The one song Neil Young wishes he could have written again: “I don’t like my words”
Neil Young doesn’t seem to be the kind of artist who meticulously labours over his work.
He has produced dozens of songs over the years, and as a man who barely takes a breath before defending himself, one might expect his first thoughts about his own work to be defensive. But one tune has proved to be a sore point for many years.
Since some of his best albums have deliberate mistakes kept in the final mix, he seems to be an artist more interested in making an emotional statement than creating a song that’s perfect front to back. That doesn’t mean that every song has to make perfect sense, and even Young realised that he may have used a hot-button issue a bit too well on ‘Alabama’.
When Young entered the 1970s, it seemed like he couldn’t do any wrong with his albums. He had more than a few duds in his catalogue, but every song he released with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, as well as the beginnings of his solo career, put him on the same songwriting level as artists like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell.
Once he settled down to make Harvest, Young wanted to strip things back. As if After the Gold Rush was too lo-fi after being recorded in Young’s house, he felt he needed a change of scenery, which involved him moving to Nashville to get the right sound for tracks like ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘A Man Needs a Maid’.
Although Young could still make fine songs, whether they had a country bent to them or not, he still had his eye on the horrors of the south. Since he was coming from Canada, Young had a very different perspective on what the southern United States looked like, with various race riots breaking out and the harsh realities of people struggling to survive in the rural environment.
Considering Young’s other political songs, ‘Alabama’ feels like his answer to a song like Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’, as he holds up a mirror to what the state has done over the years. When you get that many people described in just a few lines of a song, you can’t be surprised when people get agitated after the fact.
Aside from Lynyrd Skynyrd penning ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ to spite Young, he thought that the lyrics could have been a lot better, saying, “I don’t like my words when I listen to it today. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue”.
“Actually, the song is more about a personal thing than it is about a state,” he explained. “And I’m just using that name and that state to hide whatever it is I have to hide… I don’t know what that means.” Young’s lyrics would become some of his most iconic, even if they were all turned around.
In that case, Young’s condemnation song may have much more in common with a song like John Lennon’s ‘How Do You Sleep’. Whereas anyone with ears would think that the former Beatle was writing about his writing partner Paul McCartney, Lennon would say on numerous occasions that it was meant to be self-effacing, saying later that he regretted the association it gave to McCartney when he meant to attack himself.
Just because Young pissed a few people off didn’t mean that he was going to let up on speaking his mind. Throughout his entire career, Young was proud to speak his mind when it came to all sorts of political and social changes, whether that was playing at Farm Aid or talking about having a gentler machine gun hand in ‘Rockin’ In the Free World’. He may not know what he’s getting at all the time, but Young would rather be authentic than try to make ‘Heart of Gold Part 2’.
