“Somehow it just didn’t work”: The song Neil Young said would destroy all his other recordings
Despite the creative freedom that often comes with making music, many musicians still have to follow a set of unspoken rules to achieve success. While certain things, like ideal song length, structure, and accessibility, often tend to work better than others, many artists have pushed these boundaries, choosing instead to favour depth and meaning over pretence or restriction. Neil Young is no different.
For most of the 1980s, Young struggled to gain the level of enthusiasm and hype he had established early on in his career. Much of this could probably be pinned on Geffen Records, which the singer decided to leave in 1988 before rejoining his previous label, Reprise. After releasing This Note’s For You in this new, refreshed era, Young was ready for something far more commercially viable.
Hailed now as Young’s much-needed comeback album after years of failed attempts, Freedom hadn’t just culminated over the better part of a decade; it included varying degrees of Young’s belief in his own stylistic choices, including the ones he knew would do particularly well, and other ones centred around the greater creative license. At the same time, many capture the specific emotions of moments in time.
For instance, three songs—’Ordinary People’, ‘Sixty To Zero’, and ‘Days That Used To Be’—were written “in the middle of the ocean” when Young was on a sailboat to Hawaii. Having been on the boat for around ten days, with no outside contact or even the sounds of planes or other boats, he entered a strangely detached mindset filled with the peace and serenity of watching the point where the sky meets the sea.
“I was pretty spacey out there by then,” Young recalled, with each of these songs reflecting the mindset of someone who had momentarily disengaged from everything he knew to be familiar. However, one among these was omitted from the final tracklist, mainly because it felt too distinctive to sit among the others, too wayward, perhaps, when placed alongside others that held a taste of the type of style and arrangements he knew audiences would immediately become endeared to.
The song, ‘Ordinary People’, is an 18-minute long track Young initially wrote for Freedom, but putting it together after revealed that maybe this wasn’t its rightful home. It wasn’t that he felt it was a weaker choice—rather, the opposite—but that its value as a stand-alone needed something a little more considered instead of becoming nothing but a lost archive or an overlooked gem among the other songs.
“Today that song rings maybe even more true than it did then,” the singer recalled to Uncut. “So I felt that that’s a good example of a song without a home, a strong song that destroyed other songs when you put it with them.” He added: “When I recorded it, it would have gone on Freedom, but it blew away Freedom. Somehow, it just didn’t work.”
Holding it back until 2007’s Chrome Dreams II, the song signalled Young’s broader dedication to pushing boundaries, not just in terms of its oddly enticing structure and length but also his insistence on placing it where it belonged. The track remains divisive even after its official release, but that’s almost beside the point: after all, although it’s not for everybody, it proves a more experimental concept that wouldn’t otherwise work had it been another’s undertaking.
