The 1989 Neil Young song that was too good to release: “It blew away ‘Freedom'”
Neil Young has always been a firm believer in ensuring albums have a coherent thread running through them above all else that connects everything together.
For Young, who can write at a prolific pace, albums have never been about simply collecting the best songs he’s written in the last two years and placing them on a record together. That’s not a mindset he has ever adopted, even if it means leaving some of his best work unreleased for decades until they finally have a fitting home.
A song sitting unreleased doesn’t mean that Young thinks it’s unworthy for the public to hear. Remarkably, his next album with The Chrome Hearts, which, as of writing, has yet to be officially announced, includes three songs that he penned back in 1963, before he’d had any success in the music industry.
In that case, they were simply songs that he’d forgotten about that re-emerged into his life. In a happy accident, they fit like a glove on the record. On the other hand, finding an appropriate album to place ‘Ordinary People’, which Young wrote in the late 1980s, was a much more difficult proposition for him.
‘Ordinary People’, which has a lengthy 18-minute run time, had to be the showstopper on any album it was included on. It couldn’t just be squeezed onto a record as a filler, and it was also simply too good to be thrown away as a B-side, which left Young in a strange position.
It was a bizarre conundrum that he had on his hands, but Young, essentially, had a song that was too important to him to release, which led to it rotting for close to two decades until the time finally felt right to share it.
Eventually, it appeared on his 2007 album Chrome Dreams II and was also selected as the lead single from the record. The entire album was sculpted in the image of ‘Ordinary People’, which was always destined to be the centrepiece of a project one day, when the time was right.
While ‘Ordinary People’ was recorded in 1988, it never drifted too far away from Young’s consciousness. However, despite making many albums over the next two decades that could have feasibly accommodated the song, Young didn’t feel comfortable doing so until Chrome Dreams II.
As the title suggests, ‘Ordinary People’ is an ode to the everyman and the battles they face while trying to make their way in the world are taking it “one day at a time”. At the song’s end, he throws his support behind this demographic by singing, “I got faith in the regular kind, hard workin’ people, Patch-of-ground people.”
Although the sentiment behind the song would be relevant no matter what the era it was released in, particularly in the late 1980s during the height of consumerism, Young believed 2007 was more fitting than ever.
During an interview with Uncut, he shared: “Today that song rings maybe even more true than it did then, so I felt that that’s a good example of a song without a home, a strong song that destroyed other songs when you put it with them.”
For a time, before it was officially released, Young regularly played ‘Ordinary People’ during his live shows. He did initially plan to include it on 1989’s Freedom before suffering a change of heart, and trusting his gut instinct. “When I recorded it, it would have gone on Freedom, but it blew away Freedom. Somehow, it just didn’t work,” he remarked.
Elaborating further on his thought process to throw ‘Ordinary People’ to the wayside, Young added: “It’s relentless, there is a lot of energy in that song. And it’s a little bit abusive as a listen because it is long. I mean, ‘Ordinary People’ is so overbearing that you might want to skip it every once in a while, just go, ‘I can’t go there right now’. And if you do, that’s fine.”
He frankly admitted, “‘Ordinary People’ wasn’t able to coexist with any other records until this one. It was always there. I said, this has got to come out, and it’s got to come out before the Archives because it has too much in it to be held back for 20 years.”
As much as ‘Ordinary People’ could have, theoretically, gone on Freedom, it would have pushed it to an 80-minute runtime and into double album territory, which seemingly went against his vision for the record. Moreover, Freedom is already built around ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, which begins and ends the LP, which would have made ‘Ordinary People’ a secondary component to the album.
Everything does happen for a reason, however, and eventually, ‘Ordinary People’ made it out of his archives, even though it took two decades longer than many of us would have liked.
