Neil Young Discography. Part 2 (1980-1994) Re-up

After Neil Young left the California folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in 1968, he slowly established himself as one of the most influential and idiosyncratic singer/songwriters of his generation. Young's body of work ranks second only to Bob Dylan in terms of depth, and he was able to sustain his critical reputation, as well as record sales, for a longer period of time than Dylan, partially because of his willfully perverse work ethic. From the beginning of his solo career in the late '60s through to the 21st century, he never stopped writing, recording, and performing; his official catalog only represented a portion of his work, since he kept countless tapes of unreleased songs in his vaults.
Just as importantly, Young continually explored new musical territory, from rockabilly and the blues to electronic music. But these stylistic exercises only gained depth when compared to his two primary styles: gentle folk and country-rock, and crushingly loud electric guitar rock, which he frequently recorded with the Californian garage band Crazy Horse. Throughout his career, Young alternated between these two extremes, and both proved equally influential; there were just as many singer/songwriters as there were grunge and country-rock bands claiming to be influenced by Neil Young. Despite his enormous catalog and influence, Young continued to move forward, writing new songs and exploring new music. That restless spirit ensured that he was one of the few rock veterans as vital in his old age as he was in his youth.
Born in Toronto, Canada, Neil Young moved to Winnipeg with his mother following her divorce from his sports journalist father. Young began playing music in high school. Not only did he play in garage rock outfits like the Squires, but he also played in local folk clubs and coffeehouses, where he eventually met Joni Mitchell and Stephen Stills. During the mid-'60s, he returned to Toronto, where he played as a solo folk act. By 1966, he joined the Mynah Birds, which also featured bassist Bruce Palmer and Rick James. The group recorded an album's worth of material for Motown, none of which was released at the time. Frustrated by his lack of success, Young moved to Los Angeles in his Pontiac hearse, taking Palmer along as support. Shortly after they arrived in L.A., they happened to meet Stills, and they formed Buffalo Springfield, who quickly became one of the leaders of the Californian folk-rock scene.

Despite the success of Buffalo Springfield, the group was plagued with tension, and Young quit the band several times before finally leaving to become a solo artist in May of 1968. Hiring Elliot Roberts as his manager, Young signed with Reprise Records and released his eponymous debut album in early 1969. By the time the album was released, he had begun playing with a local band called the Rockets, which featured guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot, and drummer Ralph Molina. Young renamed the group Crazy Horse and had them support him on his second album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which was recorded in just two weeks. Featuring such Young staples as "Cinnamon Girl" and "Down by the River," the album went gold. Following the completion of the record, he began jamming with Crosby, Stills & Nash, eventually joining the group for their spring 1970 album, Déjà Vu. Although he was now part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Young continued to record as a solo artist, releasing After the Gold Rush in August 1970. After the Gold Rush, with its accompanying single "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," established Young as a solo star, and fame only increased through his association with CSN&Y.

Although Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were a very successful act, they were also volatile, and they had split by the spring 1971 release of the live Four Way Street. The following year, Young had his first number one album with the mellow country-rock of Harvest, which also featured his first (and only) number one single, "Heart of Gold." Instead of embracing his success, he spurned it, following it with the noisy, bleak live film Journey Through the Past. Both the movie and its soundtrack received terrible reviews, as did the live Time Fades Away, an album recorded with the Stray Gators that was released in 1973.

Both Journey Through the Past and Time Fades Away signaled that Young was entering a dark period in his life, but they only scratched the surface of his anguish. Inspired by the overdose deaths of Danny Whitten in 1972 and his roadie Bruce Berry the following year, Young wrote and recorded the bleak, druggy Tonight's the Night late in 1973, but declined to release it at the time. Instead, he released On the Beach, which was nearly as harrowing, in 1974; Tonight's the Night finally appeared in the spring of 1975. By the time of its release, Young had recovered, as indicated by the record's hard-rocking follow-up, Zuma, an album recorded with Crazy Horse and released later that year.

