Who was the female singer on Neil Young’s ‘Heart of Gold’?
Nothing that Neil Young ever made was meant to be sugarcoated.
Although there were faint hints of beauty across all of his albums, there are many times when you listen to what he’s doing and wonder if he’s officially lost his mind or is trying his best to make something that the masses are going to actively hate. Even if he marched to the beat of his own drum half the time, sometimes he needed the right person singing next to him to get the right feeling for some of his classics.
Because when looking at the best albums Young ever made, it’s impossible to tell that story without Crazy Horse. He was great on his own, but when listening to an album like Rust Never Sleeps, it’s hard to picture the entire album having any kind of weight to it if it didn’t have the rest of the band pushing and pulling at each other when going through their heavier tunes. But like all great heavy musicians, you can’t appreciate the riffs without knowing what it’s like for them to bring it down.
All great artists usually have their fair share of ballads to throw together, but there are also more than a few times where Young has kept a few of the rough edges in the mix. ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ is a brilliant song from a pure musical level, but when listening to the final version on Harvest, the lyrics can be more than a little bit uncomfortable at times, and when paired next to the massive string section, it’s not like Young was hitting every note perfectly in tune or anything.
Even if the album was Young’s commercial peak, he was going to do everything in his power to make the track work. There’s already a country spin to a lot of the tunes on the record, but when it comes to the song ‘Heart of Gold’, he seemed to find a small nugget of brilliance in between the more caustic songs like ‘Alabama’ and ‘Old Man’.
It also didn’t hurt that he had some of the biggest names in music beside him when working on the record. Despite James Taylor never playing a banjo before, he does manage to get a lot of great sounds out of it, but right as Young hits the chorus of ‘Heart of Gold’, some of the backing vocals may have seemed more than a little bit familiar.
Having worked with the biggest names in country rock at the time, the chorus features vocals from Linda Ronstadt, who absolutely soars on the chorus compared to Young. This was still a few years off from her releasing such classics as ‘Heart Like A Wheel’, but when you listen to her sing, everything is there, from the booming texture of her voice to the way that she subtly glides over the instrumentation whenever her part comes in.
Ronstadt did put in a lot of hours working on this one song, but she was already starstruck to be working with someone of Young’s calibre. He was one of the guiding lights of the Americana movement, and even if that didn’t make sense given his Canadian origins, getting her to sing backup did help put him in the good graces of the rest of the country-rockers that he had worked with when he was in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.
While most of us would have probably preferred if Ronstadt were turned up a little bit more in the mix, there’s something profoundly ‘Neil Young’ about the fact that her voice gets buried in the final version. Like all his music, there’s some true beauty within his tunes, but you might need to look a little closer to find it.
