The five best forgotten Neil Young covers
2025 saw the release of the tribute album Heart of Gold: The Songs of Neil Young, a charity benefit covers record featuring great new versions of songs like ‘Lotta Love’ by Courtney Barnett and ‘Heart of Gold’ by Fiona Apple.
Those songs have both been covered before, ‘Heart of Love’ especially, but even a relative deep-cut like ‘Lotta Love’ has been given plenty of fine renditions from artists as disparate as MJ Lenderman and, in a beautiful disco-pop arrangement which you would never expect to work so well for a Neil Young-penned tune, Nicolette Larson, over the years.
Young can seem like an intimidating artist to cover for many. He has got such a sprawling body of work that even narrowing down which song to sing can seem like a gargantuan task. Added to that, he has such a distinctive, unique and idiosyncratic voice that imprints on all of his lyrics and really stamps each track his own. Yet as unique as his singing is, his writing can at times be so universal that another singer or voice can really unlock whole new dimensions, meanings and messages within the words.
Because of how distinctive Young’s own style is, and because there is really no one better than him at playing his unique style of swaggering, chopping, incisive, and brutally affecting brand of music. Hence, the best covers take his songs into new realms entirely. Rather than try to sing them in something approaching a Neil Young impression, when people sing his songs with their own voices, they always come off better.
As a testament to the depth and quality of his writing, his genre-defying influence and deep impact as an artist, almost all of his songs have at least a handful of covers worth listening to. Honourable mentions include things like Bob Dylan’s live versions of the 1972 classic ‘Old Man’ from his 2002 run of Never Ending Tour shows and Poolside’s complete re-working of the timeless ‘Harvest Moon’. There are plenty more worth mentioning, and plenty more worth remembering, but for now, here are five of the best forgotten Neil Young covers.
Five best Neil Young covers:
Norah Jones – ‘Barstool Blues’
Whether it’s on her own wonderful recordings or her incredible covers of songs by people like Hank Williams (Cold, Cold Heart), Tom Waits (Long Way Home), Bob Dylan (I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight) or Leonard Cohen (Everybody Knows), Norah Jones knows how to sing and how to sell a song, but this is Norah like we never normally hear her.
There is a dark groove here, a dirty, low-down and greasy rhythm. The music places you right on the barstool yourself listening to the rawhide road band playing their southern rhythms. Couple that with her sultry, smoky voice and Neil Young’s classic lyrics and this is a recording that will make you ask the barman to set ’em up, Joe, and pour another round.
Bettye LaVette – ‘Heart of Gold’
Bettye LaVette is a soul singer who should have been much bigger than she was. When you listen to her recordings of tracks like ‘He Made a Woman Out of Me’, her Charlie Rich cover ‘Behind Closed Doors’ or especially tracks like ‘Soul Tambourine’ and ‘Your Turn to Cry’, it’s a real wonder that she had to wait until the 2000s until people started taking note of her.
Though she’s now well known for her covers of Bob Dylan songs, her 1972 cover of ‘Heart of Gold’, released as a single on the Atco label, which failed to chart, blows everything she released on 2018’s Things Have Changed album out of the water. Still, better late than never, and so it is at least something that people finally started paying attention to this incredibly talented singer eventually.
Built to Spill – ‘Cortez the Killer’
One of the very few covers that ever did justice to a Neil Young by sounding a little like Neil Young, rather than taking the song in a new direction (shoutout here also to The Flaming Lips and their version of After the Goldrush).
But more than that, Built To Spill vocalist and guitarist Doug Martsch even plays guitar like Neil Young here on this epic, sprawling cover of Young’s epic and sprawling classic, ‘Cortez the Killer‘. Young might have one of the most unique voices in music, but he is also one of the most unique—and quietly underrated—guitarists, too. He can shred with the best of them, but gets more earth, blood, roots and soul into his solos than Eddie Van Halen, Slash, or Nuno Bettencourt could or would ever dream of doing.
Buddy Miles – ‘Down by the River’
Singing drummers don’t come along all that often, but when they do, they never come much better than Buddy Miles. Maybe Levon Helm runs him close, but that’s about it.
Though he famously played behind greats like Wilson Pickett and Jimi Hendrix, he was at his best when he was really given room to spread out and shine, like when he joined Michael Bloomfield’s project The Electric Flag. Though the band boasted the equally brilliant vocalist Nick Gravenites, Miles was exuberant and superlative on tracks like ‘Over Loving You’. He was at his best there, and he was at his best here, too, when covering ‘Down By The River’.
Merry Clayton – ‘Southern Man’
“Southern man, better keep your head / Don’t forget what your good book said” is a lyric that is as powerful and as prescient in 2025 as it was when it was written in 1970, but there is something far more powerful and prescient about hearing a black woman born in New Orleans singing the rest of the lyrics in this song as a white man from Canada, or just about anyone else, singing them.
Clayton, of course, is best known for her starring guest appearance on The Rolling Stones’ opus ‘Gimme Shelter’, but she should be best known for this, her funk-fuelled, fire-and-hellstone ‘Southern Man’.
Propelled by Paul Humphrey on drums, Billy Preston and Joe Sample on keyboards and David T Walker on guitar, and with none other than Carole King and Curtis Amy on backing vocal duty, this is one of the most swaggering, scorching, powerful and soulful three minutes of music you could ever hope to hear.
