especially to Young’s wildly coiling solos.

‘Piece of Crap’

“I like to have a great thing that purposely leaves the rough edge in, and goes, ‘Fuck you,’ ” Young said of the mess of a video for “Piece of Crap.” He could’ve been talking about the song itself, a pile-driving parody of junk consumerism that’s totally in step with the post-Nirvana rock of the time. Young and Crazy Horse repeat the title phrase with a relentless glee Kurt Cobain would’ve loved.

‘Eldorado’

The Cadillac Eldorado is one of Young’s favorite cars, and “Eldorado” began as a spectral Crazy Horse highway rocker called “Road of Plenty.” Young reworked it as the title track to the limited-issue Eldorado EP in 1989, and it appeared on Freedom later that year, a violent Mexican travelogue with a South of the Border musical feel — like an update of “Cortez the Killer” for a new era.

‘Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze’

A vicious music-biz satire (probably of former Warner/Reprise execs Joe Smith and Mo Ostin), “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze” sounds as scabrous and off-kilter as any early-Eighties post-punk. “ ‘Surfer Joe’ sped up, slowed down,” Frank “Poncho” Sampedro recalled. “So we would spend time hittin’ everything we could find in there to play the groove through it — banging tambourine, banging pieces of metal together, doing hand claps.”

‘Prisoners of Rock ‘n’ Roll’

An anthem and encore for Crazy Horse’s 1986 tour, “Prisoners of Rock ‘n’ Roll” gleefully puts the band in opposition to “the record-company man.” Not coincidentally, Young penned this one the same year he was sued by David Geffen. The song was released on Life, which had cover art featuring Young behind bars with five lines scratched on the wall — which just happened to be the number of records he had released while on Geffen.

‘Slip Away’

“They’ll shit on this one,” Young said about Broken Arrow, his first album after the death of longtime producer David Briggs. “It’s purposely vulnerable and unfinished.” Even as he was being hailed as the Godfather of Grunge, Young made an album too grungy and low-fi for the times. On “Slip Away,” he seems to be singing from across the room, but the distorted guitars create a mist of harmonics and overtones, and his solos are unhurried and probing.

‘Out of Control’

After a long series of tours with Crazy Horse, Young decided to slow things down in 1999 for some solo dates in American theaters. He played this nostalgic tale of lost love on the piano almost every night, and it was slated for Silver & Gold. But when he agreed to record a reunion album with CSNY, “Out of Control” became a highlight of the otherwise dreary Looking Forward.

‘Roger and Out’

“Trippin’ down the old hippie highway,” Young sings on this slow, gentle rocker from his 2006 protest album, Living With War. “Me and my generation, we understand what that line means,” he said at the time. “Did hippies have an influence? Of course.” The lyrics lament an old friend who “died for your country,” elegantly linking the legacy of Vietnam to the era of Iraq and Afghanistan.

‘When You Dance I Can Really Love’

The lyrics of this hippie dance jam are so simple they suggest a sly parody of boogying escapism. Danny Whitten makes an appearance in what Young later said was their last recording together. Young claimed the lyrical images of a dancing girl were inspired by Jean Ray of the folk group Jim and Jean. “[She] moved real nice,” he said.

‘Crime in the City’

When Young debuted “Crime in the City” on tour in 1988, it had a different title (“Sixty to Zero”), 11 verses, and lasted close to 20 minutes. By the time he recorded it, he’d changed the title and pared it in half. A fatigued companion piece to “Rockin’ in the Free World,” it surveys Eighties moral rot, from a cynical record producer to a cop turned vigilante, who says, “There’s still crime in the city, but it’s good to be free.”

‘Bandit’

Young’s fans weren’t entirely happy with his Georg W. Bush–era rock opera Greendale . “I’ve heard people saying, ‘This is worse than Trans ,’ ” he quipped. In the middle of the record, Young planted a lone acoustic song, which he sang almost in a whisper, about baseball, poverty, gambling, and spirituality. He even quotes some lyrics from “Like a Rolling Stone,” adding with a hazy wink, “Bob Dylan said that, somethin’ like that.”

‘It’s a Dream’

In the spring of 2005, doctors discovered that Young had a cerebral aneurysm and decided to operate in New York only weeks later. With an astonishing sense of urgency, the 59-year-old songwriter and his wife, Pegi, traveled to Nashville, where he wrote and recorded almost all of the rustic Prairie Wind with musicians he’d known for years. In its best song, a tender, orchestrated waltz, the verses are like snapshots where the past and present merge. Fans speculate that “It’s a Dream” might be about Young’s father, Scott, who died of Alzheimer’s in June 2005. Either way, it’s both reassuring and terrifying when Young describes a dream as “just a memory without anywhere to stay.”

