There’s no real point in telling someone like Neil Young what to do. Even if everything’s lined up for him to make a classic in one specific style of music, whatever he puts on a record usually just comes down to how he feels that month, which could mean a throwback record, pure Americana, or something completely off the rails. While Young could have easily kept making albums like Harvest for the rest of his life, he did think that he started to become constrained by the record that made him a star.
But Young never really fit the ‘rockstar’ type to begin with. Whereas everyone else was putting flowers in their hair and talking about building a utopia in the middle of Woodstock, Young was more interested in quoting his own heart when he made his records, even if that meant only two people ended up listening to it.
Though Crosby, Stills, and Nash seemed to be helping him get his foot in the door, Young didn’t need his superstar friends to become a legend. The minute that he quit the group, albums like After the Gold Rush were showing the world the rustic version of him that everyone knew, but Harvest sees him in a state of repair.
Since he had spent the last few years in recovery from back problems, Young’s idea was to get in touch with rootsy material by moving to the South to record. While the results were pretty stunning on songs like ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘There’s A World’, it’s not very comfortable for Young to revisit that kind of material nowadays.
When speaking to The Los Angeles Times, he thought that Harvest suddenly put him in a box he didn’t want to be in, saying, “Harvest was a good record, but it wasn’t any better than many of the other records. Just another record. There are other ones that are far more compelling. But it had a moment. Everybody was ready for me to make Harvest. Then we moved on. Gotta get away from that. That’s not where I want to be.”
Then again, some of those uncomfortable feelings may have come from Young getting some heavy criticism from his idol. No matter how much you think that you’re confident in yourself as a songwriter, hearing Bob Dylan complain about how much you’re ripping him off is now going to go over well at all.
So what was Young’s answer to being pigeonholed? Go absolutely nuts. The first few releases, like On the Beach and Rust Never Sleeps, were at least in line with what he was known for, but hearing something like Trans and Everybody’s Rockin’ later in his career seemed less like experiments and more like Young was intentionally trying to test his audience to see what they would put up with from him.
But that’s what any artist is supposed to do. They don’t make music thinking about whether it pleases someone else, and as far Young was concerned, Harvest was just another pitstop in between making the net collection of decent songs he had cooking up.
