The one album Neil Young refused to promote: “I’m not doing anything with that”
The promotional cycle for any album is usually the hardest hurdle for any musician to tackle. They got into the business because they had something real to say, and parading a record around like it’s a piece of advertising wasn’t exactly what anyone signed up for when they first signed that contract. Neil Young never bothered taking the normal route when making his records, though, and when he came out with Sleeps With Angels, he refused to do the traditional dancing monkey routine that everyone expected of him.
Because by the 1990s, Young had lost his ability to really give a shit for some time. He wasn’t going to play the game and make an album just because some suit strongarmed him into doing it, and even when bringing Crosby, Stills, and Nash back into the fold with American Dream, he was quite happy to just abandon ship once he realised that the whole album was going to sink like the Titanic with critics.
Then again, that might have been because he was saving all of the good songs for himself. Looking back at Freedom, Young was on the verge of returning from the brink, and by the time the alternative revolution kicked into high gear, he had started to become known as a pseudo-father figure to the biggest names in Seattle.
Since the hair metal acts of yesteryear had been staying around for far too long, the flannel crowd gave everyone a nice look at what rock could be if it remotely took itself seriously. There was still room for rock and roll, but the minute that Kurt Cobain burst onto the scene with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, it opened the door for acts like Pearl Jam.
While Mirror Ball gave Young an unintended boost for the kids in his audience, he could have never anticipated how quickly the movement would fall after Cobain’s death. He had tried on various occasions to call the Nirvana frontman, but once news broke that he died by his own hand, it felt like the wind had been knocked out of everyone’s sails.
For Young, the best way to deal with grief is through his music, and out of respect for the scene, he refused to do any major promotion for Sleeps With Angels, telling SPIN, “I’m not doing anything with that album. It stands on its own. That’s why I made the record. Too sensitive of a subject to isolate comments on. When you speak to someone who can write things down, you have to remember that they only write what they select.”
Listening back to the record, Young made the 1990s mirror image of an album like Tonight’s the Night. While the 1970s classic shows Young as a distraught, broken man following the death of his friends, this sounds like the concerned older brother figure looking to see what he can do to ease people’s minds in the face of something so horrific.
No number of songs could have nursed a wound that was still that raw, but Young isn’t looking to heal everyone through the power of his material. He just knew what it was like having to deal with that kind of loss, and if he couldn’t find a way to make things better, it was the least he could do to give his Seattle brethren a musical shoulder to cry on.
