The album Neil Young made to terrify his label: “No one’s gonna tell me what to do”

The first move everyone should make when working with Neil Young is to follow his lead. Young normally knows what he wants whenever he sits down to make a record, and even if it isn’t the most commercial thing in the world, his best output come from him following his instincts rather than sitting around a studio doing what he thinks his label wants from him. So when he came through with the album Old Ways, he made the entire thing with the intention of his higher-ups hating it.

In the first era of Young’s career, though, this wouldn’t have seemed like a bad move or anything. Despite being Canadian, Young is responsible for some of the best Americana music of the modern age, so a project that was nothing but a bunch of country-tinged should have suited the market perfectly fine.

After all, Young had come from the era when the Eagles were one of the biggest names in music. This was pure country fare, and since Glenn Frey and Don Henley got themselves in trouble when Desperado bombed, hearing that Young was going down the same route didn’t exactly scream dollar signs for the label.

If anything, this was the second part of a plan on Young’s part. His label insisted on him getting away from his “experimental” country records in favour of rock and roll, and Everybody’s Rockin’ was the spit in the face that Young was bound to deliver if anyone got on his bad side.

Even though the first pass at Old Ways did have traces of the Young that we all knew and loved, he deliberately went back in once he got critiqued by his label to cool it with the saloon-style tracks, recalling in Rolling Stone“It was done in Nashville in only a few days, basically the same way Harvest was done There’s Harvest, Comes a Time and Old Ways I, which is more of a Neil Young record than Old Ways II. Old Ways II was more of a country record – which was a direct result of being sued for playing country music. The more they tried to stop me, the more I did it. Just to let them know that no one’s gonna tell me what to do.”

And even with the revised version steering away from rock and roll, it still sounds heavenly coming from Young. He had spent the lion’s share of the past year daring his label to forbid him from making music, so hearing him inhabit his inner Johnny Cash for a couple of tunes was the equivalent of twisting the knife when he started playing.

Despite Young eventually acquiescing and trying to give his label a hit, those projects are by far the worst pieces he ever put out. Landing on Water may have been hip for the times, but what we’re left with is a clusterfuck of different 1980s cliches that would have been better served on some forgotten pop album from around the same time.

So, the moral of the story: let Neil Young make whatever the hell music he wants to make. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been in the industry or what you think you know in terms of what’s a hit. If you try to give Young “guidance”, he’s probably going to make something that stomps on every expectation you have for him.

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