The 1962 song Neil Young called “the most beautiful” ever made
Not every Neil Young needed to sound absolutely perfect by the time that he walked out of the studio.
He was always going to put out what he felt sounded right, and even if there were a few songs that were out of tune, what mattered was being able to feel something in every performance he gave rather than working to have every song sound perfect. But Young still had a healthy amount of respect for the kind of musicians who could make any song sound heavenly whenever they picked up their instruments.
But if we’re being 100% honest here, is anyone going to claim that Young has the greatest voice in the world? He works well with the material that he writes, but there’s a good chance that no one was going to be listening to a song like ‘Heart of Gold’ and claim that he had the greatest voice in the world. He worked well for what he had, but there were a whole bunch more ideas that would have never been able to fly if he were put next to the true belters of the world or anything.
Nor were they supposed to. His voice is the sound of the everyman whenever he puts out one of his albums, and even though more than a few of his tunes are a bit ramshackle, that’s half of the appeal. But when you look at the greatest rock and roll singers that have come before him, Young was only a drop in the bucket when compared to what Elvis Presley could do. Time seemed to stop every time ‘The King’ sang, but there was no sense in competing with how Roy Orbison sang on every song.
Presley did get a lot of attention because of the unique hiccup in his voice, but Orbison sounded like a heavenly tenor that happened to be singing rock and roll. His sense of phrasing on every one of his songs sounded immaculate, and even when you look beyond the main hooks of his songs, the endings of each of his tunes have that impeccable high note that left the audience absolutely reeling by the end.
And while Young couldn’t recreate that kind of energy, he could at least tell when he was listening to a master at work, saying, “’Evergreen’ by Roy Orbison is one of the most beautiful sentiments ever recorded. I can still hear Roy’s voice and feel my girlfriend’s love. I loved Roy Orbison from the beginning—’Only the Lonely,’ that was big when we were visiting that lady at the record store.” Young couldn’t recreate what he was hearing on that song, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be influenced by Orbison in other ways.
He still sounded like a more nasally version of Bob Dylan on most of his tunes, but some of that phrasing that Orbison had could come through in his guitar playing. Young saved some of the most emotional moments of his songs for when he played guitar, and even if he had his own language on the instrument to a certain extent, some notes would pierce through sounding as crisp and clear as Orbison’s voice in a handful of tunes.
And it’s not like Young was alone in flying the flag. The Traveling Wilburys knew what they had on their hands when working with Orbison in the late 1980s, and every other member of The Beatles had nothing but good things to say about Orbison’s singing, especially when they began touring with him and saw him writing some of his greatest songs up close.
Most of what Young was doing was hard to gauge from one album to the next, but Orbison was the perfect example of someone who did every part of their job right in their mind. The Canadian icon might not have felt comfortable making the same record over and over again, but when someone has one of the greatest voices to ever grace the Earth, why the hell would they want to change anything?