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Neil Young Discography. Part 2 (1980-1994) Re-up

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Young's focus began to wander in 1976, as he recorded the duet album Long May You Run with Stephen Stills and then abandoned his partner midway through the supporting tour. The following year he recorded the country-rock-oriented American Stars 'n Bars, which featured vocals by Nicolette Larson, who was also prominent on 1978's Comes a Time. Prior to the release of Comes a Time, Young scrapped the country-rock album Homegrown and assembled the triple-album retrospective Decade. At the end of 1978, he embarked on an arena tour called Rust Never Sleeps, which was designed as a showcase for new songs. Half of the concert featured Young solo, the other half featured him with Crazy Horse. That was the pattern that Rust Never Sleeps, released in the summer of 1979, followed. The record was hailed as a comeback, proving that Young was one of the few rock veterans who attacked punk rock head-on. That fall he released the double album Live Rust and the live movie Rust Never Sleeps.

Rust Never Sleeps restored Young to his past glory, but he perversely decided to trash his goodwill in 1980 with Hawks & Doves, a collection of acoustic songs that bore the influence of conservative, right-wing politics. In 1981, Young released the heavy rock album Re*ac*tor, which received poor reviews. Following its release, he left Reprise for the fledgling Geffen Records, where he was promised lots of money and artistic freedom. Young decided to push his Geffen contract to the limit, releasing the electronic Trans in December 1982, where his voice was recorded through a computerized vocoder. The album and its accompanying technology-dependent tour were received with bewildered, negative reviews. The rockabilly of Everybody's Rockin' (1983) was equally scorned, and Young soon settled into a cult audience for the mid-'80s.

Over the course of the mid-'80s, Young released three albums that were all stylistic exercises. In 1985, he released the straight country Old Ways, which was followed by the new wave-tinged Landing on Water the following year. He returned to Crazy Horse for 1987's Life, but by that time, he and Geffen had grown sick of each other, and he returned to Reprise in 1988. His first album for Reprise was the bluesy, horn-driven This Note's for You, which was supported by an acclaimed video that satirized rock stars endorsing commercial products. At the end of the year, he recorded a reunion album with Crosby, Stills & Nash called American Dream, which was greeted with savagely negative reviews.

American Dream didn't prepare any observer for the critical and commercial success of 1989's Freedom, which found Young following the half-acoustic/half-electric blueprint of Rust Never Sleeps to fine results. Around the time of its release, Young became a hip name to drop in indie rock circles, and he was the subject of a tribute record titled The Bridge in 1989. The following year, Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Ragged Glory, a loud, feedback-drenched album that received his strongest reviews since the '70s. For the supporting tour, Young hired the avant rock band Sonic Youth as his opening group, providing them with needed exposure while earning him hip credibility within alternative rock scenes. On the advice of Sonic Youth, Young added the noise collage EP Arc as a bonus to his 1991 live album, Weld.

Weld and the Sonic Youth tour helped position Neil Young as an alternative and grunge rock forefather, but he decided to abandon loud music for its 1992 follow-up, Harvest Moon. An explicit sequel to his 1972 breakthrough, Harvest Moon became Young's biggest hit in years, and he supported the record with an appearance on MTV Unplugged, which was released the following year as an album. Also in 1993, Geffen released the rarities collection Lucky Thirteen. The following year, he released Sleeps with Angels, which was hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters. Following its release, Young began jamming with Pearl Jam, eventually recording an album with the Seattle band in early 1995. The resulting record, Mirror Ball, was released to positive reviews in the summer of 1995, but it wasn't the commercial blockbuster it was expected to be; due to legal reasons, Pearl Jam's name was not allowed to be featured on the cover.

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Neil Young Discography. Part 2 (1980-1994) Re-up

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In the summer of 1996, he reunited with Crazy Horse for Broken Arrow and supported it with a brief tour. That tour was documented in Jim Jarmusch's 1997 film The Year of the Horse, which was accompanied by a double-disc live album. In 1999, Young reunited with Crosby, Stills & Nash for the first time in a decade, supporting their Looking Forward LP with the supergroup's first tour in a quarter century. A new solo effort, Silver & Gold, followed in the spring of 2000. In recognition of his 2000 summer tour, Young released the live album Road Rock, Vol. 1 the following fall, showcasing a two-night account of Young's performance at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, Colorado, in September 2000. A DVD version titled Red Rocks Live was issued that December, including 12 tracks initially unavailable on Road Rock, Vol. 1. His next studio project was his most ambitious yet, a concept album about small-town life titled Greendale that he also mounted as a live dramatic tour and indie film.

