The 100 Greatest Neil Young Songs

The title track of a country-rock LP Young recorded in the mid-Seventies but legendarily shelved — finally releasing it in 2020 — this ode to DIY hemp cultivation doubles as an ode to self-made creative work of all sorts. “Homegrown is a good thing,” he sings, Crazy Horse laying down a red-eyed honky-tonk stomp. “Plant that bell and let it ring.” Amen, brother.

“Me and some of my friends, we were gonna save the world,” Young sings two minutes into this 16-minute jam. But this is no sentimental Sixties lament. Instead, Young and Crazy Horse drown his angst in tumultuous grunge, capped by four glorious minutes of feedback. “The playback just blew our minds,” guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro told Rolling Stone. “We had no idea we’d done something that big.”

“When I was a little kid, I thought Elvis was pretty hot,” Young said. This tribute offers images from throughout the King’s life — Young even throws in a “thankyuhverymuch.” Musically, it’s rollicking acoustic country rock: Young performed the song on Saturday Night Live in 2005, playing a guitar that had once belonged to Hank Williams, who influenced Elvis and Young.

The first nine songs on Prairie Wind were finished in the days before Young underwent brain surgery. The 10th, “When God Made Me,” came later, after one of his incisions reopened and he again lost consciousness. A series of questions posed to God, the song was so religious that it surprised even Young, who spent weeks searching for the proper conclusion: “Finally,” he said, “the word ‘compassion’ came out of nowhere.”

“Someday” recalls the way that Sixties Bob Dylan classics like “Desolation Row” radically change focus while still being deeply personal. It was first played live with Crazy Horse in 1987, and recorded a year later with the Bluenotes horn section. Young later said he wasn’t happy with the version on Freedom, but it’s one of the album’s most moving moments, balancing scenes of war, death, and corruption with a final note of fragile hope.

“This is a song about my dog. His name is Elvis,” Young said, introducing this bouncing folky tune on the Harvest Moon tour in 1992. “Old King” is a double elegy, for a faithful friend and a fallen legend; a dog named Elvis had, in fact, accompanied Young on tour. His loving but light-hearted memorial keeps circling around to the Old King’s absence: As Young told the audience that night, Elvis is “riding on Jimi Hendrix’s bus now.”

Young was never a fan of music videos, but he directed one for every song on Living With War. In the clip for this excoriating post-9/11 rocker, Dick Cheney’s smug face appears when Young sings “Lies!” It’s one of the best protest statements of the George W. Bush years. In a typically contrarian move, he distanced himself from the album’s avid tone, telling Charlie Rose, “I’m not happy about it now.”

One of the early synth-rock experiments Young recorded for what would become Trans, “Computer Age” mixed weirdly pretty vocoder melodies with guitar riffs that were inspired by a Rolling Stones show he had recently attended. Young heralds the new age with irony, searching for someone to share his alienation in the streamlined tomorrow: “You need me like ugly needs a mirror,” he sings.

Like “I’m the Ocean,” this track from the Pearl Jam collaboration Mirror Ball made it into Crazy Horse’s set list two years later. “I don’t think I’m preaching,” Young said of its critical lyrics. “I’m reflecting. Maybe talkin’ to myself.” The last verse takes a sidelong shot at Sixties folkie Phil Ochs’ late-career appearances, “dressed in gold lamé.”

“Painfully personal,” Young said of “Love to Burn,” a rugged, expansive song about keeping an open heart in a brutal world (“You gotta crawl to be tall,” he sings). The 10-minute centerpiece of Ragged Glory (reprised on the 1991 live album Weld at exactly the same length), it’s one of Crazy Horse’s finer late-period guitar excursions, thanks especially to Young’s wildly coiling solos.

“I like to have a great thing that purposely leaves the rough edge in, and goes, ‘Fuck you,’ ” Young said of the mess of a video for “Piece of Crap.” He could’ve been talking about the song itself, a pile-driving parody of junk consumerism that’s totally in step with the post-Nirvana rock of the time. Young and Crazy Horse repeat the title phrase with a relentless glee Kurt Cobain would’ve loved.

