Neil Young picks his favourite songs from his youth
From the very beginning, Neil Young seemed to be searching for some lost Eden. His music is imbued with a certain longing, a sense of having lost something along the way. Perhaps that’s why albums like After The Gold Rush, Harvest and Decade are still so popular – they all capture that sense of wanting to return to a state of innocence.
Such nostalgia might sound regressive, and there’s certainly a touch of the neo-Luddite about Young, but his music is far from apathetic. Songs like ‘Old Man’ last a lifetime. Like the best poetry, they change over time, striking the listener differently with each passing year. Conan O’Brien clearly recognised this quality in Young’s music, so he took the initiative and asked the singer-songwriter to name some of his favourite tracks from his youth during an episode of the Team Coco radio show.
The first track Young suggested was ‘Four Strong Winds’ by ’60s folk duo Ian and Sylvia. “I loved it so much I would put nickles and dimes in the jukebox to play it over and over and over again until I didn’t have any change,” he told O’Brien. “I’d just stand there and listen to it. It was a beautiful song. For some reason, it really got to me, and I could feel the magic of the music.” Young would have been around 11 or 12 at this time and living in Winnipeg. “I heard the song before, but I was at Falcon lake, a place that’s near Winnipeg,” he said. “It’s just a lake – you can pitch tents around it and stuff. So we had our tent, me and my friend Jack, who played drums in The Squiers, my first band And we were out there, and I found this thing on the jukebox.”
Young also spoke about Johnny Cash’s ‘Ballad of a Teenage Queen’, which appeared on his 1958 album with the Tenessee Two on backing vocals. Young appears to have heard multiple versions of the song, but it’s this Tennesse Two rendition he heard on analogue radio all those years ago. Discussing how one’s introduction to a song colours the way you listen to it thereafter, Young said: “When it’s way back there in your life, and you have this memory, it’s vivid. Who knows what you do with it for all those years? You may have enhanced it. It may be exactly the way it was. It may just be different in some way, because when you have a thought for so long, and you remember a memory, it becomes more than just that over time. So that’s why, sometimes when you go back, it’s not like you thought it was gonna be.”
Such comments remind us of the perspective music brings to our lives. In listening to music, we forge memories, and in doing so, we preserve certain moments in time. And so, though we might age, the past is never truly lost.