‘Ordinary People’

A sprawling, optimistic track, the 18-minute “Ordinary People” was recorded for Young’s 1988 album This Note’s for You, and played on tour with a five-piece horn section. But he didn’t release it until 19 years later. Why the delay? “People may have been distracted 20 years ago with the fact that I was doing a song with horns,” he said, adding, “It was such a powerful record that it overtook everything that I put it with.”

‘Silver & Gold’

One of young’s most heavily workshopped love songs, “Silver & Gold” dates back to at least 1984, when he started playing it live and tried recording it for his country album Old Ways. But he could never quite capture the homey feel he wanted; in 1992, he told a Cleveland crowd he would “probably never put it out.” Finally, in 2000, he nailed it, with a light, tender vocal delivery and a spry acoustic performance.

‘Hitchhiker’

The hallucinatory “Hitchhiker” is a furiously strummed, Daniel Lanois–produced ode to memory that dates back to the mid-Seventies. Young recalls smoking hash through a pen and compares himself to an ancient Peruvian. It ends with lines he penned decades after the rest of the song was written: “Thankful for my children/And my faithful wife.” Said Young, “The song never could have been done without those.”

‘Drive Back’

“Every good thing comes to an end,” Young sings on “Drive Back.” It’s one of Zuma’ s most brawling songs, epitomizing the druggy beach-house garage-rock spirit of Crazy Horse at the time. “ ‘Drive Back’ is just the [Fender] Deluxe all the way up,” Young said. Frank “Poncho” Sampedro described his enthusiasm like this: “I’d go in the bathroom, do a bunch of smack between takes, and go, ‘Hey, I’m playin’ with Neil Young — holy shit!’ “

‘Tell Me Why’

The glistening folk opener of After the Gold Rush was first introduced during the CSNY shows of 1970, and you can hear their influence in the song’s gorgeously ringing vocal harmonies. Young later said he stopped playing it live because he wasn’t sure if its famous lines “Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/When you’re old enough to repay/But young enough to sell” meant anything.

‘L.A.’

“As a document of what was happening to me, I think it was a great record,” Young said of the live LP Time Fades Away. “L.A.,” a tense, bitter rocker, is a sarcastic tribute to “the uptight city in the smog” that made him a star. It’s an especially vicious example of Young using the Time Fades Away tour to distance himself from his sensitive-singer-songwriter persona. He performed it 22 times on that tour, and a shocking one-off at the L.A. Forum with Promise of the Real in 2015 remains the only time he’s done it since.

‘Last Trip to Tulsa’

Young capped off his debut album with a surreal nine-minute voice-and-guitar spirit quest. “You get a feeling from something that doesn’t make sense,” explained Young, “Like ‘Last Trip to Tulsa.’ ” Indeed, even if lyrics about working on palm trees for 87 years and “Indians in the corner” are pretty much impossible to make sense of, the winding melody and cyclical chord progression still exert a mysterious pull.

‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’

Originally recorded by Young solo in late 1968, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” was totally reinvented months later, when he redid it backed by Crazy Horse. The first take was downright civil, with AM-radio keyboards and taut rhythm guitar. The newer version was incisive guitar rock. It’s the sound of an artist transformed.

‘See the Sky About to Rain’

Young began playing the soft, meditative “See the Sky About to Rain” at concerts in 1970 and considered putting it on both Harvest and Time Fades Away . But the first recording was by the Byrds, on their 1973 reunion album. Young finally got around to cutting it a year later, playing a warbly Wurlitzer piano himself and delivering the vocals with a tone that suggests tears.

‘Flying on the Ground Is Wrong’

One of the Buffalo Springfield’s prettiest songs, this was written around the time Young got his own L.A. apartment, with a fridge full of Cokes and Twinkies, as he notes in his memoir. “It’s about what happens when you start getting high,” he says on 1970’s Live at the Cellar Door. “And you find out that people you thought you knew, you don’t anymore — because they don’t get high, and you do.”

‘Will to Love’

Young said this “might be one of the best records I ever made.” He recorded it on a cassette player in a drugged-out haze in front of his fireplace, which can be heard snapping and crackling as he sings about being a salmon swimming upstream. He later added vibes, drums, and underwater effects, and pitched it to CSNY, who passed. “I realized there was no way I could sing the song again or perform it,” he wrote, “and I never have since.”

‘Over and Over’

“Over and Over” is a convulsive Crazy Horse guitar excursion that’s also a sweetly heartbroken Young reverie. Over distorted chords that repeat for eight minutes, Young sings about an evening spent reminiscing over “nights of love and that moment on the beach” and plays emotive, flaring solos. Yet despite its length — and because of its kinship with early-Nineties grunge — the song was a mild hit, reaching Number 33 on the mainstream-rock chart.

