“It wasn’t to be”: The CSNY songs Neil Young never bothered to release
There’s no way for anyone to tell Neil Young what to do. The music that he makes is usually only being made because he wants to put it out, and if that bothers people that want to hear a sequel to Harvest Moon or After the Gold Rush, that’s too damn bad as far as he is concerned. And while the thought of hearing any new Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young songs is a pipedream at this point, Young still has loads of songs kept in his vault that never managed to see the light of day.
Because Young is never one to hang things up for years at a time and let things slide. He was always the one constantly working to see where his muse would take him next, and that meant putting everything that he could out into the world to reflect what he was doing at the time, even if it was something batshit insane like Everybody’s Rockin’ or Re·ac·tor.
It’s one thing for Young to put out the best record he could, but it can get infuriating for fans knowing that there are still masterpieces being left in the vaults. You have to remember that Young isn’t one for throwing away any of his tunes, and there can be countless versions of tunes like ‘Cortez the Killer’ in his backlog, each more ramshackle than the last, that people would love to hear.
But Crosby, Stills, and Nash were a bit of a different beast. Since Young got to call his own shots in his solo career, getting together music for a new album with the supergroup meant things had to be paired down. Even though it was clear when David Crosby or Graham Nash wrote a song, it was important to have a record that worked together as a whole rather than a glorified mixtape of songs, and that was always a point of contention.
And by 1974, it was clear that Young had had enough of his bandmates. The band themselves had treated the whole operation like a side project between their own solo records, but now it felt like Young was making music to fulfil a contract, and once he completed his run of dates, any discussion of a new album was dead in the water when he walked out on the group for his own career.
That did leave a few new songs like ‘Traces’ and ‘Love Art Blues’ as live cuts, but Young said there was no point in putting them out as CSNY songs, saying, “Listen, if they’d had new songs with the authority that their old songs had, we could’ve knocked off four and five of mine so that just the best two surfaced… That would have truly been CSNY. But it wasn’t to be, so the record never came out.”
That wasn’t a case of Young being picky at the end of the tour, either. When they reassembled in the 1980s for American Dream, Young was never going to give them anything great, considering he was saving a lot of his best stuff for when he released albums like Freedom a few years later.
Maybe we could have seen what a song like ‘Traces’ would have been in a studio environment, but Young felt that any attempt at a new album would be a case of the band chasing the money rather than making something from the heart. And if there’s one thing that every fan has learned from Young’s time in the spotlight, it’s that if it’s not from the heart, it’s not worth doing for him.
