The album that made Neil Young quit guitar for a year: “It just drained me”
Burnout is an affliction that affects us all, but it seems particularly prevalent within the realm of the music industry. With the exhaustive world tours, endless studio sessions, and spending your fleeting iotas of free time conjuring up new songwriting efforts, it is easy to see how an artist as tireless as Neil Young might be forced to take a break every now and then.
Going right back to his first flurries into the music world, during the hazy acid-fueled days of the 1960s and his time with Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young has been vying for the title of the hardest working man in music.
Whether it’s balancing the tumultuous timeline of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young with one of the greatest solo careers in music history, or spending years on the road sharing his songwriting excellence with every far-flung corner of the globe, the Canadian songwriter has wasted absolutely no time over the course of his career.
Even in the present day, having recently entered his eighth decade here on Earth, Young shows few signs of slowing down anytime soon, consistently announcing new tours and continuing to work on creating new material to add to his some 45 studio albums as a solo artist – not even counting his recordings with the aforementioned other projects he has embraced over the decades.
With that being said, there have of course been some moments in Young’s music career where he has either chosen or been forced to take a break, either to focus on his personal life or simply to ward off the musical exhaustion for a little while. One such moment came back in 2003, in the wake of his incredibly ambitious Greendale album, which saw Young create an expansive musical narrative as a means of discussing environmentalism and the then-current state of geo-politics.
Inevitably, the reception to that album didn’t quite match with some of Young’s more beloved works from back in the 1970s, but those who chose to dive into the album’s narrative throughline were exposed to some of the most profound and skilled songwriting Young has ever recorded. It makes sense, then, that the songwriter took some time off following the record’s release.
“Greendale was such a huge thing that it just drained me,” he told Uncut in 2012. Seemingly, it drained the songwriter so much that he couldn’t even bear to look at his most beloved companion: “I didn’t pick up a guitar for almost 18 months,” he shared. “I don’t sit around and practise.”
Young has always operated by the same sonic manifesto, as he revealed, “If I don’t feel like it, I don’t do it. And if I do feel like it, I won’t do anything else.” Which goes some way to explaining both his post-Greendale break and the prolific nature of his discography up to and after that point. Had he carried on, in spite of his exhaustion, the follow-up – 2005’s Prairie Wind – would not have seemed nearly as coherent or impassioned, one would imagine.
Either way, the fact that Young did, eventually, recover from that period of burnout and continued to write, record, and perform, is more than enough to give thanks for.
