Originally posted on Instagram, January 28, 2020.
I promised another Neil Young post, and here it is! This is another new arrival to my collection, and it's another gift from my friend Maya, who has given me all the best classic rock records in my collection.
I had never heard anything from Neil Young's debut solo album before, if you don't count live versions from the digital edition of CSN&Y's '4 Way Street'. And these studio versions were very much not what I expected.
I think the difference between my expectations of this album and the reality comes from thinking of it as "the album before 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere'", when I should have been thinking of it as "the album after he left Buffalo Springfield". The combination of lavish production and hallucinatory, vaguely unsettling lyrics, along with the lush, orchestral instrumentals that open each side of the record, have a lot more in common with Buffalo Springfield tracks like "Broken Arrow" and "Expecting To Fly" than they did with anything Neil did afterward. It makes sense- by the time Neil wrote those extravagant, psychedelic Buffalo Springfield songs, he was working alone more often than he was with the other Buffalo Springfield guys. So although this was technically Neil's solo debut, it was more of a continuation of what he had already been doing. It's always interesting to see how an artist evolves, and what comes from where, especially with someone as prolific (and eclectic) as Neil Young.
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