‘Journey Through the Past’

On the Time Fades Away tour, Young introduced this lovely piano ballad as “a song without a home.” Written in 1971 during the creative surge that produced much of Harvest , it’s a lonely guy’s dream of leaving L.A. for the comforts of Canada. Though the song didn’t appear on a studio album (or the 1972 soundtrack that shares its name), it’s the rare Time Fades Away song that still shows up in Young’s live set.

‘World on a String’

Almost 20 years after Frank Sinatra bragged about having the world on a string, Neil Young cut it free. “World on a string/Doesn’t mean a thing,” he sang on a dirge that sounds ragged and spontaneous, even on Tonight’s the Night. For the whole of the song’s two minutes, his voice quivers just outside the right pitch. “I like that one, but the singing is really out,” Young later said. He gave it another shot for his 1993 Unplugged set, but fittingly let it fall apart at the end.

‘The Old Laughing Lady’

Written in the mid-Sixties at a coffee shop in Detroit — “on napkins,” Young said — “The Old Laughing Lady” is sad, pretty, orchestral pop in which the title character seems to stand in for either death or booze. Jack Nitzsche’s layered production artfully made Young’s lyrics sound, in the producer’s words, “a million miles away but right there.” The results are California psychedelia with the sun sucked out.

‘A Man Needs a Maid’

“It’s overblown, but it’s great,” Young said of this song. Featuring a dramatic Jack Nitzsche arrangement, “Maid” transcends its air of dated chauvinism to reveal a deeper core. Written for Young’s girlfriend Carrie Snodgress (who inspired the line “I fell in love with an actress”), it hangs on the fragile line “When will I see you again?” and remains a moving union of grandeur and vulnerability.

‘Razor Love’

When Young played Saturday Night Live in May 2000 to promote his gentle new album, Silver & Gold , the first song he chose was “Razor Love,” a relaxed-fit country-soul ballad that he and his all-star band performed while seated, and SNL respectfully let him play the song in its six-minute entirety. Despite the violent title, “Razor Love” — which Young first performed on a 1984 tour — is one of his sweetest, simplest domestic ballads.

‘Opera Star’

Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina called Young’s 1981 album Re-ac-tor “a turkey, a one-legged turkey.” With its stark red-and-black cover and grinding, malformed songs, it struck fans as the punk-like rawness of Rust Never Sleeps gone horribly awry. Yet the album does have its enjoyably cranky moments, including its opening track, “Opera Star,” a nagging, perverse riff-crusher in which Young sings about a rock & roll fan whose girlfriend leaves him to go to the opera with “some highbrow.” In 2013, when Young and Crazy Horse started including it in their live sets (often coupled with “Prisoners of Rock ’n’ Roll,” another hard-driving Eighties orphan), it was a welcome surprise that didn’t seem all that out of place among his beloved guitar classics.

‘Borrowed Tune’

One of the many bummed-out ballads on Tonight’s the Night. Young wrote this in a Wisconsin hotel room during the ill-fated 1973 Time Fades Away tour. He recorded it solo, just piano and harmonica, copping his melody from the Rolling Stones’ 1966 “Lady Jane.” “I’m singing this borrowed tune/I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room/Too wasted to write my own.”

‘Pushed It Over the End’

On May 16, 1974, Young played a surprise set at New York’s Bottom Line featuring many unreleased songs. The legendary show opened up with a dreamy song he introduced as “Citizen Kane Jr. Blues,” and later retitled “Pushed It Over the End” when it resurfaced that summer on CSNY’s stadium reunion tour. Supposedly inspired by Patty Hearst, it would have been a highlight for most songwriters — Young hasn’t played it since.

‘Harvest’

Harvest is Young’s biggest album, but its title track remains a lesser-known gem in his catalog. That might be because the lyrics are oblique even by his standards: “Dream up, dream up/Let me fill your cup with the promise of a man.” But the music is the essence of easygoing stoner country, led by the straightforward piano of John Harris. As Young once put it, “’Harvest’ is one of my best songs. That’s the best thing on Harvest .”

‘Thrasher’

A high point of the acoustic side of Rust Never Sleeps — just Young and his guitar, brooding over his compulsive need to keep hitting the road. Still only 32, he worries about turning into a dinosaur and has a few harsh words for Crosby, Stills, and Nash (“They were just dead weight to me”). Young knows the thrasher is coming for him someday, but he faces mortality with no sentimentality, just a shrug.

‘Look Out for My Love’

This paranoid, menacing acoustic stomp is a Crazy Horse recording like no other. They cut it at Young’s ranch in 1976, at the tail end of a massive drug binge. “It was a marathon,” Frank “Poncho” Sampedro recalled. “Girls were there, makin’ us Mexican coffees, choppin’ lines.” They blew through this take at 6 a.m. As producer David Briggs said, “We knew we had nailed it. It had the spook.”

