“Going down there”: The album Neil Young called his most depressing
Neil Young has never shied away from delving into the depths of his emotions, often confronting his fears head-on through his music. Like all great artists, Young thrives on taking creative risks, channelling his raw, unfiltered feelings into his work and reflecting them back at his audience. While pain is a recurring theme in much of his discography, he has singled out this particular album as one of his darkest explorations, pushing himself to emotional boundaries he rarely allowed himself to cross.
Then again, half of Young’s greatest tunes seem to come from that sort of emotional pain and loneliness. Some pieces are pure folk bliss like ‘Heart of Gold’, but listening to a track like ‘Cinnamon Girl’, he’s still crying out in the chorus of the tune, begging for another chance to earn the love of his other half.
When looking at Young’s body of work, though, it’s hard to think of depressing moments and not bring up Tonight’s the Night. If a few songs could be scattershot here and there, this was Young at his most vulnerable, taking the basis of his work to tell the story of him as a broken man, having gone through the heartbreak of losing one of his bandmates.
Anyone would have tried their best to move as far away from that sound as possible, but if there’s still more to say, why limit yourself to what was left over? Despite On the Beach sounding much more pleasant than what would come later on Tonight’s the Night, there are still pieces that are more disturbing to look back on in retrospect.
Hearing him talk about his girlfriend being unfaithful across the tracklist does make him feel like he’s emotionally lost, and the song about Charles Manson, ‘Revolution Blues’, seemed like a cold reflection of how dark Los Angeles had become in the wake of the Manson murders taking place. While Young was willing to press on with the dark sides of himself, On the Beach was the moment he needed to tap out.
When talking about his work on the aborted album Homegrown, Young said that he couldn’t bring himself to make something dark again after On the Beach, saying, “I had just released On the Beach, probably one [of] the most depressing records I’ve ever made. I don’t want to get down to the point where I can’t even get up. I mean, there’s something to going down there and looking around, but I don’t know about sticking around.”
And looking back on where Young would go after Tonight’s the Night wrapped up, he seemed more willing to embrace something lighter. Zuma still had traces of those dark years, but later records like Comes a Time took the basis of his usual formula and brought back that little bit of sunshine that he had left over from working on Harvest.
But this wasn’t a case of Young suddenly switching to the kind of music that his audience would have liked. He was much more interested in finding something lighter within himself rather than becoming someone who seemed more cynical about their place in the world.
