The songwriter Neil Young said will be remembered in 100 years: “One of the greatest”
Neil Young has always followed his own ethos. From the first time that he stepped up to the microphone to sing in Buffalo Springfield, Young wasn’t willing to play the game of the music industry, constantly reinventing his sound in the way that he felt that it should be delivered. Although Young has enjoyed one of the singularly weirdest careers of his contemporaries, he may have picked up a few tricks from one of his childhood heroes.
To have spent over five decades at the top of the rock world is a feat not many artists can achieve. Neil Young has done it not with gimmicks or pop prowess but by continuously writing songs which are deliberate, artistic and authentic. There are few artists who feel as genuine as Neil Young. Not plagued too deeply by ego or swayed by individualism, Young hasn’t just been one of the starring songwriters of his five decades in the limelight, but he’s also been just as happy to take a back seat and let the band take the praise.
Hardly any artists have been as prolific as Neil Young in their career. Never deterred by workload or expectation, Young has always been his own master and has made sure that everything he has done has been an accurate reflection of him.
When looking through his back catalogue, though, Young is not a one-trick pony. While many fans have labelled him the ‘Godfather of Grunge’ for his caustic side and celebrated the downtempo works he has made like Harvest, Young has been determined to stretch himself into whatever musical shape he can think of.
Across albums like Trans, Young was known to toy with synthesisers for the first time in his career, while an album like Everybody’s Rockin threw his sound back to the pre-British Invasion with various rockabilly tunes. Looking at Young’s versatility, though, he may have been taking inspiration from Paul McCartney’s willingness to go against the grain.
Although he may have earned the reputation as the most sensible member of The Beatles, McCartney was just as willing to push the envelope as the rest of the Fab Four. Getting into the avant-garde scene months before his bandmates, McCartney would continue to test the boundaries of his sound during his solo career, moving from stadium rock in the 1970s to pop fodder in the 1980s to eventually making various genre experiments like the jazzy reworking of RAM entitled Thrillington or his electronic soundscapes made under The Fireman.
While Young’s music may not have had the same immediacy as The Beatles, he did admit that the band helped give him his first standing ovation. When playing his first gig, Young remembered that the crowd exploded once they played ‘It Won’t Be Long’, having already played through a version of the Motown classic ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’.
When inducting McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Young would say that McCartney’s melodies are some of the most timeless pieces of music in the rock canon, saying, “I have a lot of respect for [Paul]. He’s just a great songwriter. One of the greatest songwriters, perhaps ever. I think he’ll be remembered hundreds of years from now for the work that he did, starting with ‘Yesterday’ and continuing into today and tomorrow hopefully.”
It’s not like Young is too far off the mark regarding the quality of McCartney’s songwriting. By going down different avenues and continuing to write phenomenal music, the former Beatle gave millions of fans a roadmap of what could be done within the rock medium, penning brilliant melodies that could stand up alongside the giants that came before him, from ‘Eleanor Rigby’ to ‘Penny Lane’.
Even though Young has crafted bulletproof melodies throughout his career, few can compare to what McCartney has given to the music world at large. Besides the rock medium, Macca’s work is sophisticated enough to stand next to compositions by Bach and Beethoven in the hallowed halls of music history.