‘Roll Another Number (For the Road)’

Woodstock was a mere four years in the past when Young debuted “Roll Another Number” while on tour in 1973, but there was already plenty of longing for that bygone era. “I’m a million miles away from that helicopter day,” he sang. The song became a defiant statement, closing out many gigs, perhaps as a kiss-off to fans who came expecting a night of hits.

‘Campaigner’

“Even Richard Nixon has got soul,” Young sang in “Campaigner.” He wrote this acoustic ballad while on tour, after watching a TV news bulletin about Nixon’s wife, Pat, being hospitalized, and debuted it onstage hours later. “Guess I felt sorry for [Nixon] that night,” he said. In the Decade liner notes, Young had a droll explanation for his surprising pardon: “Sort of a modern-day Cortez, you know.”

‘Stringman’

“There is no dearer friend of mine/That I know in this life,” Young sings on this moving piano ballad, originally written during 1976 sessions with the Stills-Young Band. Some have speculated that it’s about his at-times-tenuous friendship with Stephen Stills, but Young has said it’s about producer Jack Nitzsche, then struggling with drugs and personal issues. A live version with ghostly backing vocals and faint electric guitar was widely bootlegged. But it didn’t get officially released until Young performed it on Unplugged in 1993, showing new listeners an example of his songwriting at its most somberly powerful, while offering a gift to die-hard fans.

‘Comes a Time’

The homespun folk album Comes a Time arrived after a run of anguished rock records like Tonight’s the Night and Zuma, offering fans some of Young’s most amiable music in years. “It’s the first record I’ve released,” said Young, “where I’m actually facing the audience on the jacket and smiling.” Originally recorded solo-acoustic before being recut with a full band, the album’s title track features Rufus Thibodeaux’s lilting fiddle and Nicolette Larson’s warm backing vocal, which add porch-y ambience to Young’s wistful melody. When he sings “This old world/Keeps spinning round,” it’s resignation with a touch of contentment.

‘Be the Rain’

In 2003, at the height of America’s mood of blinkered Iraq War–era jingoism, Young released Greendale, a politically charged concept album he also spun into a graphic novel and film. It told the story of a fictional American town and a family struggling there. “I don’t think Americans felt holier-than-thou in the 20th century,” Young told Rolling Stone during the 2003 tour with Crazy Horse to support the album. “Something else is going on now. That’s what Greendale is about.” Greendale ’s finale and highlight is a latter-day combination of a socially aware CSNY homily and a wailing Crazy Horse guitar jam. Leading a chorus in a call-and-response while hollering through what sounds like a megaphone, Young declares the need to “save Mother Earth” against Big Oil and corporate farms that are dumping toxic waste into rivers. “Don’t care what the governments say/They’re all bought and paid for anyway,” he shouts. “The energy [in “Be the Rain”], that’s youth rising out of this,” Young said, adding, “This period is the biggest breeding ground for revolution in this country since the mid-Sixties.”

‘Sample and Hold’

The experimentation of “Sample and Hold” is precisely the sort of gesture that inspired David Geffen to sue Young for releasing “unrepresentative” music. The Kraftwerk-inspired, synth-heavy tune, on which he sang through a vocoder, was unlike anything he had recorded up until that point. But he wasn’t just being an anti-corporate contrarian: Trans was inspired by his young son Ben, who has cerebral palsy and can’t communicate with language; Young wanted people to feel what it’s like to hear words without understanding them. “Sample and Hold” was partially inspired by a new digital system for controlling toy trains, a hobby Young would later share with his son.

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The Best Neil Young Albums of All Time

Neil Young is a true music legend; he's known as one of the best folk singers , one of the best singer /songwriters, and one of the greatest rock stars of all time. While he wrote and sang classic songs as a member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Buffalo Springfield , his most enduring work came as a solo artist. Having released over 40 studio albums, many with his backing band Crazy Horse, Neil Young is as prolific as he is important. But what are the best Neil Young albums?

Is the best Neil Young album also one of the most commercially successful? Harvest was the best selling album in 1972. One of Young’s best known songs, the political anthem “Keep On Rockin’ in the Free World,” was a single off of 1989’s Freedom . The country-tinged sounds and beautiful lyrics of After The Gold Rush cemented Young as a living songwriting legend. With so many classics in the Neil Young discography, it might be hard to decide which is the greatest Neil Young album.

This list of the top Neil Young albums contains shining examples from every era of Young’s decades long career. Vote up for your favorite Neil Young releases and vote down on whatever’s on the list that you think is overrated.

After the Gold Rush

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

On the Beach

Tonight's the Night

Comes a Time

Ragged Glory

Harvest Moon

Sleeps With Angels

American Stars 'n Bars

Prairie Wind

Psychedelic Pill

Broken Arrow

Long May You Run

Silver & Gold

Mirror Ball

Chrome Dreams II

Living With War

This Note's for You

• Classic Rock

Neil Young – every album ranked!

