Young's songs often come down to a single moment, a gesture that crystallizes and then breaks the tension, because they depend so much on the vagaries of mood. This undoubtedly is one of the things that Young has found so attractive about folk—the sense it often conveys of being a found music, with tone and atmosphere almost everything. A song could be whipped up on the spot, like a talking blues, and what mattered was not the proper convergence of theme and metaphor, but comic timing. If you ...

That heart of gold he's searching for—that heart of gold I'm searching for—that h. of g. you're looking for—it's not some other person. It's me—it's you—it's Neil Young—it's the heart of gold inside. The untapped vein. I know it's here somewhere. For me to like a record it has to scratch the back of my brain (never mind the front, I can reach that myself)—it has to touch my heart—and it has...

For anyone still passionately in love with rock & roll, Neil Young has made a record that defines the territory. Defines it, expands it, explodes it. Burns it to the ground. Rust Never Sleeps tells me more about my life, my country and rock & roll than any music I've heard in years. Like a newfound friend or lover pledging honesty and eager to share whatever might be important, it's both a sampler and a synopsis—of everything: the rocks and the trees, and the shadows between the...

The successes [on Tonight's the Night]—the ironic "Tired Eyes," the deceptively sweet "Albuquerque," the thunderous "Lookout Joe" and the two versions of the title song—are Young's best music since Gold Rush. Lofgren's guitar and piano are forceful and direct, Ralph Molina's drumming apt on both the rockers and the weepers (the latter driven by Ben Keith's steel guitar). Young's playing, on piano, harp and guit...

If [After the Goldrush] had been anybody's album but Neil Young's, it would have been an achievement. Indeed, it may seem to be an achievement to that unfortunate majority who know Neil Young only from his work with Crosby, Stills, Nash, and not from the Buffalo Springfield or from his two previous solo albums. After The Goldrush is pleasant enough, but it lacks intensity and genius…. [It is] the first Neil Young album to be anything less than brilliant….

Unless one understands the "On the Beach"/"Motion Pictures"/"Ambulance Blues" trilogy from On the Beach (and "Don't Be Denied" from Time Fades Away), one simply cannot write intelligently about Neil Young. But when one understands these songs, one begins to perceive the exciting possibility that perhaps Young is rock & roll's first (and only?) postromantic. That he knows something that we don't, but should…. For Young, b...

History is evidently much on Young's mind—the fact that it's the tenth anniversary of Woodstock matters a great deal to him. He first made his legend as an elegist for the Sixties, and one reason why his oeuvre during the long period of willful obscurantism that followed Harvest (1972) didn't loom as large as it should have was that he hadn't found another theme of commensurate scope. For Young, 1979 represents the end of another epoch, and this seems to have spurred him i...

Neil Young [is] the thirty-one-year-old loner who for more than 10 years has danced unflinchingly along the edge of that greatest of all precipices, Romance. Young is a romantic whose narcissistic mortification cuts so deep that his music—as evidenced by his latest release, the triple-disc retrospective, Decade—is among the most passionate in rock…. He's a committed malcontent approaching middle age, as indeed the whole rock form is, pressured to abandon the obsessions he has str...

Time Fades Away has its virtues when taken on its own terms and not as the latest major work of a major artist. Here, Young seems to have consciously avoided the sober sense of importance that accompanied After the Gold Rush and Harvest…. For whatever reason, he's made a startlingly unorthodox album…. More than any of his earlier works, this record shows Young's reticence about being a public figure.

Since his days with Buffalo Springfield, the shifts in Neil Young's preoccupations have presented a barometer of a generation's attitudes toward itself, reflecting the dissolution of political idealism and, beyond that, the end of the romance of youth itself. Even in such early ballads as "Sugar Mountain" and "I Am a Child," Young gently warned against living with the illusion of perpetual youth, while his childlike vocals tantalized us with the possibility. The pai...

Young is always trying to catch up with himself, to keep pace with his own prolific, quixotic imagination. His albums are often attempts to document his changing moods and perspectives, to offer his latest idea of himself to the world. Thus the fractured chronology of his output, as he constantly reassesses his stocks of material and revises the content of scheduled releases…. ["Rust Never Sleeps"] deals most blatantly with Young's obsessive restlessness, the constant need to cha...

On the basis of the vast inferiority relative to his altogether spectacular Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere of the two albums he's made since teaming up with Crosby, Etc. (and thus insuring that he'd never again want for an audience), it can only be concluded that Neil Young is not one of those folks whom superstardom becomes artistically. Harvest … finds Neil Young invoking most of the L.A. variety of superstardom's weariest cliches in an attempt to obscure his inability to do a...