n early 2005, Young was diagnosed with a potentially deadly brain aneurysm. Undergoing treatment didn't slow him down, however, as he continued to write and record his next project. The acoustically based Prairie Wind appeared in the fall, with the concert film Heart of Gold, based around the album and directed by Jonathan Demme, released in 2006. That year also saw the release of the controversial CD/DVD Living with War, a collection of protest songs against the war in Iraq that featured titles such as "Let's Impeach the President," "Shock and Awe," and "Lookin' for a Leader." Restless, prolific, and increasingly self-referential, Young issued Chrome Dreams II late in 2007 and the car-themed Fork in the Road in 2009. Later in 2009, Young finally released the first installment in his long-rumored Archives series, Archives, Vol. 1, a massive first volume that combined over ten CD and DVD discs in a single box. As he was prepping Archives, Vol. 2, Young entered the studio with producer Daniel Lanois and recorded Le Noise, which appeared in the fall of 2010.

Young, Richie Furay, and Stephen Stills finally reunited as Buffalo Springfield for a pair of shows at Young's annual Bridge School Benefit in the fall of 2010. It wasn't a complete reunion, since bassist Bruce Palmer had died in 2004 and drummer Dewey Martin passed in 2009, but the three singers used drummer Joe Vitale and bassist Rick Rosas to fill in. The same configuration played six concerts in the spring of 2011 but reportedly did no studio work. Young continued going through his archives with the release of A Treasure in 2011, a single-disc set of live tracks recorded during his 1984-1985 tour with the International Harvesters that featured five previously unreleased Young songs mixed in with older songs like "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" and "Are You Ready for the Country?," all done in the classic Harvest style. In 2012, Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Americana, a set of classic folk tunes like "This Land Is Your Land" and "Wayfarin' Stranger," followed several months later by the double-disc album of originals Psychedelic Pill, which again saw Young turning to the guitar garage stomp of Crazy Horse. A month prior to the October release of Psychedelic Pill, Young published his memoir, Waging Heavy Peace.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Following the triumph of Rust Never Sleeps, Hawks & Doves benefited from the enormous critical goodwill Neil Young had amassed, though fans and critics nevertheless were baffled by its set of obscure acoustic and country-tinged songs. The seven-plus-minute "The Old Homestead" (copyright 1974) was interpreted by some as an allegory for Young's relationship to CSNY, perhaps because that was the only way to make any sense of the most mysterious Young lyric since "The Last Trip to Tulsa." In retrospect, now that it's known Young was distracted by domestic medical concerns while working on the album, its theme of perseverance in the face of adversity, both in a personal context of family commitment ("Stayin' Power," "Coastline"), and in a national context of hard work and patriotism ("Union Man," "Comin' Apart at Every Nail," "Hawks & Doves") seems more apparent, as does the sense that Young may have been trying to fulfill his recording contract (even with the inclusion of trunk songs like "The Old Homestead," the album runs less than half an hour) while devoting a bare minimum of his time and attention to the effort. The result is correspondingly slight.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01 - Little Wing [2:16]
02 - The Old Homestead [7:43]
03 - Lost In Space [4:21]
04 - Captain Kennedy [2:59]
05 - Stayin' Power [2:22]
06 - Coastline [2:30]
07 - Union Man [2:13]
08 - Comin' Apart At Every Nail [2:40]
09 - Hawks & Doves [3:28]

Neil Young employs Crazy Horse to help him bash out a guitar-drenched hard rock set made up of thrown-together material. The group plays fiercely, as usual, but the lyrics are sketchy, seemingly improvised (the nadir is the nine-minute "T-Bone," which consists of the lines "Got mashed potato/Ain't got no t-bone" repeated over and over), and frequently cranky, as in "Motor City," which finds Young criticizing Japanese cars, and "Rapid Transit," which takes a belated swipe at new wave music while sounding like second-rate Talking Heads. For the second album in a row, Young seems to be just fulfilling his one-album-a-year record contract. The exception is the album-closing "Shots" (written by 1978), a more substantive and threatening song given a riveting performance. Later, it would be revealed that Young was finding time for his music while giving most of his attention to caring for his disabled son. Still, he might have been better advised to have suspended record-making for a few years instead of turning out half-baked efforts like this one.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01. Opera Star
02. Surfer Joe And Moe The Sleaze
03. T-Bone
04. Get Back On It
05. Southern Pacific
06. Motor City
07. Rapid Transit
08. Shots