As a new live album is released and a 50th anniversary edition of After the Gold Rush approaches, we rate every album by Canada’s irascible godfather of grunge

45. Landing on Water (1986)

If other 1970s greats, including Don Henley, were having 80s hits with modern, synth-heavy records then why shouldn’t Neil Young give it a go? A question to which the obvious answer is: because it might sound like Landing on Water, on which perfectly good songs – not least Hippie Dream’s devastating portrait of David Crosby in his coked-out ruin – were knackered by sterile, unsympathetic production.

44. Everybody’s Rockin’ (1983)

As a monumental middle-finger to a record label that had demanded a “rock” album from Young, the rockabilly and 50s R&B of Everybody’s Rockin’ is pretty impressive. As a listening experience, not so much. The digital production is horrible; the cover of Jimmy Reed’s Bright Lights Big City abysmal.

43. Old Ways (1985)

It has its moments, My Boy and Are There Any More Real Cowboys? among them, but Young’s 80s country record – produced again, it seemed, mainly to annoy his then-label, Geffen – is overproduced, syrupy and cliched to the point of sounding patronising. His subsequent courting of the conservative Nashville market by making reactionary statements in interviews is best overlooked.

42. Are You Passionate? (2002)

This collaboration with Booker T and the MGs, which attracted much attention for the bellicose, post-9/11-themed Let’s Roll, is otherwise forgettable: competent, aimless mid-tempo songs; low on thrills. Relief arrives when Crazy Horse lumber gracelessly into view on Goin’ Home.

41. Peace Trail (2016)

You cannot fault Young’s recent work ethic, or his political commitment, but Peace Trail – his second album of 2016, partly inspired by the environmental protests at Standing Rock reservation – was a mess: sketchy songwriting, half-baked musical ideas including a burst of Auto-Tuned vocals, platitudinous lyrics. Good title track, though.

40. Life (1987)

After hobbling Landing on Water with a cack-handed application of synths and drum machines, Young proceeded to hobble an album with his old muckers Crazy Horse in exactly the same way. It’s infuriating as the songs were often great, as evidenced by Prisoners of Rock and Roll, a virtual manifesto for Crazy Horse’s primitive musical approach: “We don’t wanna be good.”

39. Fork in the Road (2009)

“I’m a big rock star, my sales have tanked / But I still got you – thanks,” offered Young on the title track. He’s nothing if not honest, but his sales might have held up better had his later albums not sounded increasingly dashed-off, with more thought put into their messages – here about pollution and the ongoing financial crisis – than the music.

38. Broken Arrow (1996)

There is a pervasive theory that Young’s music has suffered since the death of his long-term producer, David Briggs, the one man who seemed capable of reining him in and calling out his less inspired ideas. Certainly the first album he made after Briggs’s death felt sprawling and directionless: long Crazy Horse jams alongside bootleg-quality live tracks.

37. Paradox (2018)

Darryl Hannah’s incoherent film about Young and his latest young collaborators, Promise of the Real, is an endurance test to rival 1972’s similarly aimless documentary Journey Through the Past, but the soundtrack – a patchwork of instrumental passages, outtakes and live recordings – is quite immersive and enjoyable as it drifts along, although clearly only diehard Young nuts need apply.

36. Colorado (2019)

The latest in a succession of middling albums with Crazy Horse, Colorado features some incendiary performances in the band’s patent ham-fisted style – there’s a moment midway through She Showed Me Love where drummer Ralph Molina appears to stop playing by mistake – but it also features some painfully on-the-nose political lyrics, and not much in the way of decent tunes.

35. Storytone (2014)

Indecision plagued Storytone, which Young released in three versions: one orchestrated, one stripped back, one with a bit of both. Perhaps he realised that the album’s initial Neil Young-as-crooner concept didn’t quite work, veering as it did between charming (the big band-fuelled I Want to Drive My Car) and schlocky (Tumbleweed).

34. Prairie Wind (2005)

The least appealing of Young’s albums in the Harvest vein, Prairie Wind is still one of Young’s stronger latter-day albums. The autumnal, reflective mood of He Was the King and This Old Guitar were presumably influenced by the death of his father and Young’s own brush with mortality after a brain aneurysm.

33. Silver & Gold (2000)

Another album in the country-rock vein of Harvest. The highlights are high – the brooding closer Without Rings is particularly fine – but there is a lot of filler, and the rose-tinted nostalgia of Young’s paean to his former band, Buffalo Springfield Again, is particularly runny.

32. Greendale (2003)

Hailed by some as a return to form – which simply meant an improvement on its lacklustre predecessor, Are You Passionate? – Greendale was Young’s rock opera, a grandiose title that seemed antithetical to its rough, bluesy sound. The songwriting is too uneven to sustain interest: Be the Rain and Bandit are great; Grandpa’s Interview interminable.

