The sombre album Neil Young described as “very personal”
One of the beautiful things about rock ‘n’ roll is its lack of definition. As a genre, it is an amalgamation of several rot styles, meaning that artists who regard themselves as rock stars can explore anything from soft country rock to heavy metal. Neil Young, the Canadian singer-songwriter who grew up playing country music on his banjos and ukuleles, has led a career of admirable scope and is today revered for his pioneering work in heavy proto-grunge music and as the songwriter behind a vast catalogue of acoustic ballads.
In a sense, Young’s heavy rock music with Crazy Horse and the comparatively soft acoustic material exhibits the two sides of the artist. In his classic blues-inspired track ‘On the Beach’, Young sings, “I need a crowd of people / But I can’t face them day to day.” This line confirms the musician’s mixed feelings about public exposure and evidences his lifelong struggle with self-confidence and introversion.
Classic songs like ‘Cinnamon Girl’ and ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ reflect the more confident, unyielding side of Young’s songwriting. Meanwhile, more sentimental tracks like ‘Old Man’ and ‘Harvest Moon’ seem much more personal to Young. He wrote the former after moving to Broken Arrow Ranch to get away from the bustle. After meeting an old ranch hand, he realised there wasn’t much of a difference between them.
Speaking to AXS in 2016, Young revealed that ‘Harvest Moon’ was a favourite of his own songs because of its personal connotations that seem to translate very well to his fans. “It’s a real song about real feelings,” he said. “People come up to me now, and they say, ‘We played that at our wedding,’ you know, ‘When we first met, that song was playing.’ There’s a romantic atmosphere of the song. There’s something about it that brings that out in people. It’s interesting. It’s nice to see.”
The duality in Young’s personality and, hence, creative output has led to a degree of capriciousness over the years. After rising to stardom, he could afford to spend plenty of his time toying with new ideas and recording music, much of which still hasn’t seen the light of day. Financially solvent stars often have no necessity to release music they aren’t totally happy with and can afford to return to the drawing board.
In an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2022, Young discussed the vast amount of material he has in the vault. Although he began releasing lots of archival music throughout the 2010s, he suggested that there is a fair bit more where that came from. “I couldn’t finish some things because I was into something else,” he said. “It’s usually because I was distracted by something new. But sometimes I didn’t want to put it out because I was feeling it too much and didn’t want that out there at the time in my life.”
Young revealed that throughout the emotional rollercoaster of rock ‘n’ roll success, he had written some music that was too emotionally charged to release at the time. Instead, such material served as a personal release that he could either release several years on or just keep for himself. Among Young’s “lost” albums was Toast. Recorded between 2000 and 2001, the album was ultimately shelved in favour of Are You Passionate? and finally released two decades later.
Toast carries a sombre mood that reflects Young’s mindset at the time of recording. Allegedly, it was a difficult period in his marriage to his then-wife, Pegi Young. “It’s subtle. You can listen to Toast and not even really realise what’s going on in it,” Young explained. “But Toast was a very personal record for me, and I didn’t put it out for a long time. There’s a few more like that in [the archives].”