When it was released, Trans was Neil Young's most baffling album. He had employed a vocoder to synthesize his voice on five of the album's nine tracks, resulting in disembodied singing, the lyrics nearly impossible to decipher without the lyric sheet. And even when you read the words, "Computer Age," "We R in Control," "Transformer Man," "Computer Cowboy," and "Sample and Hold" seemed like a vague mishmash of high-tech jargon. Later, Young would reveal that some of the songs expressed a theme of attempted communication with his disabled son, and in that context, lines like "I stand by you" and "So many things still left to do/But we haven't made it yet" seemed clearer. But the vocoder, which robbed Young's voice of its dynamics and phrasing, still kept the songs from being as moving as they were intended to be. And despite the crisp dance beats and synthesizers, the music sounded less like new Kraftwerk than like old Devo. A few more conventional Young songs (left over from an earlier rejected album) seemed out of place. Trans had a few good songs, notably "Sample and Hold" (which seemed to be about a computer dating service for robots), a remake of "Mr. Soul," and "Like an Inca" (an intended cross between "Like a Hurricane" and "Cortez the Killer"?), but on the whole it was an idea that just didn't work.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

1. Little Thing Called Love (3:13)
2. Computer Age (5:25)
3. We R in Control (3:32)
4. Transformer Man (3:24)
5. Computer Cowboy (a.k.a. Skycrusher) (4:14)
6. Hold on to Your Love (3:28)
7. Sample and Hold (8:04)
8. Mr. Soul (3:19)
9. Like an Inca (9:46)

By following the hi-tech Trans after only seven months with a rockabilly album, Neil Young baffled his audience. Just as he had followed the sales peak of Harvest in 1972 with a series of challenging, uncommercial albums, Young had now dissipated the commercial and critical acceptance he had enjoyed with 1979's Rust Never Sleeps with a series of mediocre albums and inexplicable genre exercises. Everybody's Rockin', credited to "Neil & the Shocking Pinks," represented the nadir of this attempted career suicide. Running less than 25 minutes, it found Young covering early rock evergreens like "Betty Lou's Got a New Pair of Shoes" and writing a few songs in the same vein ("Kinda Fonda Wanda"). If he had presented this as a mini-album at a discount price, it would have been easier to enjoy the joke Young seemed to intend. As it was, fans who already had their doubts about Young dropped off the radar screen; Everybody's Rockin' was his lowest-charting album since his 1969 solo debut, and he didn't release another album for two years (his longest break ever between records).

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

1. "Betty Lou's Got a New Pair of Shoes" (Bobby Freeman) 3:02
2. "Rainin' in My Heart" (Slim Harpo/Jerry West) 2:11
3. "Payola Blues" (Ben Keith/Neil Young) 3:09
4. "Wonderin'" (Young) 2:59
5. "Kinda Fonda Wanda" (Tim Drummond/Young) 1:51
6. "Jellyroll Man" (Young) 2:00
7. "Bright Lights, Big City" (Jimmy Reed) 2:18
8. "Cry, Cry, Cry" (Young) 2:39
9. "Mystery Train" (Junior Parker/Sam Phillips) “ 2:47
10. "Everybody's Rockin'" (Young) 1:57

In 1984, Geffen Records sued Neil Young on the grounds that he had submitted uncharacteristic, uncommercial records to the label. By the time a settlement had been reached, Young had been on the road with a country band called the International Harvesters for over a year and recorded a revamped version of Old Ways, a 1982 recording originally rejected by Geffen that was cut in the style of Harvest and Comes a Time, but with a stronger country leaning. Young depends heavily on friends, especially for vocals – Waylon Jennings sings harmony on six out of the ten tracks, and one of the others is a duet with Willie Nelson. Though populated by cowboys and country references, Young's take on the genre is typically idiosyncratic, including a reworked version of his autobiography in "Get Back to the Country," a cover of the 1956 Gogi Grant hit "The Wayward Wind," and the uncategorizable "Misfits," which portrays astronauts watching Muhammad Ali fights on television in space. Old Ways is not a great Neil Young album and at the time of its release served to alienate him even further from his audience, but it has its moments.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

