The song Neil Young wrote about quitting Buffalo Springfield: “I didn’t have to answer or obey anyone”
Buffalo Springfield were early adopters of the folk-rock genre, combining folk influences with psychedelia and popular rock to create a distinctive sound. In their two-year existence, the band found much critical success, with their single ‘For What It’s Worth’, written by Stephen Stills, peaking at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100.
In a short period of time, Buffalo Springfield churned out three successful albums that cemented them as folk rock icons. However, the band came to an end in 1968 after multiple lineup changes, run-ins with the law, and personal issues interfered with their creative process. Neil Young was constantly in and out of the band, and he was famously absent from their set at the iconic Monterey Pop Festival, with David Crosby filling in for him.
Talking to Rolling Stone, Young explained the dissolution of the band in further detail, stating: “I just couldn’t handle it toward the end. My nerves couldn’t handle the trip. It wasn’t me scheming on a solo career, it wasn’t anything but my nerves. Everything started to go too fucking fast, I can tell that now. I was going crazy, you know, joining and quitting and joining again. I began to feel like I didn’t have to answer or obey anyone. I needed more space.”
He continued: “That was a big problem in my head. So I’d quit, then I’d come back ’cause it sounded so good. It was a constant problem. I just wasn’t mature enough to deal with it. I was very young. We were getting the shaft from every angle and it seemed like we were trying to make it so bad and were getting nowhere. The following we had in the beginning, and those people know who they are, was a real special thing. It gave all of us, I think, the strength to do what we’ve done. With the intensity that we’ve been able to do it. Those few people who were there in the very beginning.”
On one of the occasions that Young quit the band, he went away and penned ‘Broken Arrow’, a confessional style of song that features on Buffalo Springfield’s final album, Buffalo Springfield Again. It is noted for its unconventional structure, divided into three parts defined by different time signatures. It has also drawn comparisons to The Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ due to its inclusion of random soundbites and the beginning of one of the band’s other tracks, ‘Mr. Soul’.
Young claims he wrote the song because he was suffering from “an identity crisis,” which is reflected in the odd structuring and collection of sounds on the track. Jim Messina, an engineer on the track, recalled to Uncut Magazine: “When Neil brought the song in, he wanted to use all these separate pieces. That was a first for me, but I knew what we had to do to make it work. I got a chance to see how his mind worked in terms of piecing all those images together”.
“The last part has that jazz part in it, which I never understood why he wanted it there. But when it all came together, it was quite wonderful,” he added. “I would never have pictured it in that way, but Neil did. Sitting back and watching him think it through, then bringing the band in and getting them to play it, then putting that little piece in the end; it was fascinating. I remember him standing up when it was done, with a huge smile on his face, and saying, ‘That’s it. That’s great.'”
In hindsight, Broken Arrow feels less like an outlier in Buffalo Springfield’s catalogue and more like a quiet preview of Neil Young’s future creative instincts. The song’s fractured structure and emotional rawness would later become hallmarks of his solo work, where vulnerability and experimentation often outweighed polish. What emerged during this period of instability was not confusion alone, but the early formation of an artist learning how to trust his own impulses.
Buffalo Springfield may have burned briefly, but the intensity of their short lifespan left a lasting imprint on everyone involved. For Young in particular, the band functioned as both a proving ground and a breaking point, a place where creative possibility collided with personal limitation. Broken Arrow captures that tension perfectly, standing as both a farewell to the group and a declaration of intent for everything that followed.
Revisit ‘Broken Arrow’ below.