Decade, while being eventful in that it did once and for all establish [Neil Young] as a Major Artist of impressive proportions, also illustrated the fact that his is a vision as consistent as it is clear; he will sing about how it feels to live in this strange and risky world, where friends still die and politics of oppression still operate and love is always hard to live with, and he will do it with none of rock's usual obfuscation or frivolity until they come to take him away. New-album-wise (Come...

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)….

On the Beach is so uneven in both concept and delivery that it is more than just disappointing, it is, in many ways, disgraceful. For an artist as stimulating as Young to have lost his way musically for so long is enough reason to believe that he may just not "have it" anymore. To be sure, there are a few moments of brilliance, even on such a sorry recording. When Young launches into "See the Sky About to Rain," visions of the old talent are readily in evidence. (p. 76)

Neil Young's ninth solo album, Zuma, is by far the best album he's made; it's the most cohesive (but not the most obvious) concept album I've ever encountered; and despite its depths, Zuma is so listenable that it should become Young's first hit album since Harvest…. If Tonight's The Night was bleakly, spookily black, Zuma—Young's "morning" album—is hardly suffused with sunlight and flowers. Apparently, tempered gloom is the...

If "Long May You Run" is about anything at all, it is the concern of friendship. Appropriately, therefore, the tenor of this record is mellow and reflective, especially on the first side, although there is nothing beyond the title song that is actually nostalgic. The mood is that of old pals, long since gone different ways but still mutually respectful, winding down in each other's congenial company…. For Young,… "Long May You Run" will surely not be credited...

[Of] all the talents that came together … to form [the Buffalo Springfield], Neil Young is the only one who I believe has come close to artistry in his subsequent writing and performances…. Young's music is simple, and many of his lyrics share this simplicity…. [He] is capable of turning out songs that are ice-clear reflections of the times we're living in and the way young people see them. Most of the songs are very personal affairs, but when Young does attempt a politica...

Buffalo Springfield … is a lovely, moving experience. You have to be into it, however; chances are you won't even like it on first hearing. All the songs seem to sound alike…. There are certain samenesses in the Springfield's material, and if you hear them on one of their rare off nights, you'll be quite bored. But what the Springfield does is rise above these samenesses, employing beautiful changes and continually fresh approaches within their particular framework. The mo...

A 1988 undergraduate seminar—American Rock Romanticism 202. The midterm exam question: "Music historian Antoine Ferrand describes the music of Neil Young as 'a body of work that tells us more than we'd like to know about the feelings of despair, betrayal and helplessness that characterized a segment of America during the 1970's.' Using Decade as your primary source, discuss how Young's music over his first ten year period supports or refutes Ferrand's ...

Let's make one thing immediately clear, amigo: "Decade" is certainly no mercenary enterprise intended to exploit the dedication of Neil Young's audience. The apparently indulgent and extravagant design of this triple album retrospective is powerfully justified by the impressive authority and diversity of its contents, and the invaluably comprehensive account of Young's artistic development and maturity into one of rock's most individual and arresting performers that...

Comes a Time is Neil Young's gentlest record since After the Gold Rush…. At first listening, the simplicity of the music makes Comes a Time seem wimped-out. It's not. Usually, Neil Young is most compelling for his musical excess…. Comes a Time, though, stands on its songs, not on the sound; Young has substituted a lyrical chaos for the musical one. What keeps you listening is not so much what's here, but what's left out of the half-realized sentences and shifting im...

[The title track which opens "Time Fades Away" is Young's] own approximation of Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues."… It's interested more with the sound of the lyrics and their rhythm than the content, and is taken at a fast clip.

Let the buyer beware: "Journey Through The Past" is not The New Neil Young Album in any meaningful sense. It's a ragbag collection of old Buffalo Springfield and CSNY 'live' cuts, and tapes from the "Harvest" session, seemingly salvaged from the cutting-room floor, all stitched together with snatches of conversation, a bit of community singing, a few sound effects, and a speech, courtesy of President Nixon. There's only one new song.

[Tonight's the Night] is an album of resolute drugginess and obsession with death…. But mostly, it is about Neil Young and his nightride into devastation. The atmosphere Young creates is that of a solitary figure riding through this album like a bad luck John Wesley Harding: a rootless, drug saturated hippie, cruising the west in search of the ultimate burnout….

The Mona Lisa has nothing on Neil Young. Enigmatic is probably too precise a word for a man whose songs defy any attempt to pin him down. He is all things to all men….

It's awfully hard to improve on what Steve Simels once said about Neil Young: he may be a bozo, but he's a great bozo. Young has come to mean so much more to many of us than the sum of his talents. Most of the negative stuff said about him is said affectionately…. He's not a great singer or a great guitarist, and he probably isn't even a great songwriter—although he does have a good, strong, healthy, dependable voice as a writer—but there's an extra in...