1. The Wayward Wind (3:13)
2. Get Back to the Country (2:51)
3. Are There Any More Real Cowboys? (3:04)
4. Once an Angel (3:56)
5. Misfits (5:07)
6. California Sunset (2:57)
7. Old Ways (3:08)
8. My Boy (3:37)
9. Bound for Glory (5:48)
10. Where Is the Highway Tonight? (3:03)

Backed only by co-producer Danny Kortchmar on guitar and Steve Jordan on drums, with all three playing synthesizers, Neil Young turns in an album that attempts to mix the raunchy rock thrust of his Crazy Horse-style music with contemporary trends in pop, especially the tendency to turn the drums way up in the mix. It's an uneasy combination in which Jordan's forceful drumming dominates the tracks, with Young's vocals nearly buried. But that only means that the production has ruined a group of songs few of which were any good anyway. The only one that offers the promise of being one of Young's better efforts is "Hippie Dream," a sober criticism of what became of '60s idealism in general and Young's erstwhile bandmate David Crosby in particular. But if Landing on Water was not a good album, at least it seemed to point Young away from the stylistic dabbling of his last three albums and back toward the kind of rock he did best, and at least some of his fans returned as a result, giving him a slight uptick in sales.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01 - Weight Of The World [3:43]
02 - Violent Side [4:23]
03 - Hippie Dream [4:14]
04 - Bad News Beat [3:17]
05 - Touch The Night [4:31]
06 - People On The Street [4:34]
07 - Hard Luck Stories [4:09]
08 - I Got A Problem [3:19]
09 - Pressure [2:47]
10 - Drifter [5:04]

In the fall of 1978, Neil Young undertook a North American tour with Crazy Horse, then added overdubs to new songs recorded on the tour for one of his best albums, Rust Never Sleeps. In the fall 1986, he did the same thing, but Life, Young's first album with Crazy Horse since 1981's Re-ac-tor, was not one of his best albums. It was, however, better than most of the other albums he had made in the 1980s, and it was the first really interesting album he'd made in a long time. Despite the return to Crazy Horse, Young continued to use some of the production techniques from Landing on Water, especially the loud drums and the synthesizers. But he mixed things up, including acoustic-based songs such as "Long Walk Home" (which recalled "After the Gold Rush") and "Inca Queen" (the third in his series of long, atmospheric songs about the Incas) and rockers like "Prisoners of Rock 'n' Roll." The last, with its attacks on "record company clowns" and chorus "that's why we don't want to be good," seemed intended as the theme song for the Rusted-Out Garage Tour on which it was performed and served as a reminder that Young was still at odds with Geffen Records, which he left after releasing this album. Despite the criticism he had endured for his support of President Reagan's military buildup, Young had foreign policy on his mind in the action-movie-in-song "Mideast Vacation" and in "Long Walk Home," which addressed military misadventures from Vietnam to Beirut. It could be argued that Young was repeating himself on much of this material and that the album was typically uneven. But Life was an encouraging step back to the tried and true for an exploratory artist who finally seemed to have realized that he had experimented too much for his own good.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01 - Mideast Vacation [4:21]
02 - Long Walk Home [4:56]
03 - Around The World [5:26]
04 - Inca Queen [7:56]
05 - Too Lonely [2:48]
06 - Prisoners Of Rock'n'Roll [3:12]
07 - Cryin' Eyes [2:52]
08 - When Your Lonely Heart Breaks [5:16]
09 - We Never Danced [3:37]

