The Neil Young albums he called his least accessible: “As good as any record”
Success comes in waves, and one can never take a fruitful period for granted, as though that’s the way things are always going to be. Trends come and go as quick as a flash, and if you’re not willing to keep up with the demands of the changing tides, then you’re undoubtedly going to have to accept that a period in the wilderness is going to follow. You could argue that an artist such as Neil Young has successfully managed to navigate his way around this and managed to remain relevant at all stages of his career, but this wouldn’t be exactly true.
When you reach a point of stagnation in your career, there’s always going to be a burning desire to explore different avenues in order to freshen things up and keep the job exciting. Where earlier in your career, you might have been prohibited from putting out more experimental works due to a need to stay in the spotlight and keep the paychecks coming in, hitting a block in the road might be the perfect time to seize an opportunity and attempt something dramatically different.
However, there’s often an urge to phone it all in and churn out music until a wave of inspiration arrives once again, and forcing yourself to be at your absolute peak level of performance might prove to be a challenge in itself. Feeling compelled to remain a formidable force is tiresome, and sometimes just keeping your name on people’s lips by releasing at a steady rate is a good way to prolong the creative process, even if the returns are disappointing by comparison.
Saying that Young failed to retain his position as an imposing figure at the top of the pile after his prolific period at the start of the ‘70s would be unfair, especially seeing as he’s still enough of a titan to warrant being offered a headline slot at Glastonbury in 2025. However, he certainly had a period where his output wasn’t as well-received as classic albums like Harvest and On The Beach, and the man himself is acutely aware of how things began to decline for him in what was a difficult spell in the 1980s.
In a 1995 interview with Mojo, Young reflected upon how this decade was one of the most challenging periods of his career, and having been an active presence in the world of music for a decade and a half at this point, he knew that having done this for a long time was beginning to catch up with him and his creativity. “The ’80s are usually the period that people tell me they lost me or I lost them,” he told the publication. “What happened was that I just wasn’t being accessible. See, as far as I’m concerned, those records are as good as any record I’ve ever made. Maybe my ’80s music should just be looked at as one record. Maybe it would be easier for people to understand.”
While he cited albums such as Trans, Everybody’s Rockin’ and Old Ways as being albums that he holds a significant amount of pride in from the ‘80s, it’s true that they weren’t as well received as his prior efforts due to how inaccessible they might have been to audiences. Young also acknowledged that his reunion with Crosby, Stills and Nash for 1988’s American Dream was also an underwhelming moment in a torrid decade, claiming that it was “an attempt that failed to reach anything like its true potential,” before saying that “that’s no reason for me to not try it again sometime.”
He might have had a bit of a blip by his own strong standards during this period, but after the disappointment of the CSNY reunion, Young would return to a rich vein of form, and the success of albums such as Freedom, Ragged Glory and Harvest Moon at the turn of the decade would see him experience something of a resurgence. While things might not have always gone according to plan for him in terms of success, this return to the spotlight was proof that it is always possible to turn fortunes around.
