Neil Young crowns his best song with Crosby, Stills and Nash: “The folk process at work”
Neil Young’s discography has always been made up of beautiful contradictions.
Even though he has created some of the most earnest songs in the entire rock canon, he has always done things on his terms, all while not having the patience to work on some songs until they have reached perfection. While Young has been able to carve out his own path as an artist who does whatever he wants, even he could admit that he got the perfect sound when working among his fellow legends.
Then again, Young never needed a band behind him to be noticed. After trying his hand in various local bands in Canada, Young’s inclusion in Buffalo Springfield featured him playing some of the most abrasive music that the 1960s had ever known, playing around with distortion while also creating music brilliance on tracks like ‘For What It’s Worth’.
As Young began venturing into his solo career, he got a call from his old bandmate Stephen Stills about the prospect of working alongside David Crosby and Graham Nash. Although the trio had already created a phenomenal debut record, Young would come on for the album Deja Vu, adding his signature flair to the other members’ songs while turning in stellar tracks like ‘Helpless’.
Even though the band had been a humble folk-rock act on their first album, Young’s aesthetic brought an edge to their sound, sounding much more caustic whenever he strapped on his guitar. For all of the outstanding contributions that Young made to everyone else’s tracks, one of the most celebrated songs that Young ever made didn’t make the final cut of the album.
During his time with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Young got word about the Kent State massacre in 1970, where cops fired upon various student protestors. Disgusted by what he saw in print and on the news, Young documented his grief in the song, ‘Ohio’, which would become one of the many protest songs he wrote for the group.
Although it’s easy to hear the anger in Young’s voice as he sings, ‘Ohio’ captures a sense of grief that no one else has come close to in rock and roll. Young knows that no ridicule will help the situation, and all he can do is look at the tragedy of losing respectable human beings who were punished for speaking their mind.
Looking back on that era of his songwriting, Young would single out ‘Ohio’ as one of his finest moments, recalling in Classic Rock Stories, “It was really like the folk process at work. You know, that was really like music as news. It’s still hard to believe I had to write this song. It’s ironic that I capitalised on the death of these American students. My best CSN&Y cut”.
Part of what gave ‘Ohio’ such a lasting impact was how immediate it felt. Unlike many protest songs that arrived months or years after the fact, Young wrote and recorded the track almost in real time, capturing the shock and outrage before the wounds had even begun to heal. There was no poetic distance or metaphor softening the blow. Lines like “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming” sounded raw because they were raw, delivered with the same disbelief that much of America was feeling at the time.
The recording itself also reflected the urgency behind the song. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young reportedly cut the track within days of Young writing it, and that sense of emotional immediacy bleeds through every second of the performance.
Crosby’s haunted backing vocals, Stills’ stabbing guitar lines and Young’s ragged delivery all combine to make the song feel less like a polished studio creation and more like a collective outcry. For an artist who spent much of his career chasing instinct over perfection, ‘Ohio’ may have been the clearest example of Neil Young trusting his gut and getting everything exactly right.
While Young would leave the band behind to focus on his solo career, the folk edge would become a pivotal part of his songwriting. Across albums like After the Gold Rush and Harvest, Young would continue playing to his strengths as a writer, talking about the emotional problems with the world while also reaching deep into his soul to create works of art like ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’. Folk music would ultimately be one aspect of Young’s career, but by turning his songwriting outward on ‘Ohio’, he helped millions of people through one of the darkest scenes of the early 1970s.
