The song Neil Young wrote in memory of his hearse: “When I last saw you alive”
And yes, you did read that correctly. ‘Long May You Run’, the track taken from the 1976 Neil Young album Decade, was written to commemorate a formative moment in the musician’s life while paying tribute to the vehicle that allowed it to happen.
From a glance, ‘Long May You Run’ sounds like a tender ballad for a friend or perhaps a long-lost lover. In the first verse, Young sings: “We’ve been through / some things together /With trunks of memories / still to come/ We found things to do / in stormy weather / Long may you run”. That reference to a “trunk” full of memories, however, suggests that Young’s affection isn’t necessarily for a human companion.
‘Long May You Run’, written after Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young parted ways, is actually a tribute to Neil Young’s beloved Pontiac hearse, ‘Mort’. Young and Stephen Stills met in Los Angeles in the early 1960s, first collaborating in Buffalo Springfield before later joining Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The track began as a joint effort between Young and Stills. While it might seem unusual to sing such a tender ballad about something made of steel and rubber, it makes sense—Neil drove Mort from Toronto to Los Angeles in the early ’60s, a journey that led to meeting Stills and forming Buffalo Springfield.
But ‘Long May You Run’ is more than a tribute; it’s a eulogy. Young was in Canada at the time, driving Mort up to Sudbury, when the car started making some worrying noises. After sputtering its last fume-laced breath, Mort conked out in Blind River. It was late. There was nobody around. Mort was a goner. “Well, it was back in Blind River, in 1962, when I last saw you alive,” Young sings mournfully. The musician’s potent grief quickly moves beyond sentimentality, becoming almost comical in its sobriety.
On the surface, ‘Long May You Run’ is about a car—his beloved Mort, the 1948 Buick Roadmaster—but like all great Neil Young songs, it’s not just about the vehicle. It’s about time, about the passing of eras, about holding onto memories as they slip through your fingers like dust in the rearview mirror. The song’s easygoing rhythm, harmonica strains, and gentle acoustic strumming evoke a kind of sunlit melancholy, like watching the end of summer roll in.
Young’s voice, always somewhere between a whisper and a wail, carries a tenderness here that hits deep. When he sings, “We’ve been through some things together / with trunks of memories still to come,” it feels like he’s singing not just to a car but to a time, a place, maybe even a person he can’t quite get back.
The ballad of Mort and Neil is, of course, intentionally ironic. The entire Stills-Young collaboration was never taken too seriously—least of all by the musicians themselves. In 1976, Stephen Stills and Neil Young formed the Stills-Young Band and released an album titled Long May You Run. Stills contributed four songs, while Young added five, including the title track.
However, the project fell apart just nine days into the supporting tour after the two had a falling out. Young abruptly abandoned the tour, leaving Stills with nothing but a telegram that read: “Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach. Neil.”
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