Neil Young … joined Crosby, Stills and Nash just about the time when their first album was completed…. Young has added a dark side to the group's sound, which partially accounts for the dramatic transition of their music from the first to the second album, Déjà Vu…. (pp. 71, 79) Déjà Vu … varies a great deal in texture as compared with the first album, and there is an undercurrent of conflict which runs sporadically through the songs, breaking t...

["After the Gold Rush"] stands up to listening better than it does to criticism…. Certainly, "After The Gold Rush" has its faults … the album is too much a collection of separate and distinct songs to make it acceptable to those who demand some kind of linking thread to run through a record.

Long May You Run is like an old World's Finest comic book: the team-up of Superman and Batman always drained each of his most interesting characteristics. Like Superman, Stephen Stills is a rather muscular lunkhead of a personality; Neil Young's Batman is less heroic—shadowy and darkly mortal. The music on Long May You Run is a collection of each man's puffier and less autobiographical new material…. For both, this is a less personal project, and the straightforwardness su...

Ever since Time Fades Away, Neil Young has been expressing himself with a personally spontaneous and haphazard simplicity. He abandoned structure and perfection for a looseness induced by senses that were dulled in order to ease the pain. At least we can thank him for offering insights into emotionally vulnerable times. The mournful moments were allowed to sound as painful as they were, undisguised by musical perfection—which never really sooths the pain (viz. Joni Mitchell) but merely represses or i...

The title of Young's newest record, Journey Through the Past, suggests a selection of tracks from the various phases of Young's career. Unfortunately, the album instead pawns itself off as a film soundtrack, although whether the existence of any film could justify the existence of this record is questionable…. It's sad but true that the best stuff on Journey is by the Buffalo Springfield….

Unlike all of Young's work since "Tonight's the Night," "Comes a Time" has a consistent theme that is stated, mused over, and partially resolved over the course of its two sides. The theme concerns his dealings with women and considers the ways relationships can be worked out, nourished, or abandoned. In song after song, Young, oftburned in the romantic fires, considers whether he ought to entrust his love to the woman in question, and every tune comes up with a dif...

Neil remains the only Sixties artist nobody calls burnt-out or irrelevant. "Decade," his remarkably comprehensive new greatest-hits collection, demonstrates that what many of us mistook for profound change over time was nothing of the sort, but simply a case of our inability to see the total artist, rather than just the facets, as the years went by. There's something here for almost everybody…. If you missed it on "Zuma," "Decade" contains what is in m...

[Buffalo Springfield] produced some of the most distinctive and thoroughly enjoyable sounds to come out of [the West Coast rock revolution of 1966/7]…. [The] Springfield used subtlety, understatement and clean, tight playing as their stock in trade….

Neil Young's category has often been "painful-listening," but most of American Stars 'n Bars has the kind of easy-beat accessibility that could readily roll across this summer's Mellow Sounds radio. If nasty Neil sounds a trifle lobotomized compared to his dirges on Zuma and On The Beach, at least the relaxation shows up as gracefulness rather than torpor…. Following the simplistic, Buffalo-Springfieldy "Hey Babe" is this record's tour de force:...

In several respects [Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere] falls short of [Neil Young]. Young's new material is a little disappointing…. [The] lyricism of the first album can only be found in faint traces here. But despite its shortcomings, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere offers ample rewards. The most interesting tracks on the album are "Running Dry" and "Cowgirl in the Sand."… The lyrics [of "Running Dry"] are a bit over-dramatic, but the music and...

[For] all Young's Californian convolutions, "Comes A Time" has the romantic innocence of those Sixties folk clubs where I used to sigh over the cool young men who, like Bob Dylan, rooted their personal anguish in the Human Condition, and suggested a life in which, instead of having to go back to school the next day, you could just travel on forever—breaking a heart here, having a heart broken there. Hitching down the highway, lonely city streets, distant mountains, rough seas...

["American Stars 'N' Bars"] might not entirely reflect Young's present state of mind, but the emotional polaroids, so distinctively developed here, offer a fascinating series of portraits that capture various aspects of the author's complex personality and his contradictory attitudes to women, love and its defeats and cruel disappointments. These are the predominant concerns of the songs included here, nearly all of which are marked by a melancholic despair and resi...

Neil Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was far and away the standout of the otherwise undistinguished first album from the late Buffalo Springfield, and through "Broken Arrow" to "The Old Laughing Lady" one has watched the growth of a very individual talent…. I'm certain that Neil Young will continue to knock more and more people out with his unique songs of despair and alienation—and, once in every while, happiness.