A collective groan from Neil Young fans could be heard when it was announced that, as his return to Reprise Records, Young was engaging in yet another genre experiment, this time recording blues and R&B with a six-piece horn section. If Landing on Water and Life had been lackluster, at least they hadn't been as embarrassing as Young's forays into rockabilly (Everybody's Rockin') and techno (Trans). And if you took This Note's for You on its own genre terms, it could be just as laughable. A song like "Sunny Inside," with its marching rhythm and charging horn charts, seemed to demand a forceful, gritty singer on the order of Wilson Pickett, and Young's watery tenor just didn't cut it. But the album was only half up-tempo numbers; the other half was bluesy ballads for which Young's singing was effective and on which he sounded more personally involved than he had in years. And even on the rockers, his sense of humor often carried the day. This Note's for You was the best of Young's stylistic side trips because it was the only one in which the style augmented his own instead of overwhelming him. The songs were mediocre, but the playing was spirited. The album earned much better reviews than Young had gotten lately, largely because critics tend to stand in awe of the blues in whatever form it appears. And Young got further kudos due to his contretemps with MTV when the video channel first declined to program a clip for the title song because it featured parodies of popular MTV artists and commercial sponsors, then caved in and named it Best Video of the Year. Lost in all that hoopla, however, was that record buyers never came to the party. This Note's for You was another commercial failure for Young, and it was apparent that, to lure back his audience, he would have to go back to making the kind of music his fans had liked a decade before.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01 - Ten Men Workin' [6:28]
02 - This Note's For You [2:05]
03 - Coupe De Ville [4:18]
04 - Life In The City [3:14]
05 - Twilight [5:54]
06 - Married Men [2:39]
07 - Sunny Inside [2:37]
08 - Can't Believe Your Lyin' [2:58]
09 - Hey Hey [3:05]
10 - One Thing [6:01]

Neil Young is famous for scrapping completed albums and substituting hastily recorded ones in radically different styles. Freedom, which was a major critical and commercial comeback after a decade that had confused reviewers and fans, seemed to be a selection of the best tracks from several different unissued Young projects. First and foremost was a hard rock album like the material heard on Young's recent EP, Eldorado (released only in the Far East), several of whose tracks were repeated on Freedom. On these songs – especially "Don't Cry," which sounded like a song about divorce, and a cover of the old Drifters hit "On Broadway" that he concluded by raving about crack – Young played distorted electric guitar over a rhythm section in an even more raucous fashion than that heard on his Crazy Horse records. Second was a follow-up to Young's previous album, This Note's for You, which had featured a six-piece horn section. They were back on "Crime in the City" and "Someday," though these lengthy songs, each of which contained a series of seemingly unrelated, mood-setting verses, were more reminiscent of songs like Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" than of the soul standards that inspired the earlier album. Third, there were tracks that harked back to acoustic-based, country-tinged albums like Harvest and Comes a Time, including "Hangin' on a Limb" and "The Ways of Love," two songs on which Young dueted with Linda Ronstadt. There was even a trunk (or, more precisely, a drunk) song, "Too Far Gone," which dated from Young's inebriated Stars 'n Bars period in the '70s. While one might argue that this variety meant few Young fans would be completely pleased with the album, what made it all work was that Young had once again written a great bunch of songs. The romantic numbers were carefully and sincerely written. The long imagistic songs were evocative without being obvious. And bookending the album were acoustic and electric versions of one of Young's great anthems, "Rockin' in the Free World," a song that went a long way toward restoring his political reputation (which had been badly damaged when he praised President Reagan's foreign policy) by taking on hopelessness with a sense of moral outrage and explicitly condemning President Bush's domestic policy. Freedom was the album Neil Young fans knew he was capable of making, but feared he would never make again.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01 - Rockin' In The Free World [3:41]
02 - Crime In The City (Sixty To Zero Part I) [8:45]
03 - Don't Cry [4:16]
04 - Hangin' On A Limb [4:19]
05 - Eldorado [6:05]
06 - The Ways Of Love [4:30]
07 - Someday [5:42]
08 - On Broadway [4:59]
09 - Wrecking Ball [5:10]
10 - No More [6:06]
11 - Too Far Gone [2:49]
12 - Rockin' In The Free World [4:42]

