The one musician Neil Young feels closest to: “Like Mozart or Chopin or Beethoven”
Neil Young is rightly hailed as one of the most consequential musicians of his day and remains a juggernaut of popular culture. The Winnipeg native has accomplished a lot over his long career, and without him, the state of the music industry would not be as progressive as it is today.
Political, poetic and passionate, his work ranks among the very finest in existence. From 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to the recently released Toast, Young has delivered many significant moments in which people from all different works of life can find solace.
To have spent over five decades at the top of the rock world is a feat not many artists can achieve. Neil Young has done it not with gimmicks or pop prowess but by continuously writing songs which are deliberate, artistic and authentic. Few artists feel as genuine as Neil Young. Not plagued by ego or individualism, Young hasn’t just been one of the starring songwriters of his five decades in the limelight but he’s also been just as happy to take a back seat and let the band take the praise.
Ostensibly ‘The Godfather of Grunge’, there is no surprise that the most lauded alternative heroes all cite Young as a defining influence on their work. It’s a testament to the gravitas of his efforts that if you were to delete his music from the hard drive of history, we’d be without the likes of Nirvana, Radiohead, Oasis and Sonic Youth, four of the essential modern rock bands.
The praise of Thom Yorke and Kurt Cobain alone is enough to confirm Young’s status. A true icon, who still has much to give musically and personally, he’s one of music’s foremost philosophers and continues to deliver, even at his age.
Over the years, Young has given his opinion on many of his most prominent contemporaries, including The Beatles and Bob Dylan. However, despite him wasting no time in showering praise on the aforementioned artists, for Young, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys is a truly extraordinary figure.
Wilson masterminded everything that the California surf rockers did, and his chef-d’œuvre, 1966’s Pet Sounds, remains as breathtaking as it was upon release. A surreal, psychedelic body of work, the segue Wilson made from the sugary pop of their early days to this new cerebral style amidst ongoing personal problems is one of music’s fascinating tales.
To people of Young’s generation, Wilson’s genius was evident long before the release of Pet Sounds, but the record only served to crystallise what people had always known. In a statement shared on Wilson’s website, Young gushed about his old friend, comparing him to the great classical composers such as Mozart and Chopin.
Young opined: “He’s like Mozart or Chopin or Beethoven or something. This music will live forever. It’s going to be these melodies and these words. It’s just fantastic. I can’t describe it. There’s very few writers I feel the emotional and spiritual contact with that I feel with Brian.”
It’s quite hard to define the talent of Brian Wilson. Mercurial is a word often given to such artists who remain unquantifiable despite shifting millions of records, who hide in the shadows despite hitting the spotlight and the kind of artists who are as wholly indefinable as they are reliable to create majestic work. Brian Wilson, however, operates slightly above such a premise. He is the definition of a true artist.
