The Neil Young song he retired from touring: “It sounds like gibberish to me”
When you’ve built up a catalogue as broad as Neil Young has, certain songs will always fall by the wayside. Since there are only so many chunks of time during a show, there’s no telling whether or not that deep cut that you really want in the set is going to fly in favour of people who want to hear the big hits. Young didn’t give two shits what his fans wanted, though, and when working on ‘Tell Me Why’, he thought that sheer stupidity forced in out of the setlist.
But are we just going to sidestep some of the brilliance that Young put out during this era of his career? In just a few short years, Young created a body of work where he practically couldn’t go wrong, giving away amazing songs like ‘Helpless’ when working with Crosby, Stills, and Nash and still having material left over to create albums like Harvest and After the Gold Rush.
If anything, it was impressive when he sounded dishevelled during this period. Say what you want to about how much Tonight’s the Night is out of tune and doesn’t have the same sonic fidelity as the rest of his records, but the reason it works so well is how much of a wreck Young sounds like when playing on it.
While After the Gold Rush is one of the crowned jewels of his discography, ‘Tell Me Why’ may be one of the simplest masterpieces he ever made. The rest of Crazy Horse might be behind him, but Young sitting with an acoustic guitar and singing about the questions that he has surrounding adolescence is a lot more profound than he probably realised.
Looking at it objectively, though, Young didn’t think he created something all that special. Later, he said that the lyrics forced him to retire the piece, telling SPIN, “I don’t understand it. It sounds like gibberish to me. I stopped singing that song because when I get to that line, I go, what the fuck am I talking about? You know, I don’t edit my songs. I knew something was happening at the time that I wrote it to make that right, but I can’t remember what it is, and it doesn’t apply to what I’m doing now.”
It might mean something different over time, but Young made one of the most profound lines of his career when talking about being old enough to repay but young enough to sell. Outside of his confusion with the world, being at that crossroads in one’s life when you’re starting to get responsibilities for your elders and yet still trying to live like a teenager is something that no one will ever escape from in their lives.
Then again, it might have been because Young retired the song when going through one of the slumps in his career. After a run of lacklustre solo albums and the unholy reunion album with CSN on American Dream, it would take Young a few more years before bringing back his rock and roll chops on Freedom.
In that respect, ‘Tell Me Why’ could have been an anthem for the grunge rockers who respected Young years before the genre started. Many people knew what it was like to survive the 1960s in Young’s generation, but artists like Eddie Vedder proved that just because they were young enough to sell didn’t mean they forgot their principles.
