The two sets of lyrics Neil Young will always hate but be glad he wrote: “It takes a lotta nerve”
Alongside artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Neil Young gained a fierce reputation as one of North America’s finest wordsmiths. A dab hand at music arrangements and a much underrated guitarist though he was, Young’s skill were his devastating lines.
Whether it was the narrative he drew up within tracks like ‘Old Man’ and ‘Powderfinger’ or the ability to deliver truly poetic pieces of work like the unmentionably brilliant ‘Harvest Moon’ and real-life sadness of ‘Cinnamon Girl’. Young is perhaps a lyricist first and foremost.
But that doesn’t mean he has always got things right. On a number of occasions, Young has admitted that he didn’t quite hit the nail on the head. The songs ‘Southern Man’ and ‘Alabama’ were pointed enough, especially in the eyes of the proud southern band Lynyrd Skynyrd, to earn Young a bit of heat as he seemingly tore down the image of the southern states.
It was something Young would admit he got a bit wrong, sharing that ‘Southern Man’ was meant to focus on the civil rights movement and that ‘Alabama’ was “more about a personal thing than it is about a state,” he said, “And I’m just using that name and that state to hide whatever it is I have to hide; I don’t know what that means.”
But there are two more songs with lyrics that not only miss the mark, but can quite accurately be seen as a detriment to Young’s impressive lyrical legacy, but still bolster his record sales in one way or another. ‘Rockin in the Free World’ is a track that has found favour with a whole host of music lovers, both loved and hated. Quite possibly one of Young’s most famous compositions came about in curious circumstances. Young had spent the previous decade being deliberately obtuse, even provoking his record company to sue him for releasing music that was “unrepresentative of Neil Young”.
“I wrote that song out on the road,” Young would explain of the song’s main refrain. “I really don’t remember, except I know I wrote it all on my bus. I thought of the first line, rocking in the free world, keep on rocking in the free world. I said, Oh God, that really says something, but that’s such a cliché”.
“It’s terrible, [but] it’s such an obvious thing, and then I knew I had to use it!”
Neil Young
Another track, which he distinctly disliked for its lyrics, was ‘Sugar Mountain’. A perfectly balanced tune about Young growing old at the ripe old age of 19 is, according to the songwriter, beleaguered by a terrible verse. When performing in February 1971 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Young explained that he had selected the worst verse possible for this track out of the 126 attempts he had, a confession he picked, “the worst verse of the 126 that I wrote.”
He continued: “What I’m trying to say is, by stopping in the middle of the song, and explaining this to you, is that… I think it’s one of the lamest verses I ever wrote. And, uhh…it takes a lotta nerve for me to get up here and sing it in front of you people. But, if when I’m finished singing, you sing the chorus ‘Sugar Mountain’ super loud, I’ll just forget about it right away, and we can continue.”
The two sets of lyrics aren’t quite top of Young;s mantel when considering the rest of his work, and you’d be a fool not to recognise the cheesy quality of ‘Rockin’ in the free World’ or the immaturity within ‘Sugar Mountain’, but the truth is, every mistake we make along the way helps to define the person we become. It just so happens that Young has become one of the finest songwriters of our time, so perhaps it’s OK to have a misstep or two in your life, and be happy that they arrived when they did. Because chances are, they’re pushing you on towards something better.
