I think I bought my copy of this album on vinyl sometime in high school, junior year I suspect, and it was with me through college and then on cassette for years after I no longer had a lifestyle compatible with a turntable and stereo setup. To me, this is the quintessential Neil Young, the Neil Young album that stands above all others. I'm not alone; for a lot of people, it has maybe the only Neil Young song or songs they know on it. I went on to other Neil Young albums and enjoyed those a lot, but this is the one I will always come back to.
And why not? It's a lovely album, Young at his most gentle and pure country-folk. This Young as master songwriter, daring anyone to even come close. It's a colossal achievement of the form. Just take a song like the title track. It's got the gently strummed guitar and piano and the pedal steel all add to the lazy, dreamy feel. The lyrics are obscure, with typically Neil Young surrealism:
Did I see you down in a young girl's town
With your mother in so much pain?
I was almost there at the top of the stairs
With her screamin' in the rain
Why is she screamin' in the rain? Why is he gonna fill her cup with the promise of a man? Only Neil knows (btw, he said it was one of his best songs, and the best on this album).
Lots of people know "Heart of Gold," a more straightforward song about searching for realness in a fake world, with lovely backing vocals by James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. Taylor and Ronstadt happened to be appearing on the Johnny Cash show in Nashville with Young when he decided to start recording songs at Quadrofonic Sound. Young wanted to start recording right away, on a Saturday night, and producer Eliott Mazer had to corral musicians from around town (the legend is that bassist Tim Drummond just happened to be walking by the studio - not that crazy since it was located on Music Row in Nashville) and pull them in to start the recordings. "Old Man," another one of the best-known songs, was recorded that night. Some of the others were recorded later the next week and in the months that followed.
There are also two songs - "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World" with full symphony backing courtesy of the London Symphony Orchestra, recorded at the wonderfully-named Barking Town Hall in London. For some reason, these are my two least-favorite and most-skipped songs on the album. It's not you, London Symphony Orchestra, it's me; I just don't like the songs.
There's some uptempo stuff too. "Are You Ready for the Country" is a country stomp, a gem of a song with, again, those dark, weird lyrics Neil loves:
I was talking to the preacher, said God was on my side
Then I ran into the hangman, he said. "It's time to die
You gotta tell your story, boy
You know the reason why"
And I would be remiss if I didn't mention "Alabama," the next salvo in the ongoing series of diss tracks between Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd. You may recall that Young released "Southern Man," which Southern rock act Skynyrd took umbrage at, and then they responded with "Sweet Home Alabama," which Young then responded to with "Alabama," which is a direct swipe at the namesake state ("Alabama, you got the weight on your shoulders/That's breaking your back"). Then I guess everybody got bored and half of Skynyrd got killed in a plane crash and even Young later admitted the whole thing was dumb.
There is one track on here recorded live, "Needle and the Damage Done," a song about heroin addiction that's so raw it's almost physically painful to listen to. Young, of course, had plenty of experience with the subject, but the song lays it out in such stark and unforgiving terms ("But every junkie's like a settin' sun") you immediately come face to face with it as well.
Is this album in my personal Top 500? Well, yeah.
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