31. Arc (1991)

It was Sonic Youth ’s Thurston Moore who suggested Young release a live album entirely comprised of the feedback-laden intros and outros of his live performances. Mixed in the studio into one 35-minute track, it is not quite as confrontational a statement as Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, but it’s worth hearing at least once.

30. The Monsanto Years (2015)

Young’s latest backing band, Promise of the Real, sound fiery here, and Young himself is audibly livid, but The Monsanto Years was another album that felt rushed to the point that actual writing had been overlooked. The lyrics – raining fire on GMOs – frequently feel more like ranting blogposts set to music than songs.

29. Trans (1982)

Inspired by his quadriplegic son Ben, an electronic Neil Young concept album with vocodered vocals was an incredibly bold move, so much so that Young padded it out with more straightforward material. The end result was a curious mess; the loveliness of Transformer Man was fully revealed only when Young played it acoustically on 1993’s MTV Unplugged.

28. Hawks & Doves (1980)

Distracted by family strife, Young’s follow-up to the classic Rust Never Sleeps was a ragged collection of thrown-together country tunes and sundry offcuts. Hawks & Doves is wildly uneven, its title track flatly awful, but the good bits – the sinister Captain Kennedy, the beautiful Lost in Space, The Old Homestead’s lengthy allegory for his own career – are fantastic.

27. Mirror Ball (1995)

Clearly proud of his “godfather of grunge” tag – Crazy Horse’s combination of looseness and intensity was a key influence on the sound – Mirror Ball saw Young collaborating with Pearl Jam . The results were solid, but never explosive or edgy enough to stop you wishing he’d chosen to work with his former tourmates Sonic Youth, who might have pushed him harder.

26. Chrome Dreams II (2007)

Classic Neil: 30 years after declining to release an album called Chrome Dreams, he puts out a follow-up. Chrome Dreams II hinges on one track, the astonishing 18-minute Ordinary People. Recorded in 1987, it casts most of the album’s newer material in an unforgiving light, but the frazzled, ultra-distorted Dirty Old Man holds its own.

25. Americana (2012)

An album largely comprised of folksongs dramatically reassembled – Clementine and Oh Susanna among them – Americana is sporadically great, occasionally sloppy and sometimes genuinely surprising. Improbably enough, it concludes with Crazy Horse setting about God Save the Queen, as in the UK national anthem, not the Sex Pistols song.

24. Neil Young (1968)

“Overdub city,” protested Young of his solo debut, and he had a point. It is packed with fantastic songs that Young would repeatedly return to live – The Loner, Here We Are in the Years, The Old Laughing Lady – but frequently groans under the weight of Jack Nitzsche’s elaborate arrangements. From this point on, Young would prize simplicity and spontaneity.

23. Psychedelic Pill (2012)

Crazy Horse made their name playing extended jams, an approach Psychedelic Pill took to the extreme: the opener here, Driftin’ Back, goes on for the best part of half an hour. Whether it warrants that length is another question, although Ramada Inn, which clocks in at a mere 16 minutes, is terrific.

22. Dead Man (1995)

Young’s first film soundtrack, 1972’s Journey Through the Past, was a mishmash of live recordings and outtakes that succeeded in horrifying fans who thought it was the follow-up to Harvest. Performed live to a rough cut of Jim Jarmusch’s surreal western Dead Man , it is something else: a lengthy, stark, occasionally violent guitar instrumental.

21. American Stars ’N Bars (1977)

The weakest of Young’s 1970s studio albums, American Stars ’N Bars matched tracks taken from the then-unreleased Homegrown with lo-fi home recordings (the oddly creepy Will to Love), leaden country-rock and one undisputed Crazy Horse classic: Like a Hurricane (although there are better live versions out there).

20. A Letter Home (2014)

It sounds like a novelty – Young recording cover versions in a 1947 vinyl recording booth owned by Jack White – but A Letter Home works, leaping from songs Young would have played as a coffeehouse folk singer, such as Bert Jansch ’s Needle of Death, to a haunting version of Bruce Springsteen ’s My Hometown.

19. Living With War (2006)

Swiftly recorded and released, backed by a 100-voice choir, the anti-Iraq war tirade Living With War finds Young sounding energised by the urgency of his undertaking and, one suspects, by the furore he must have known it would cause. A subsequent Crosby Stills Nash & Young tour heavy on this material was greeted by boos and walkouts from their more conservative fans.

18. Re-ac-tor (1981)

A Crazy Horse album that’s grinding, dark and repetitious (deliberately so; it’s influenced by a gruelling programme of treatment undergone by Young’s son), Re-ac-tor is hard work, occasionally uninspired and sometimes magnificent, as on the ferocious din of Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze and the concluding Shots.

