How many songs has Neil Young written about specific places?
Hailing from Canada’s Ontario region and later making the countercultural trek to Los Angeles in 1966, as the era’s music scene began to stir potently along the US West Coast, it’s natural that Neil Young surveys the North American landscape in his songwriting.
Raised in the sleepy Omemee town, then pulled to California’s bustling entertainment capital, Young’s outsider psyche and boundary traverse lead to occasionally penning songs that can be packed with a sense of psychogeography, or parading certain locales as glowing remote elixirs as beckoning as Oz’s Emerald City.
Young’s no different in this respect than the rest of the Woodstock generation. America stands tall with all its terrible beauty across much of the rock and pop’s output across the 1960s and early ‘70s, lyrically posturing as a globe devouring Uncle Sam imperialist, a romantic terrain of pop mythos, a miasma of corporate sloganeering and crass commercialisation, the Stars ‘n’ Stripes jackboot of whitey on the necks of Black neighbourhoods, or the nostalgic source of frontier legend consumed as children before the US’ stark, political unveiling.
America during those heady years was many things: a nebulous character in itself, plastered on Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, or providing the subversive fuel for The United States of America’s electronic psych-rock. Forged in that special era yet never defined by it—later deep dives into punk, synthpop, and rockabilly pastiche attesting to his eager, legacy desecration—Young smatters the American map across his voluminous songbook, lifting cities, states, and entire regions as vehicles to explore the federal republic’s spiritual turmoil and beauty, forever clawing and fighting each other across its near 250 year history.
In total, he has written well over 1000 songs, likely a conservative estimate. When pulling the sleeves up to collate the numbers in Young’s oeuvre, with a 1000 thank yous to DavidE1979UK for his comprehensive Spotify playlist, some peripheries have to be firmly put in place. Firstly, no live songs. Secondly, we’re not combing through every lyric for a possible reference or nod to a place. Thirdly, demos, outtakes, and session noodles that lie buried in his Archives series can be pushed aside because life’s too short. Lastly, we’re sticking to real places here, so no allusive nicknames (sorry Re·ac·tor’s ‘Motor City’), and we can safely ignore realms of mythological or legendary existence—no ‘Eldorado’ from Freedom to be found here.
So, how many songs has Neil Young written about specific places?
With our strict and meticulous methodology, we count 15 songs that Young has written that explore explicit places, and all but one involve locations in North America.
While we’re flouting the rules a little here, it would be remiss not to include ‘Sugar Mountain’. Having long existed as a live favourite but first cut way back in 1965 with his early band The Squires, his ode to the anxieties of peaking too soon and the precarious road that faces any hopeful musician may well have found its lyrical spark from the namesake North Carolina rocky village. Later, with Buffalo Springfield, where Young would meet future collaborator and infrequent frenemy Stephen Stills, Manitoba’s famous Falcon Lake would enjoy a song dedicated to the Whiteshell Provincial Park natural wonder, a favourite holiday spot of Young’s as a boy.
Across his solo career and numbers with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, seven states get a reference, albeit not all in a positive light. CSNY’s excoriating ‘Ohio’, lambasting the bloody Kent State massacre meted out to the campus students in 1970, and the Homegrown collection features a whopping two states and country to boot, Florida, Kansas and Mexico, respectively.
The 15 count is likely provisional, and the Youngheads out there will likely pluck out many more location songs from his songbook, and with the creative pace he’s been running of late, the list will probably become outdated in due course. Take a look at our collation below for a smorgasbord of Young’s songs about specific places.
