The three songwriters Neil Young deems “the greatest”
After making broad strides alongside Stephen Stills in Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young blossomed into a stable solo career unlike any other. Never afraid to reinvent his sonic visage, the Canadian songwriter has encompassed folk, country, blues and rock and even pioneered grunge along the way.
Young’s ‘Godfather of Grunge’ handle manifested in the late 1980s, following his hybrid live/studio album of 1979, Rust Never Sleeps. Thanks to the raw, distorted reprise track with Crazy Horse, ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’, Young received praise from Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, among others, as the originator of the grunge sound. Besides this instrumental innovation, the artist is praised as one of the finest songwriters of his generation.
Where does such a songwriter learn the ropes? I hear you ask. From the best, of course. Young emerged at a time when Bob Dylan and the Lennon-McCartney partnership were at the height of their influence. Before Young befriended both, he was a huge fan and learned much from the three monumental songwriters.
In 1999, Young inducted McCartney into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He told the crowd: “The first song I learned to play was a Beatles song – ‘Give Me Money, That’s What I Want’. Paul McCartney is one of the greatest songwriters ever. He’ll be remembered hundreds of years from now.”
Young once revealed his unrivalled envy for Dylan in a similar breath of glowing praise. “He’s the master. If I’d like to be anyone, it’s him. And he’s a great writer, true to his music and done what he feels is the right thing to do for years and years and years,” Young told Time in 2005. “The guy has written some of the greatest poetry and put it to music in a way that it touched me, and other people have done that, but not so consistently or as intensely.”
Rising to prominence alongside Young and his supergroup bandmates, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash, was fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell. A promising artist on the Newport Folk Festival roster in the mid-1960s, Mitchell blossomed into one of her generation’s finest songwriters with seismic releases like Blue and Ladies of the Canyon.
In a 2022 appearance on The Zach Sang Show, Young remembered the first time he met his close friend, Mitchell. “I was 20, and she was about 22, or maybe one year older than me. I think we were in Winnipeg at the 4th Dimension Club,” Young recalled. “I was listening to her, I was local in Winnipeg, she was just passing through on the road with her husband, Chuck. They were a duo playing, and we talked a little bit, I got to know her and played her ‘Sugar Mountain’.”
Young concluded with the utmost praise for his kindred spirit. “I love Joni. She’s wonderful. She’s one of the greatest artists of our generation. She may be the greatest artist of our generation,” he said.
Watch Neil Young perform with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell in Martin Scorsese’s concert movie The Last Waltz below.
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