17. Harvest (1972)

That Harvest’s huge commercial success sparked a bout of wilful, even contrarian behaviour in Young wasn’t so inexplicable: he presumably knew his biggest album was nowhere near his best. The songs veer from fantastic (the title track; Words) to forgettable, while the arrangements are slick but sometimes overblown, as on A Man Needs a Maid.

16. This Note’s for You (1988)

By far the most successful of Young’s 80s genre experiments, and a creative rebirth of sorts, Young’s bluesy R&B album is best known for its title track, an evisceration of 80s rock’s growing penchant for corporate sponsorship, but its best moments are subtle and understated: the atmospheric Twilight, the small-hours melancholy of Coupe De Ville.

15. Hitchhiker (1976)

The sound of Young alone in the studio, “turning on the tap” as David Briggs put it, and letting new songs pour out (almost all of which ended up being re-recorded elsewhere). The fact that Young is audibly, heroically stoned throughout only adds to the album’s intimate charm.

14. Le Noise (2010)

Produced by Daniel Lanois, this is Young’s best album of the 21st century, and it took him somewhere new. Lanois added the occasional disorientating tape loop while Young accompanies himself on distorted electric guitar, which he is clearly playing at ear-splitting volume. Bringing this freshness of approach to a solo singer-songwriter album resulted in some strong material.

13. Harvest Moon (1992)

Harvest Moon is better than the classic album its title referenced, and whose backing musicians it reassembled. The sound fits the songs, which are wistful and streaked with nostalgia. The title track, its riff nicked from the Everly Brothers’ Walk Right Back, is a genuinely beautiful hymn to marriage and enduring love.

12. Ragged Glory (1991)

Crazy Horse at their most gleefully primitive – Young apparently recorded his vocals standing in a pile of horse manure – rampaging through garage-rock standards (the Premiers’ Farmer John), riotous jams (Love and Only Love, Mansion on the Hill) and paeans to their own limitations (F!#*in’ Up). A blast from start to finish.

11. Homegrown (1975)

“Sometimes life hurts,” wrote Young in explanation of Homegrown’s belated 2020 release, 45 years after he recorded it in the wake of his split from the actor Carrie Snodgrass. It’s certainly downcast, its tone set by the opener Separate Ways, but it is also Young at the peak of his powers, writing fragile, beautiful songs.

10. Comes a Time (1978)

The gentle country-rock album his record company doubtless wished he had released as a follow-up to Harvest, Comes a Time is far better than its spiritual predecessor. It is rougher round the edges – Crazy Horse show up on the wonderful Lotta Love and Look Out for My Love – and home to a brace of Young classics, the title track among them.

9. Freedom (1989)

After a confused 1980s, Young’s stunning return to full, raging power was perfectly timed, chiming with the nascent grunge movement he helped inspire. The widely misinterpreted Rockin’ in the Free World was the hit, but Freedom is packed with killer tracks, from the lengthy, horn-backed Crime in the City (Sixty to Zero) to a ferocious, feedback-strafed cover of On Broadway.

8. Sleeps With Angels (1994)

Kurt Cobain’s suicide note quoted a Young lyric, much to its author’s horror; the title track of Sleeps With Angels was his distressed response. Elsewhere, this is as bleakly compelling and creepy as his mid-70s work, with Crazy Horse on surprisingly muted form. Piece of Crap, meanwhile, introduces Young the cranky middle-aged refusenik, a role he would frequently inhabit.

7. Time Fades Away (1973)

Only Neil Young would follow up his commercial breakthrough with a chaotic audio-verité souvenir of a disastrous tour. But Time Fades Away isn’t just a screw-you gesture, it’s utterly compelling. The songs – Last Dance’s churning, hippy-baiting din; fragile piano ballad The Bridge; and the autobiographical Don’t Be Denied – are incredible, potentiated by the ragged performances.

6. Zuma (1975)

Lighter in tone than the “ditch trilogy” (Time Fades Away, Tonight’s the Night and On the Beach) that preceded it, Zuma reunited Young with a revitalised Crazy Horse, sparking Barstool Blues’s glorious evocation of a drunk mind meandering and the brooding, majestic historical epic Cortez the Killer. And its lambent closer Through My Sails is the last truly great song that Crosby Stills Nash & Young released.

5. After the Gold Rush (1970)

After The Gold Rush feels like Young’s morning-after-the-60s album, but unlike the consoling tone of Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, it is gaunt, troubled and affecting. Amid the relationship woes, there is ecological disaster, racism and Don’t Let It Bring You Down, which, Young noted, was “guaranteed to bring you down”.