Having re-established his reputation with the musically varied, lyrically enraged Freedom, Neil Young returned to being the lead guitarist of Crazy Horse for the musically homogenous, lyrically hopeful Ragged Glory. The album's dominant sound was made by Young's noisy guitar, which bordered on and sometimes slipped over into distortion, while Crazy Horse kept up the songs' bright tempos. Despite the volume, the tunes were catchy, with strong melodies and good choruses, and they were given over to love, humor, and warm reminiscence. They were also platforms for often extended guitar excursions: "Love to Burn" and "Love and Only Love" ran over ten minutes each, and the album as a whole lasted nearly 63 minutes with only ten songs. Much about the record had a retrospective feel – the first two tracks, "Country Home" and "White Line," were newly recorded versions of songs Young had played with Crazy Horse but never released in the '70s; "Mansion on the Hill," the album's most accessible track, celebrated a place where "psychedelic music fills the air" and "peace and love live there still"; there was a cover of the Premiers' garage rock oldie "Farmer John"; and "Days That Used to Be," in addition to its backward-looking theme, borrowed the melody from Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages" (by way of the Byrds' arrangement), while "Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)" was the folk standard "The Water Is Wide" with new, environmentally aware lyrics. Young was not generally known as an artist who evoked the past this much, but if he could extend his creative rebirth with music this exhilarating, no one was likely to complain.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01. Country home (07:06)
02. White line (02:58)
03. Fuckin' up (05:55)
04. Over and over (08:28)
05. Love to burn (10:00)
06. Farmer John (04:14)
07. Mansion on the hill (04:48)
08. Days that used to be (03:42)
09. Love and only love (10:18)
10. Mother earth (natural anthem) (05:11)

Neil Young's sequel to 1972's HARVEST found him reuniting with the Stray Gators and inviting along a few other famous friends. Unlike Crazy Horse's sonic bludgeoning, the Gators' light playing featured ethereal-sounding pedal steel and harmonies that caressed like a gentle lover. This was the perfect compliment for Young's songwriting, which was fueled by romantic notions of courtship and deep thought. Young and Nicolette Larson harmonized and became the lovers of "You and Me," whereas Jack Nitzsche's string arrangements made for a nice contrast in "Such a Woman," a bold-faced declaration of love. Other insights into the normally cranky iconoclast's sentimental side include the delicate touch of the title track, which leaves an image of slow-dancing in a dark corner.

Fast approaching 50, Neil Young also used HARVEST MOON to reflect back on his life, particularly in the biographical "One of These Days," and "From Hank to Hendrix," a twangy sequel to "My My, Hey Hey (Out of The Blue)." Young also continued his commitment to the environment by including both a protest against man's destruction of nature ("War of Man") and a live tribute to the forest and jungles recorded at a Portland, Oregon performance that included sounds of the Brazilian rainforest ("Natural Beauty.")

by Rovi

Tracklist:

1. Unknown Legend - 4:33
2. From Hank To Hendrix - 5:17
3. You And Me - 3:45
4. Harvest Moon - 5:05
5. War Of Man - 5:43
6. One Of These Days - 4:57
7. Such A Woman - 4:37
8. Old King - 2:57
9. Dreamin' Man - 4:36
10. Natural Beauty - 10:24

Though it once again reunites him with Crazy Horse and includes such typical rock workouts as the lengthy "Change Your Mind" and the raucous "Piece of Crap," Sleeps With Angels is more musically varied than most of Neil Young's albums with his erstwhile backup group, ranging from piano-based ballads like the album opener, "My Heart," and closer, "A Dream That Can Last," which might have fit on After the Gold Rush, to the country-folk "Train of Love," which sounds like a leftover from Harvest Moon, and the hard-edged grunge of the title track. The Crazy Horse influence comes in the songs' structural simplicity and the unpolished playing. Though musically diverse, Sleeps With Angels is a song cycle in which Young repeats the same themes and images. To put it simply, the album is about death, presumably primarily the suicide of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain, which occurred while it was being recorded. From "My Heart," which declares, "It's not too late" and "Somehow, someone has a dream come true," to "A Dream That Can Last," which declares, "There's a better life for me someday," Young begins and ends with a shaky, uncertain optimism, even though his language is riddled with references to violence, especially gunfire, and desperation. As in the album's title, even the references to sleep and dreams are about death. Young repeats some of the same lines from song to song and sometimes the same music ("Western Hero" and "Train of Love" have the same tune). The album thus has a tired, mournful feel that is both compelling and off-putting. Young had not investigated such forbidding territory since the days of Tonight's the Night and On the Beach, and Sleeps With Angels is on a par with those often harrowing works.

by William Ruhlmann

Tracklist:

01 - My Heart
02 - Prime Of Life
03 - Driveby
04 - Sleeps With Angels
05 - Western Hero
06 - Change Your Mind
07 - Blue Eden
08 - Safeway Cart
09 - Train Of Love
10 - Trans Am
11 - Piece Of Crap
12 - A Dream That Can Last



All thanks go to Swamp Fox