The song Neil Young proudly predicted would stand the test of time: “Still resonates”
Every week, a seemingly endless deluge of musical material hits the airwaves in such a quantity that it is virtually impossible to wade through it all. In that exponentially-saturated landscape, therefore, it takes something pretty spectacular to stand out among all the rest, and something even more impressive to boast the same enduring legacy as the discography of a songwriter like Neil Young.
From the heady hippie days of his initial emergence with Buffalo Springfield back in the 1960s, Young always seemed destined for musical greatness, but even he likely couldn’t have predicted the sheer endurance that would soon be pinned to his career.
Whether it’s the argument-fueled masterpieces of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, or his vast and varied career as a solo performer, the Canadian musician has seemingly done it all, and he’s done it all by his own unwavering artistic principles, too.
Like virtually every songwriter, of course, Young has certainly had his fair share of misses and misguided efforts – that ghastly rockabilly album immediately springing to mind – and not every song that has ever leapt from the pen of the songwriter has truly stood the test of time.
After all, he’s put out some 45 studio albums, not including his many collaborative works, and embraced a vast range of different styles over the years, from country and folk to synthpop and proto-grunge. Through volume alone, there are bound to be a few songs in there that are best forgotten, and more than a few that Neil Young himself doesn’t look back on with much fondness.
By that same metric, though, the songwriter has also penned a wealth of material which still strongly stands the test of time, as reflected beautifully by his Glastonbury headline slot earlier this year, which saw him breeze through his many decades as a musical hero. You can probably gather which Neil Young tracks still hold up for Young himself based on his current setlists; he hardly seems like the type to play a track he hates just because an audience demands it. However, there is one song which seems to stand out among all the rest.
Writing on his website back in 2020, Young revealed, “One of the best tracks (imho) is ‘Already One’.” A stand-out effort from his 1976 record Comes A Time, the track was one of Young’s ‘Wall of Sound’ experiments, created using an extensive cast of around 30 different musicians giving it the kind of colossal sound which lends itself quite naturally to traversing the decades.
“That song still resonates strongly with me today,” Young continued in his praises of the song. “I wrote it about Carrie [Snodgress], Zeke’s mom. She was a very special person and I still see her and love her in Zeke today.” Young wrote a multitude of songs in tribute to Snodgress during their five-year marriage, including the earth-shatteringly beautiful ‘Harvest’, but ‘Already One’ is special in that it acts as a kind of epilogue to those tracks, having been written shortly after the pair split in 1975.
Snodgress tragically passed away in 2004, at the age of only 58. So, it is not all that surprising that ‘Already One’ still holds a special place in Young’s heart, reminding him of the love they once shared and the son, Zeke, that they brought into the world together.
