Though music had been a central force in his operations from day dot, Neil Young first reached ears around the world as a member of the West Coast folk-rock collective Buffalo Springfield. Alongside enduring collaborator Stephen Stills, he would exercise his passion for folk, as nurtured by the work of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, and blend it with a more contemporary electric sound. This combination would provide a foundation for Young’s ongoing creative evolution.
We celebrate Young as an artist of utmost dignity and integrity, given that he has never failed to express himself in emotive lyricism, often employing innovative instrumental ideas. Even when pandering to the masses with sweet, radio-friendly songs like ‘Old Man’ and ‘Harvest Moon’, Young reflects on his own experiences to connect with his audience.
In the documentary Heart of Gold, Young remembered writing material for Harvest while living on Broken Arrow Ranch. After breaking through in his career, he bought the picturesque farmland in Woodside, California, and used it as a place to escape from the Los Angeles bustle. When he first moved to the ranch, the old caretaker named Louis Avila took Young for a ride in his jeep.
The old farm manager drove Young to a viewpoint on a hill above the ranchland near a lake that irrigated the pastures. “He says, ‘Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?’” Young recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s the darnedest thing I ever heard.’ And I wrote this song for him.”
Likewise, discussing ‘Harvest Moon’ in a past interview with AXS, Young singled the 1990s classic as a personal favourite because of its profound effect on fans. “People come up to me now, and they say, ‘We played that at our wedding,’ you know, ‘When we first met, that song was playing,’” he beamed. “There’s a romantic atmosphere of the song, there’s something about it that brings that out in people. It’s interesting. It’s nice to see.”
As the ‘On the Beach’ lyric, “I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day”, suggests, Young is a man of great duality. He is introverted, but his career requires him to be extroverted; he loves the countryside but needs the city. This coin of two sides is represented throughout the Canadian’s songwriting catalogue, with the breezy acoustic material of Harvest representing vast rural scapes and the heavy proto-grunge work with Crazy Horse representing the gritty, noisy inner city.
With such a chaptered career behind him, it would be difficult for Young to name just one song as his overall favourite; he has favourites of all different styles, eras and degrees of emotional connection. Understanding this, Conan O’Brien asked Young to name a few landmark songs that shaped his life and career during an interview for SiriusXM.
When discussing the earliest song he can remember falling in love with as a young teenager, Young picked out ‘Four Strong Winds’ by Ian and Sylvia. “I loved it so much that I would put nickels and dimes in the jukebox to play it over and over and over again until I didn’t have any change,” Young reflected. “I would just stand there in front of it and listen to it. It was a beautiful song. For some reason, it really got to me, and I could feel the magic of the music.”
At the time, Young had just joined his first band, The Squires, with his close friend Jack. The pair would frequently visit Falcon Lake near their hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where anyone could pitch up a tent. “We were out there, and I found this thing on the jukebox in the restaurant,” Yung added, fondly remembering his core musical memory.
The Canadian songwriter Ian Tyson wrote ‘Four Strong Winds’ in 1962 and recorded the song with his musical and marital partner, Sylvia, for their sophomore album of the same name. The album was the first of the pair’s to chart in the US, and though its ripple was small, those made at Falcon Lake turned out to be seismic.
‘Four Strong Winds’ remains a classic of the 1960s folk revival and has been covered by several prominent artists, including Bobby Dare and Neil Young. Young recorded his cover in the late 1970s for inclusion on his ninth studio album, Comes a Time. Like several songs on the album, Young’s cover featured JJ Cale on acoustic guitar and the Gone with the Wind Orchestra.