‘Like A Hurricane’: The song Neil Young wrote after being “possessed” by a woman
For any musician, inspiration doesn’t come from just one muse. Someone that in tune with their craft can either write a song based on how they felt getting out of bed in the morning or get into the mood after thinking about what they had for breakfast. While Neil Young has reached the point where he could make dusting his house sound poetic, he came up with ‘Like A Hurricane’ after being put under a woman’s spell.
Then again, is there anything that suits the pop charts better than a love song? The Beatles have proven that one could make a living out of making romantic tunes, and even if they didn’t always look upon their other halves with love, there’s a reason why many Rolling Stones fans always go back to tracks like ‘Wild Horses’ to have their heartstrings tugged on that much more.
But Young was a bit of a different breed when looking at his songcraft. Toeing the line between a recovering folkie and a rock and roll troubadour, every one of Young’s songs tended to come from a place of anger or angst half the time. ‘Sugar Mountain’, while poetic, is still about the confusion that comes with growing up, and even his most iconic song, ‘Heart of Gold’, has more to do with him finding love rather than receiving any in return.
When working on ‘Like a Hurricane’, though, Young was smitten the night he wrote it after going with band members out to a bar. After locking eyes with a woman in the joint, Young was so enamoured that he immediately went home and started hammering out the tune.
While his bandmates have been there to witness him woodshedding tracks countless times, there was something different in his eyes this time around, with his neighbour Taylor Phelps recalling, “Neil had this amazing intense attraction to this particular woman named Gail – it didn’t happen, he didn’t go home with her. We go back to the ranch, and Neil started playing. Young was completely possessed, pacing around the room, hunched over a Stringman keyboard, pounding out the song.”
Looking through the lyrics, this is the closest to pure poetry that Young had ever written up to that point. Outside of the more intense tracks on After the Gold Rush, Young sounds like he’s trying to put the listener in the exact moment that he felt that night, where Gail looks as if she’s walking on air throughout the bar and hitting him like a ton of bricks if she actually bothers to talk to him.
And while Young still has a Dylanesque cadence to his voice, never once does it start sounding sarcastic or snobby. This is just a pure declaration of love in the same way that the greatest Motown bands did it back in the day, and while Young doesn’t come close to that musically, he knows the feeling like the back of his hand.
Because, really, Young doesn’t really have an insincere bone in his body. No matter what he feels, chances are he’s going to put it in his material, whether it’s wanting to see a change in the world or meeting a woman that leaves him in stitches with just one look.
