The albums Neil Young couldn’t stand making: “It was the worst period of my working life”
There’s no sense in arguing with Neil Young whenever he decides to make a record.
As much as people might like to push their artists in a direction that they think the fans will like, Young is more likely to hold up a stiff middle finger to anyone who dares to get in between him and his muse whenever he gets into the studio. He marched to the beat of his own drum every time he played, but that doesn’t mean that he was safe from making compromises every now and again, either.
Because as much as Young loves to play, not everything that he’s made has been absolutely perfect. There’s a definite sweet spot to his records if you know where to look, but out of all his classics, there are also albums like Everybody’s Rockin’ that were practically designed to be bad. I respect the fact that he put his label in his place by giving them something deliberately atrocious, but the rest of us were the sorry fans that had to end up listening to it at the end of the day.
Then again, some Young albums needed to marinade for a little longer to be fully appreciated. When you listen to an album like Trans, it’s easy to hear him going off the deep end in many respects by working with the vocoder, but considering the nice gesture this was towards his young son’s developmental disorders, it’s actually a lot more heartfelt that any other rock star trying to stumble their way into the 1980s.
But when switching to a new record label, Young’s history of following his muse had led to him slipping off the charts for years. What he needed was to get back in touch with what the kids were listening to, but whereas acts like David Bowie were prepackaged and gift-wrapped for the MTV generation, there had never been someone more allergic to the commercial side of the network than Young.
While he made it through the decade in one piece, Young remembered that records like Landing on Water were among the worst times he ever had in the studio, saying, “It was the worst period of my working life. I felt I was being manipulated and I began manipulating back. It was all so anti-creative. Making music became a hassle.” And if you listen to those records, it’s easy to understand why he was so pissed off.
Nothing about Young seemed designed for bright colours and neon lights, and even if you take away the god-awful video for ‘Weight of the World’, the fact that the song itself sounds like a guy trying to make a garage-rock approach to synth music stands next to CSNY’s American Dream as one of the worst decisions Young ever made during that decade. So once he got out of that tailspin, he was going to go in the exact opposite direction.
Compared to everything that he had to endure on the previous few records, a song like ‘This Note’s For You’ was like him turning the dial all the way to the other side. It wasn’t the first time that he talked about commercialisation, but whereas most of his peers could have come off as preachy or cringy depending on what they were working with, the odd bit of humour that Young throws into the mix felt a lot more genuine than whatever he had done before.
So, moral of the story: let Neil Young whatever record he wants. He was always more accustomed to following the right songs on each of his albums, and if he was told what “the right way” to make an album was supposed to be, you could pretty much guarantee that the exact opposite of that was what was going to come out.
