Lyrically Speaking: Demystifying the surreal world of Neil Young song ‘Cinnamon Girl’
Without Neil Young‘s 1969 album Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, the emergence of grunge music in the early 1990s might never have occurred. In this album, Young adopted a unique guitar tuning known as double drop D, where both the high and low E strings were tuned down to D. Along with the use of substantial distortion, Young played a pivotal role in ushering in a raw and powerful sound revolution.
There are certain songs that appear as if they were composed in a feverish reverie, with the artist’s thoughts ensnared in the eerie yet captivating fog of a sickness-induced delirium. Surprisingly, this was the exact scenario for Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’. Young was in the throes of a battle with the flu when he crafted the lyrics, which explains some of its perplexing verses.
‘Cinnamon Girl’ serves as the opening track on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. This album followed the breakup of Buffalo Springfield and overlapped with his collaboration with Crosby, Stills, and Nash, marking his initial partnership with Crazy Horse as his supporting band, which he joined forces with after witnessing a performance by a group called The Rockets at the Whiskey a Go Go club in West Hollywood. There, he enlisted three musicians: Danny Whitten on second guitar and harmony vocals, Billy Talbot on bass, and Ralph Molina on drums.
Creating music with this band resolved the issue of excessive overdubbing that had defined Young’s first album, as their natural synergy allowed for a predominantly live recording process. Young’s musical partnership with Whitten, in particular, flourished. However, Whitten fell into a heroin addiction, ultimately becoming entirely consumed by the drug, leading to his removal from Crazy Horse.
Despite the later tragic loss of Whitten, his influence significantly shaped the sound of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. It’s his soaring harmonies that grace ‘Cinnamon Girl’, providing a perfect contrast to the song’s ruggedness achieved by the double drop D. focussing solely on the lyrics, however, the mystery surrounding its muse only grows as the song goes on.
Speculations have suggested that the song might reference Pamela Courson, Jim Morrison’s girlfriend and source of inspiration, who was present in that era and famously had fiery cinnamon-coloured hair. However, Young dismissed this notion, leading fans to consider his then-wife, Susan Acevedo, as a possible muse. In the liner notes of Young’s Decade, he states: “Wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me thru Phil Ochs eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife.”
A closer look at Young’s choice of words in the first verse shows that if it wasn’t about his wife, it was undoubtedly about someone who caught his eye. He sings: “I wanna live with a cinnamon girl / I could be happy the rest of my life with a cinnamon girl.” In the second verse, his poetic fixation becomes more apparent: “A dreamer of pictures I run in the night / You see us together chasing the moonlight / My cinnamon girl.”
By the third and fourth verses, Young’s feverish mentality comes through in his use of abstract vocabulary: “Pa sent me money now / You know I’ll make it somehow / I need another chance / You see your baby loves to dance / Yeah, yeah, yeah”.
Clearly, there was a subtle hint of infidelity involved, contributing to the song’s mysterious nature. For those familiar with rock history, it’s possible to infer that the song is about Jean Gray: the mention of ‘finger cymbals’ alludes to the fellow 1960s folk singer who, along with her husband Jim Glover, established the group Jim and Jean.
Young often alluded to dancing women in his songs, which he also includes in ‘Cinnamon Girl’. He was once asked about the reason behind this, to which he responded: “I remember this one girl, Jean Ray, she did a lot of dancing with finger cymbals.”
Jim Glover was also a college friend of Ochs’, and Young connected with the songwriter in the 1960s as part of the progressive folk scene. Young has often cited him as a significant influence; however, when asked whether the song was about Jean Ray specifically, Young stated that “only part of the song” was about her and that there are “images that have to do with other people”.
While the subject of ‘Cinnamon Girl’ remains uncertain, it also serves as a tribute to complete artistic spontaneity in songwriting. Young essentially allowed his instincts to guide him, resulting in lyrics that were simultaneously mystifying and surreal. It encapsulated a moment where he was fully immersed in the creative process. While the song might have been inspired by various muses in Young’s life, the poetic imagery crafted within the song is also deserving of recognition.
