The songwriter and musician is almost nothing strange between folk and hard rock. Neil Young was a member of Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. But in his long 56 career as a solo artist alone, he published a good 90 albums: studio and live recordings, soundtracks and a lot of excavations from the archive in recent years. Where do you start with the recommendations? We tried it.
Essential
Everybody Knows this is nowher (1969)
Present Crazy Horse. After the inevitable debut album Neil Young from 1968, Neil Young with Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina from the Los-Angeles-Band The Rocken-Band The Rocken-Bands Kongeniale will find companions. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere justifies a decades of on-off relationship between solo artist and the band, which now calls itself Crazy Horse. The first common album becomes a masterpiece. Songs such as “Down by the River”, “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon Girl” establish Neil Young Signature Sound: Minimalist Hard Rock with powerful, sprawling guitar improvisations in the interaction of him and Danny Whitten.
Six stars
Harvest (1972)
Neil Young’s admission ticket to the mainstream: Harvest was recorded in Nashville with a number of country musicians (The Stray Gator and Pedal Steel guitarist Ben Keith), with guest singer: inside like Crosby, Stills & Nash, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, as well as the London Symphony Orchestra at two songs. Young Country Folk (-Rock) was never as melodic, accessible and traditional as on this album, with which the artist is mainly associated over 50 years after the publication. A classic with songs such as the anti-drug anthem “The Needle and the Damage Done”, “Old Man” and the number 1 hit “Heart of Gold”.
Six stars
On the beach
Contemporary critics couldn’t do much with Neil Young fifth studio album. Above all, they criticized the desperate undertone of on the beach. How despair really sounds, the artist should show the tonight’s The Night, a year later. On the beach there is a braked folk rock, minimalist and natural. In the songs, Young addresses the mixed feelings that the unexpected success of the Harvest album had triggered with him. Over the years, the album gained the status of a classic, which was also due to the fact that it was not available in any format for a good two decades.
Six stars
Tonight’s The Night (1975)
Likewise, document of grief, pain and loss as a song about the hippie culture of the 1960s. On his sixth studio album, Neil Young processed the drug death of the Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Roadies Bruce Berry, 29 and 22 years old. Tonight’s The Night was recorded in the summer of 1973, but only published two years later because the label was the album as too dark and morbid. At that time, contemporary criticism and audience brought little understanding for the skeletonized, minimalist country folk rock songs, today Tonight’s The Night is of course considered a classic in the catalog of Neil Young.
Six stars
Rust Never Sleeps (1979)
A mixture of reworked live songs and studio recordings, separated according to an acoustic and an electrical side. The album is framed by the acoustic key song “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and its electric counterpart “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”. The song, in which Young critically deals with the music industry and its own artistic meaning, gave him a relevance of the old hippie, in the punk era, from which he still draws today.
Six stars
Freedom (1989)
In the 1980s, Neil Young unsettled his followers: inside with a number of albums with stylistic experiments between Rockabilly, Country and Electronic Music. At the end of the decade, he returned to Freedom what he can best do in Folk, according to his fans: rock songs primed with socio -political texts in folk. Released in October 1989, the album and its key song “Rockin ‘in the Free World” became an unofficial hymn for the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
Five stars
Ragged Glory (1990)
At the beginning of the nineties, Neil Young & Crazy Horse presented themselves in all their shabby splendor. Ragged Glory recalled the early seventies with folk-infected heavy rock and extensive guitar jams directly from the garage. The album made enthusiasm for virtuosity and at the time founded the call Neil Young as “Godfather of Grunge”, but above all it is still a collection of excellent songs: “Country Home”, “Fuckin ‘Up”, “Mansion on the Hill”, “Love and only love”.
Five and a half stars
LIVE
Earth (2016)
As a young, white man, Neil Young has developed an ecological awareness that was expressed in many songs. Earth is the document of the 2015 tour with Promise of the Real, the band of Lukas and Micah Nelson, the sons of Willie Nelson. It is a collection of songs that contain environmental issues. But Neil Young would not be himself if he had made a “normal” live album on the subject. Natural noises, thunderstorms, insect sums, birds and the vocals of an eight -person choir were added to the studio. The last song offers the solution for all problems in over 28 minutes: “Love and Only Love”.
Four and a half stars
Way Down in the Rust Bucket (2021)
With his long -time companion band Crazy Horse, Neil Young created magical moments. Especially on stage when the songs develop a life of their own and become excessive NOISE symphonies. Way Down in the Rust Bucket documents a warm-up show for the Ragged Glory tour in November 1990 in front of 800 spectators: inside in Santa Cruz, California. Young and band look as if they didn’t need to warm up at all, everything sits and fits, rocks hard and groovt. Above all, the epic “Cortez the Killer”, here in the best available live version. No substitute for, but a good addition to Weld, the live album of the Ragged-Glory tour.
Five stars
Noise & Flowers (2022)
Shortly before the start of the 2019 European tour with Promise of the Real as an accompanying band, Neil Young’s long -time manager Elliot Roberts died. The tour and the resulting live album became a tribute to the friend. What is special about NOISE & Flowers: In addition to the usual standards, the album offers a number of songs that rarely come to the setlist of Neil-Young concerts: “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” On the Beach “,” Field of Opportunity “,” From Hank to Hendrix “. And Promise of the Real are able to give the songs from all creative periods Neil Young their own vibe.
Five stars
Strange
ARC (1991)
A short trip to the Musique Concrète. Thurston Moore, singer and guitarist of Sonic Youth, brought Neil Young the idea of making an entire album from the live cacophony of his often sprawling song intros and-outros. This created a 35-minute “compilation composition” from feedback, guitar noise and vocal fragments, which was recorded on the 1991 US tour with Crazy Horse.
1-6 stars
Dead Man (1996)
The soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s dystopian late western with Johnny Depp perfectly translates the oppressive, unreal atmosphere of the film into music. Young solved in six pieces on the electric guitar, occasionally reaches for acoustic and sits on the piano and pump organ. The deep-grumbling leitmotif, which is repeatedly repeated, makes the soundtrack a kind of avant-garde symphony.
1-6 stars