The musician Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard calls “the ultimate songwriter”
There is nothing quite like discovering a new artist with a plethora of music you can dive into. Often, you will go through their discography, enjoy it and then be happy to leave it there. Other times, you will come out of a listening session completely perplexed. That was the case when Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard first listened to Neil Young, as he was left shocked that more of his songs weren’t considered classics.
Pearl Jam is no stranger to songs flying under the radar. While they might be an incredibly popular band, once you get a discography over ten albums long, some records and songs will undoubtedly fall by the wayside. That’s what has happened with a lot of Pearl Jam’s music, as many tracks that are well within their rights to be called classics end up not getting picked up by fans in the way an artist would like them to. The same happened with Neil Young.
“To be honest, I hadn’t really listened to Neil Young until he asked us to play with him on Mirrorball; that had a huge impact upon us, and it was such a compliment,” said Gossard, discussing the first time he was exposed to Young’s music. “And when I went back and listened to all of his albums, they just blew me away. Even his most obscure records have songs that are so beautiful and so moving that you can’t believe they weren’t huge hits.”
Gossard went on to complement a plethora of Young’s albums, reeling off the likes of Sleeps With Angels, Trans Am, Western Hero and Change Your Mind as some of the best pieces of music he had ever heard. “It’s just ridiculous in the way it starts to climb each time for his solos. And this is one of the records that people don’t even talk about much!”
What is it that makes Young’s music so enticing? It depends on who you ask, but at the very heart of everything he does is precisely that: heart. Young is the kind of musician who puts his own taste ahead of everybody else’s. While this means that fans often overlook some music, it also means that whenever you listen to any of his albums, you are listening to someone who puts all they are genuinely passionate about into their work. This clearly resonates with Gossard, who isn’t afraid to call Young one of the best songwriters of all time.
“He’s the ultimate songwriter, singer, lead guitarist and soundscaper, he’s in that Dylan zone,” he said, “The way he mixes up distortion and feedback and blues and folk and rock and soul and noise is just inspirational. The way he digs solos out, just throttling his guitar, is masterful.”
Gossard isn’t alone in his assessment of Young, and the adoration that fans have for him should be a lesson to musicians to always keep the ideas they are passionate about at the forefront of their minds. If they mean a lot to them, they will likely mean a lot to somebody else, so just run with it.
