The one album Neil Young called “a gift”
Following a momentous spell working with Stephen Stills, David Crosby, and Graham Nash in various combinations throughout the late 1960s, the talented Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young resumed his solo career with great resolve, releasing his captivating third solo album, After the Gold Rush, in 1970. This balanced and eclectic record marked the beginning of a prolific and pivotal decade for the singer-songwriter.
“I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day.” As this excerpt from ‘On the Beach’ hints, Young is a particularly capricious artist. When writing material for his acoustic masterpiece, Harvest, in the early ’70s, Young unveiled a double life in the countryside, where a ranch offered a tranquil hippie retreat.
“About that time when I wrote [‘Heart of Gold’], and I was touring, I had also—just, you know, being a rich hippie for the first time—I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today,” Young said of ‘Old Man’ in the film Heart of Gold. “And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife, Clara. And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep.”
He added: “He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there’s this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, ‘Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?’ And I said, ‘Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s the darnedest thing I ever heard.’ And I wrote this song for him.”
Young’s capricious nature led him to explore a healthy breadth of styles from country and blues to the proto-grunge sound of The Rust Never Sleeps, which earned him the title of ‘The Godfather of Grunge’.
Young has remained prolific as a solo artist and alongside his Crazy Horse bandmates over the past four decades and continues to find deep satisfaction in musical projects. In a 2021 interview feature with Apple Music, Young met Zane Lowe at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Ranch recording studio in Malibu to discuss his recent work. During the conversation, Young highlighted the importance of location when recording an album.
“Geography is important,” he said. “Not just the room, but where is the room? Where am I? I really care about that because every time you move to a new place, everything changes. So in the music, you feel that some places are good for some things.”
“You looked like you were on top of the world when you recorded this one,” Lowe told Young regarding his new album, Barn.
“It’s really good to be with the people that are doing it, that want to do it, that understand what it is,” Young opined.
Lowe responded: “On NYA, you said that this was your best record or maybe the best you’d made with Crazy Horse?”
“It may be; it’s hard to say,” Young replied. “I know that I’m very thankful for having made it, and I think it was a gift, and everything in it works. And it’s not often that happens. It works for me; I don’t know if it works for anybody else, but for me, it works. Everything felt right, so I feel great about it.”
Lowe was interested to find out why Young felt Barn was a “gift” of an album to Young. “Well, it’s just the fact that we all got together and played, and we were in a new place that we hadn’t been before [log cabin],” Young continued. “It was there, and the logs – all round and big, huge logs – they have a sound. There’s no square edges on anything, so it gives you a different sound, everything’s round, every surface is on a curve, things bounce in different ways.
the musician concluded: “A lot of rooms you go into, and you’ll play, and one instrument will stick out because it’s resonating against the walls or something. In the barn, nothing sticks out, everything is there. Even a soft instrument is heard when a loud instrument is playing, and the loud instrument doesn’t seem to be as loud unless you go right over to it.”
Listen to ‘Song of the Seasons’, the lead single from 2021’s Barn, below.
