The one album Neil Young refused to speak about for years
Everything that Neil Young has ever released feels like an open book into his psyche.
He can only be honest with his music, and even when he was making the most head-scratching music of his life, you could at least tell that he had some semblance of passion to what he was doing. And while that can be great for people trying to understand their favourite artist on a more intimate level, it can get more than a little bit uncomfortable when the audience expects Young to wear his heart on his sleeve at every single turn.
Because as much as Young might leave it all for the audience to figure out when releasing his records, it’s not like all of them are the easiest albums to listen to. There are plenty of great songs during his prime in the 1970s that are still one of the hardest listening experiences for most people. There might be a few fidelity issues now and again, but even on a record like Rust Never Sleeps, hearing him refer to Crosby, Stills and Nash as dead weight to him was bound to be a hard pill to swallow.
And let’s not forget when he made Tonight’s the Night. There had been albums of heartache before from songwriters like Joni Mitchell, but if Blue was the sound of a heart slowing breaking into a million pieces, Young was a shell of the musician that he used to be on this album, knowing that Danny Whitten was losing his battle with addiction halfway through and having no way of helping him.
It’s one thing to not be able to help out your friends, but even if they lose their personal battles, it’s better to at least set the best example for the next generation to follow. After all, the biggest names in songwriting had come to know Young as a rock and roll god, and by the time that grunge hit, he had gone from being a relic of the past to one of the biggest progenitors for the flannel and Doc Marten crowd.
Pearl Jam were always outspoken fans, and Young would even record with the Seattle heavyweights, but Kurt Cobain left a much harsher impression on the folk-rock icon when he passed away. Young could tell that he was struggling and was trying his best to get in contact with the Nirvana frontman, but after hearing his own lyrics being quoted back to him in Cobain’s suicide note, his grief came pouring out in Sleeps With Angels.
There doesn’t have to be overt mentions to the grunge scene to know that the record has overtones of Cobain’s passing, but Young ended up being too close to the album to want to discuss it, saying, “Sleeps With Angels has a lot of overtones to it, from different situations that were described in it – a lot of sad scenes. I’ve never really spoken about why I made that album. I don’t want to start now. I just don’t want to talk about that. That’s my decision. I’ve made a choice not to talk about it and I’m sticking to it.”
Even though a lot of what Young talks about on the record has to do with facing mortality, that actually fit right in with what his contemporaries were doing. The heavyweights like Bob Dylan would be writing tunes like ‘Tryin’ To Get to Heaven’ in the years that would follow, and even on Harvest Moon, Young had a few songs that seemed to be about preserving his own legacy as one of the founding fathers of modern songwriting.
So while Cobain may have been the catalyst for Young to switch up his approach to songwriting, it wasn’t like he was overtly trying to cash in on the angst of the 1990s, either. He had seen what the corporate world can do to an artist, and even if Sleeps With Angels had a lot in common with the other aging rockers of the time, it was more about Young trying to discover his own humanity again after losing one of the biggest figures in modern rock.
