Tonight's the Night is Neil Young's third washout album in a row…. (p. 62)

[Tonight's the Night was conceived] as one long dirge in memory of Bruce Berry, a member of his road crew, and Danny Whitten, a musician with Young's original backing band, Crazy Horse (both of whom apparently died of drug overdoses)….

[In] the realm of thematic coherence, consider this wail from "Borrowed Tune" …: "I'm singing this borrowed tune/I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room/Too wasted to write my own…." Young recently told Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone that Tonight's the Night was "the most liquid album I've ever made…. You almost need a life preserver to get through that one," which accounts for the meandering of most of his material….

Young seems to have been quite in earnest when he set out to make a miserable album about feeling miserable...