The album Neil Young thought would live on forever: “If it’s true, it’ll be true forever”
Most artists aren’t thinking about their longevity whenever they write a song. Many of the greatest anthems of all time tend to just capture a singular moment in time, and if the writer is lucky, then the lyric will be just open enough to be passed down through multiple generations and still resonate. Although Neil Young never seemed all that concerned with what his musical legacy would be, he knew he had hit upon something extremely potent when working on On the Beach.
By the late 1970s, Young could have cared less about what the mainstream thought about his music. He never catered to other people’s definitions of success, which led to him making some of the strangest right turns in music, whether that was leaving behind the sound of Harvest to work on Rust Never Sleeps or eventually going fully electronic in the 1980s on Trans.
But On the Beach sees Young at one of his emotionally raw stages in life. Tonight’s the Night made us realise how much pain he had been going through, but these tunes were like the calm before the storm for that album, where Young goes into detail about the affair that had happened behind his back.
No one’s going to just shrug off those emotions, and some of the lyrics behind these tunes are among Young’s most emotionally frail. While it does feel like a lot more optimistic than what would end up coming to light afterwards, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to listen to, either, especially towards the end when Young performs ‘Revolution Blues’, which covered his feelings about the Charles Manson murders.
Then again, Young wasn’t necessarily an artist trying to keep things sugarcoated. He would gladly show fans the rawest pieces of his personality, and even though On the Beach is far from the easiest listening in his catalogue, he remained fiercely proud of what he had created decades after the fact.
When talking to The Age, Young knew that there was a certain power behind those songs that held up years after the fact, saying, “On the Beach is a record that reflected what was going on at that time, and what was going on in my life at that time, and I think, like anything, if it’s true in the first place, it’ll be true forever. It should just ring differently, but it will still ring. If you’re contriving it or working too hard to create something, then it’s not going to ring true later on.”
Young doesn’t really have to prove the fact that it still resonates, either. Looking at many of his contemporaries who had tried to ape his style and fell off, the reason why Young’s records still work is because they feel real. No matter when you hear it, it’s like listening to a band cutting loose in the studio and Young pouring his heart out every single time.
Even when the Canadian icon did have to cower to what the label wanted, the suits learned a vital lesson when it came to steering him in different directions. It’s one thing to nudge an artist towards a different style, but if Young doesn’t have his heart in it, you’ll get a record with zero personality.
