Listen to the isolated vocals on the Neil Young song ‘Cortez the Killer’
Most elements of Neil Young have been routinely praised over the years: his startling guitar work, his unmatched songwriting ability, and his eye for constantly evolving his music being chief among them. But if there’s one part of Young’s musical identity that doesn’t always go over well, it’s his voice. High, reedy, and completely unique, Young’s voice is an acquired taste that has been praised and derided in equal measure.
But when Young is in control of that unwieldy tenor, it can become something truly transcendent. All you have to do is listen to the isolated vocal on a song like ‘Cortez the Killer’ to understand that. Without the super-high notes or crackling octave jumps that appear throughout his catalogue, ‘Cortez the Killer’ finds Young in a more haunting and restrained area. That place is perfect for his voice, one that sounds like it’s been echoing for centuries across different cultures.
“I think there’s little kernels of our lives in many of our songs, unless you’re writing ‘Cortez’ or something,” Young’s former wife Pegi once observed. “It must have been in another life my husband was an Incan warrior.”
To fans, the meaning behind ‘Cortez the Killer’ became a fascination for many. But for Young, the exact structure and narrative of ‘Cortez the Killer’ weren’t as important as what the song made the audience feel. “It’s not about information. The song is not meant for them to think about me,” Young claimed in the biography Shakey. “The song is meant for people to think about themselves. The specifics about what songs are about are not necessarily constructive or relevant. A lot of stuff I make up because it came to me.”
In fact, Young grew so tired of getting asked to explain ‘Cortez the Killer’ that he started making up random origin stories. At a show in Manassas, Virginia, on August 13th, 1996, Young told the audience a (likely apocryphal) story about how the song came from a hamburger binge. “One night I stayed up too late when I was goin’ to high school. I ate like six hamburgers or something,” Young told the crowd.
Adding: “I felt terrible… very bad… this is before McDonald’s. I was studying history, and in the morning I woke up I’d written this song.”
For guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, the words to ‘Cortez the Killer’ didn’t even factor in when he and Crazy Horse were recording the song with Young. Instead, Sampedro was lost in a haze of drugs. “When we recorded ‘Cortez,’ I had just smoked some angel dust,” Sampedro told Uncut.
“The whole song I thought the second chord, D, was the first chord. So I emphasized that every time round, while Neil was leaning on the first chord, E minor. I think that helped keep a really slow tune moving along.”
Check out the isolated vocals for ‘Cortez the Killer’ down below.
