Listen to the isolated vocals of Neil Young from ‘Harvest Moon’
Few voices have pierced the souls of so many over the past half-century than that of Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young. Young rose to prominence with his 1960s work alongside Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, creating a warm blend of folk, blues and country-inspired music. Subsequently, he found unprecedented success and fame as he returned to a solo career in the 1970s.
Young’s prolific spell as a solo artist in the ’70s saw the release of several seminal albums, such as After the Gold Rush, Harvest, On the Beach and Rust Never Sleeps. This sample of four salient albums hears Young offer his vocals to a range of musical styles, with a heavily blues-orientated sound on On the Beach and a famously raw and distorted sound in 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps that earned him the nickname, The Godfather of Grunge.
With such a diverse approach to music, Young has spread his influence far and wide, with countless contemporaries and modern musicians citing him as a crucial luminary. While Young played the field musically, his vocals have remained consistent. This distinctive sound offers a ubiquitous identity to Young’s oeuvre and never fails to bring the neck hairs up.
One of Young’s keen admirers is Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who was first introduced to the Canadian’s music after being told of a vocal likeness. Yorke once recalled that, as a 16-year-old, he had sent some homemade demo recordings to the BBC with hopes of gaining some attention for his songwriting. “They said, ‘This guy sounds like Neil Young,'” Yorke told the BBC in 2008. “I was like, ‘Who is Neil Young?'”
The singer soon found himself in a nearby record shop and thought he would see just how similar this Neil Young character was. He purchased a copy of Young’s 1970 album, After The Gold Rush. “I immediately fell in love with his music,” Yorke said. “He has that soft vibrato that nobody else has. More than that, it was his attitude toward the way he laid songs down. It’s always about laying down whatever is in your head at the time and staying completely true to that, no matter what it is.”
Listen to Neil Young’s unique vocals through isolated tracks taken from his 1992 classic ‘Harvest Moon’ below.