4. On the Beach (1974)

Despairing and disconsolate, but set to beautiful music: the shimmering electric piano of See the Sky About to Rain, the epic acoustic closer Ambulance Blues (“You’re all just pissing in the wind,” it concludes), the title track’s stoned, misty take on rock. For contrast, there is Revolution Blues, a ferocious, unsparing portrait of Young’s old acquaintance Charles Manson.

3. Tonight’s the Night (1975)

Young’s tequila-sodden, no-filter response to the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and their roadie Bruce Berry is harrowing, extraordinarily powerful listening, the drunken raucousness of the performances matching the raw emotion of the songs. The point when Young’s voice cracks during Mellow My Mind is perhaps the most starkly potent in his catalogue.

2. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Young’s debut with Crazy Horse is an incredible album: the sheer potency of its songs and sound; the killer riff of Cinnamon Girl; the way the playing on the extended jams Down By the River and Cowgirl in the Sand embodies their lyrical angst, keeping the listener utterly gripped even as they tip the 10-minute mark.

1. Rust Never Sleeps (1979)

The line between Young’s live and studio albums has always been flexible. Rust Never Sleeps was recorded on stage in 1978, then overdubbed. In truth, most of his 70s albums could conceivably be called his best – he kept up a remarkably high standard – but Rust Never Sleeps offers a perfect summary of everything that makes him great, its quality perhaps spurred by the punk movement he references on Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) and, more elliptically, on Thrasher. Side one’s sequence of acoustic songs is breathtaking, and Crazy Horse rage in thunderous style on side two, home to Powderfinger’s heartbreaking saga of violence, death and familial bonds – arguably his greatest song.

• Pop and rock

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6 of the Best Neil Young Lyrics

by Alex Hopper October 21, 2022, 10:13 am

Neil Young is uncompromising in his lyricism. Whether he’s delivering piercing rock with Crazy Horse or swaying folk with Crosby, Stills & Nash, Young isn’t afraid to say what he wants—when he wants. He’s continued that tradition for decades in the music industry and doesn’t seem to be stopping anytime soon.

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In celebration of Young’s incomparable career, we’ve picked a handful of lines that stand out as some of his best. Though this list could go on for days, find 6 great Neil Young lyrics below.

[RELATED: 5 Deep Cuts From Neil Young That Should Have Been Singles]

1. They were hiding behind hay bales / They were planting in the full moon / They had given all they had / For something new (“Thrasher”)

This delicate acoustic offering concerns Young’s feelings toward his work with Crosby, Stills and Nash. In 1995, he revealed that he began to worry the group had lost its direction and felt a sense of liberation after breaking free from CSN. In lines from “Thrasher” above, Young looks back on the heyday of the group before his departure, allowing for a moment of fondness.

2. There’s one more kid / That will never go to school / Never get to fall in love / Never get to be cool (“Rockin’ in the Free World”)

“Rockin’ in the Free World” is a berate to society during the Bush Sr. era. Across the song, he comments on his own standing in society, the government, and (as seen in the lines above) the vicious cycle poverty can enforce. It’s one of Young’s most popular songs for a reason. He leaves no stone unturned in this one.

3. I see bloody fountains / And ten million dune buggies coming down the mountains / 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 (“Revolution Blues”)

Yet another sharp social commentary from Young, “Revolution Blues” was inspired by the Charles Manson murders of 1969. In the lines above, he references Manson’s delusions of an impending apocalypse and mixes them with observations about upper-crust culture as a whole. It can also be seen as a dig at his fellow musicians in Laurel Canyon, whom Young always felt slightly out of place with.

4. Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself / When you’re old enough to repay / But young enough to sell? (“Tell Me Why”)

Despite being a lauded songwriter, Young isn’t afraid to admit that sometimes he doesn’t know what he’s singing about. “Tell Me Why” is one such song. In Young’s biography, Shakey , he says that the lines above “sound like gibberish” to him. Famously not one to edit his songs, he rolled with what came to him and landed on something great, unbeknownst to him.

5. And I saw you in my nightmares / But I’ll see you in my dreams / And I might live a thousand years / Before I know what that means (“Barstool Blues”)

In “Barstool Blues,” Young reckons with a lost love. She is so ingrained in his mind that he’s thinking about her even when he’s asleep, though he doesn’t know quite what to make of it. It’s simple, relatable yet poetic—a hallmark of Young’s lyricism.

6. Sometimes I think that I know / What love’s all about / And when I see the light / I know I’ll be all right (“Philadelphia”)

Written for the soundtrack for the 1993 drama film of the same name, “Philadelphia” takes a stand on LGBTQ+ rights. The movie, which follows the story of a gay man who attempts to sue his employers after being fired for having AIDS, clearly inspired the lyrical content. He opens the track with the lines above, imbuing an air of optimism into the otherwise grave situation.

[RELATED: From Neil Young to Janis Joplin: 8 of the Best Singers With Unusual Voices]

Neil Young Photo by Ebet Roberts/Redferns)

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