The Cadillac Eldorado is one of Young’s favorite cars, and “Eldorado” began as a spectral Crazy Horse highway rocker called “Road of Plenty.” Young reworked it as the title track to the limited-issue Eldorado EP in 1989, and it appeared on Freedom later that year, a violent Mexican travelogue with a South of the Border musical feel — like an update of “Cortez the Killer” for a new era.

A vicious music-biz satire (probably of former Warner/Reprise execs Joe Smith and Mo Ostin), “Surfer Joe and Moe the Sleaze” sounds as scabrous and off-kilter as any early-Eighties post-punk. “ ‘Surfer Joe’ sped up, slowed down,” Frank “Poncho” Sampedro recalled. “So we would spend time hittin’ everything we could find in there to play the groove through it — banging tambourine, banging pieces of metal together, doing hand claps.”

An anthem and encore for Crazy Horse’s 1986 tour, “Prisoners of Rock ‘n’ Roll” gleefully puts the band in opposition to “the record-company man.” Not coincidentally, Young penned this one the same year he was sued by David Geffen. The song was released on Life, which had cover art featuring Young behind bars with five lines scratched on the wall — which just happened to be the number of records he had released while on Geffen.

“They’ll shit on this one,” Young said about Broken Arrow, his first album after the death of longtime producer David Briggs. “It’s purposely vulnerable and unfinished.” Even as he was being hailed as the Godfather of Grunge, Young made an album too grungy and low-fi for the times. On “Slip Away,” he seems to be singing from across the room, but the distorted guitars create a mist of harmonics and overtones, and his solos are unhurried and probing.

After a long series of tours with Crazy Horse, Young decided to slow things down in 1999 for some solo dates in American theaters. He played this nostalgic tale of lost love on the piano almost every night, and it was slated for Silver & Gold. But when he agreed to record a reunion album with CSNY, “Out of Control” became a highlight of the otherwise dreary Looking Forward.

“Trippin’ down the old hippie highway,” Young sings on this slow, gentle rocker from his 2006 protest album, Living With War. “Me and my generation, we understand what that line means,” he said at the time. “Did hippies have an influence? Of course.” The lyrics lament an old friend who “died for your country,” elegantly linking the legacy of Vietnam to the era of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lyrics of this hippie dance jam are so simple they suggest a sly parody of boogying escapism. Danny Whitten makes an appearance in what Young later said was their last recording together. Young claimed the lyrical images of a dancing girl were inspired by Jean Ray of the folk group Jim and Jean. “[She] moved real nice,” he said.

When Young debuted “Crime in the City” on tour in 1988, it had a different title (“Sixty to Zero”), 11 verses, and lasted close to 20 minutes. By the time he recorded it, he’d changed the title and pared it in half. A fatigued companion piece to “Rockin’ in the Free World,” it surveys Eighties moral rot, from a cynical record producer to a cop turned vigilante, who says, “There’s still crime in the city, but it’s good to be free.”

Young’s fans weren’t entirely happy with his Georg W. Bush–era rock opera Greendale. “I’ve heard people saying, ‘This is worse than Trans,’ ” he quipped. In the middle of the record, Young planted a lone acoustic song, which he sang almost in a whisper, about baseball, poverty, gambling, and spirituality. He even quotes some lyrics from “Like a Rolling Stone,” adding with a hazy wink, “Bob Dylan said that, somethin’ like that.”

In the spring of 2005, doctors discovered that Young had a cerebral aneurysm and decided to operate in New York only weeks later. With an astonishing sense of urgency, the 59-year-old songwriter and his wife, Pegi, traveled to Nashville, where he wrote and recorded almost all of the rustic Prairie Wind with musicians he’d known for years. In its best song, a tender, orchestrated waltz, the verses are like snapshots where the past and present merge. Fans speculate that “It’s a Dream” might be about Young’s father, Scott, who died of Alzheimer’s in June 2005. Either way, it’s both reassuring and terrifying when Young describes a dream as “just a memory without anywhere to stay.”

A sprawling, optimistic track, the 18-minute “Ordinary People” was recorded for Young’s 1988 album This Note’s for You, and played on tour with a five-piece horn section. But he didn’t release it until 19 years later. Why the delay? “People may have been distracted 20 years ago with the fact that I was doing a song with horns,” he said, adding, “It was such a powerful record that it overtook everything that I put it with.”

One of young’s most heavily workshopped love songs, “Silver & Gold” dates back to at least 1984, when he started playing it live and tried recording it for his country album Old Ways. But he could never quite capture the homey feel he wanted; in 1992, he told a Cleveland crowd he would “probably never put it out.” Finally, in 2000, he nailed it, with a light, tender vocal delivery and a spry acoustic performance.

The hallucinatory “Hitchhiker” is a furiously strummed, Daniel Lanois–produced ode to memory that dates back to the mid-Seventies. Young recalls smoking hash through a pen and compares himself to an ancient Peruvian. It ends with lines he penned decades after the rest of the song was written: “Thankful for my children/And my faithful wife.” Said Young, “The song never could have been done without those.”

“Every good thing comes to an end,” Young sings on “Drive Back.” It’s one of Zuma’s most brawling songs, epitomizing the druggy beach-house garage-rock spirit of Crazy Horse at the time. “ ‘Drive Back’ is just the [Fender] Deluxe all the way up,” Young said. Frank “Poncho” Sampedro described his enthusiasm like this: “I’d go in the bathroom, do a bunch of smack between takes, and go, ‘Hey, I’m playin’ with Neil Young — holy shit!’ “

The glistening folk opener of After the Gold Rush was first introduced during the CSNY shows of 1970, and you can hear their influence in the song’s gorgeously ringing vocal harmonies. Young later said he stopped playing it live because he wasn’t sure if its famous lines “Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself/When you’re old enough to repay/But young enough to sell” meant anything.

“As a document of what was happening to me, I think it was a great record,” Young said of the live LP Time Fades Away. “L.A.,” a tense, bitter rocker, is a sarcastic tribute to “the uptight city in the smog” that made him a star. It’s an especially vicious example of Young using the Time Fades Away tour to distance himself from his sensitive-singer-songwriter persona. He performed it 22 times on that tour, and a shocking one-off at the L.A. Forum with Promise of the Real in 2015 remains the only time he’s done it since.

Young capped off his debut album with a surreal nine-minute voice-and-guitar spirit quest. “You get a feeling from something that doesn’t make sense,” explained Young, “Like ‘Last Trip to Tulsa.’ ” Indeed, even if lyrics about working on palm trees for 87 years and “Indians in the corner” are pretty much impossible to make sense of, the winding melody and cyclical chord progression still exert a mysterious pull.

Originally recorded by Young solo in late 1968, “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” was totally reinvented months later, when he redid it backed by Crazy Horse. The first take was downright civil, with AM-radio keyboards and taut rhythm guitar. The newer version was incisive guitar rock. It’s the sound of an artist transformed.

Young began playing the soft, meditative “See the Sky About to Rain” at concerts in 1970 and considered putting it on both Harvest and Time Fades Away. But the first recording was by the Byrds, on their 1973 reunion album. Young finally got around to cutting it a year later, playing a warbly Wurlitzer piano himself and delivering the vocals with a tone that suggests tears.

One of the Buffalo Springfield’s prettiest songs, this was written around the time Young got his own L.A. apartment, with a fridge full of Cokes and Twinkies, as he notes in his memoir. “It’s about what happens when you start getting high,” he says on 1970’s Live at the Cellar Door. “And you find out that people you thought you knew, you don’t anymore — because they don’t get high, and you do.”