The 100 Greatest Neil Young Songs

“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.”

Young said this “might be one of the best records I ever made.” He recorded it on a cassette player in a drugged-out haze in front of his fireplace, which can be heard snapping and crackling as he sings about being a salmon swimming upstream. He later added vibes, drums, and underwater effects, and pitched it to CSNY, who passed. “I realized there was no way I could sing the song again or perform it,” he wrote, “and I never have since.”

“Over and Over” is a convulsive Crazy Horse guitar excursion that’s also a sweetly heartbroken Young reverie. Over distorted chords that repeat for eight minutes, Young sings about an evening spent reminiscing over “nights of love and that moment on the beach” and plays emotive, flaring solos. Yet despite its length — and because of its kinship with early-Nineties grunge — the song was a mild hit, reaching Number 33 on the mainstream-rock chart.

On the Time Fades Away tour, Young introduced this lovely piano ballad as “a song without a home.” Written in 1971 during the creative surge that produced much of Harvest, it’s a lonely guy’s dream of leaving L.A. for the comforts of Canada. Though the song didn’t appear on a studio album (or the 1972 soundtrack that shares its name), it’s the rare Time Fades Away song that still shows up in Young’s live set.

Almost 20 years after Frank Sinatra bragged about having the world on a string, Neil Young cut it free. “World on a string/Doesn’t mean a thing,” he sang on a dirge that sounds ragged and spontaneous, even on Tonight’s the Night. For the whole of the song’s two minutes, his voice quivers just outside the right pitch. “I like that one, but the singing is really out,” Young later said. He gave it another shot for his 1993 Unplugged set, but fittingly let it fall apart at the end.

Written in the mid-Sixties at a coffee shop in Detroit — “on napkins,” Young said — “The Old Laughing Lady” is sad, pretty, orchestral pop in which the title character seems to stand in for either death or booze. Jack Nitzsche’s layered production artfully made Young’s lyrics sound, in the producer’s words, “a million miles away but right there.” The results are California psychedelia with the sun sucked out.

“It’s overblown, but it’s great,” Young said of this song. Featuring a dramatic Jack Nitzsche arrangement, “Maid” transcends its air of dated chauvinism to reveal a deeper core. Written for Young’s girlfriend Carrie Snodgress (who inspired the line “I fell in love with an actress”), it hangs on the fragile line “When will I see you again?” and remains a moving union of grandeur and vulnerability.

When Young played Saturday Night Live in May 2000 to promote his gentle new album, Silver & Gold, the first song he chose was “Razor Love,” a relaxed-fit country-soul ballad that he and his all-star band performed while seated, and SNL respectfully let him play the song in its six-minute entirety. Despite the violent title, “Razor Love” — which Young first performed on a 1984 tour — is one of his sweetest, simplest domestic ballads.

Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina called Young’s 1981 album Re-ac-tor “a turkey, a one-legged turkey.” With its stark red-and-black cover and grinding, malformed songs, it struck fans as the punk-like rawness of Rust Never Sleeps gone horribly awry. Yet the album does have its enjoyably cranky moments, including its opening track, “Opera Star,” a nagging, perverse riff-crusher in which Young sings about a rock & roll fan whose girlfriend leaves him to go to the opera with “some highbrow.” In 2013, when Young and Crazy Horse started including it in their live sets (often coupled with “Prisoners of Rock ’n’ Roll,” another hard-driving Eighties orphan), it was a welcome surprise that didn’t seem all that out of place among his beloved guitar classics.

One of the many bummed-out ballads on Tonight’s the Night. Young wrote this in a Wisconsin hotel room during the ill-fated 1973 Time Fades Away tour. He recorded it solo, just piano and harmonica, copping his melody from the Rolling Stones’ 1966 “Lady Jane.” “I’m singing this borrowed tune/I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room/Too wasted to write my own.”

On May 16, 1974, Young played a surprise set at New York’s Bottom Line featuring many unreleased songs. The legendary show opened up with a dreamy song he introduced as “Citizen Kane Jr. Blues,” and later retitled “Pushed It Over the End” when it resurfaced that summer on CSNY’s stadium reunion tour. Supposedly inspired by Patty Hearst, it would have been a highlight for most songwriters — Young hasn’t played it since.

Harvest is Young’s biggest album, but its title track remains a lesser-known gem in his catalog. That might be because the lyrics are oblique even by his standards: “Dream up, dream up/Let me fill your cup with the promise of a man.” But the music is the essence of easygoing stoner country, led by the straightforward piano of John Harris. As Young once put it, “’Harvest’ is one of my best songs. That’s the best thing on Harvest.”

A high point of the acoustic side of Rust Never Sleeps — just Young and his guitar, brooding over his compulsive need to keep hitting the road. Still only 32, he worries about turning into a dinosaur and has a few harsh words for Crosby, Stills, and Nash (“They were just dead weight to me”). Young knows the thrasher is coming for him someday, but he faces mortality with no sentimentality, just a shrug.

This paranoid, menacing acoustic stomp is a Crazy Horse recording like no other. They cut it at Young’s ranch in 1976, at the tail end of a massive drug binge. “It was a marathon,” Frank “Poncho” Sampedro recalled. “Girls were there, makin’ us Mexican coffees, choppin’ lines.” They blew through this take at 6 a.m. As producer David Briggs said, “We knew we had nailed it. It had the spook.”

Woodstock was a mere four years in the past when Young debuted “Roll Another Number” while on tour in 1973, but there was already plenty of longing for that bygone era. “I’m a million miles away from that helicopter day,” he sang. The song became a defiant statement, closing out many gigs, perhaps as a kiss-off to fans who came expecting a night of hits.

“Even Richard Nixon has got soul,” Young sang in “Campaigner.” He wrote this acoustic ballad while on tour, after watching a TV news bulletin about Nixon’s wife, Pat, being hospitalized, and debuted it onstage hours later. “Guess I felt sorry for [Nixon] that night,” he said. In the Decade liner notes, Young had a droll explanation for his surprising pardon: “Sort of a modern-day Cortez, you know.”

“There is no dearer friend of mine/That I know in this life,” Young sings on this moving piano ballad, originally written during 1976 sessions with the Stills-Young Band. Some have speculated that it’s about his at-times-tenuous friendship with Stephen Stills, but Young has said it’s about producer Jack Nitzsche, then struggling with drugs and personal issues. A live version with ghostly backing vocals and faint electric guitar was widely bootlegged. But it didn’t get officially released until Young performed it on Unplugged in 1993, showing new listeners an example of his songwriting at its most somberly powerful, while offering a gift to die-hard fans.

The homespun folk album Comes a Time arrived after a run of anguished rock records like Tonight’s the Night and Zuma, offering fans some of Young’s most amiable music in years. “It’s the first record I’ve released,” said Young, “where I’m actually facing the audience on the jacket and smiling.” Originally recorded solo-acoustic before being recut with a full band, the album’s title track features Rufus Thibodeaux’s lilting fiddle and Nicolette Larson’s warm backing vocal, which add porch-y ambience to Young’s wistful melody. When he sings “This old world/Keeps spinning round,” it’s resignation with a touch of contentment.

In 2003, at the height of America’s mood of blinkered Iraq War–era jingoism, Young released Greendale, a politically charged concept album he also spun into a graphic novel and film. It told the story of a fictional American town and a family struggling there. “I don’t think Americans felt holier-than-thou in the 20th century,” Young told Rolling Stone during the 2003 tour with Crazy Horse to support the album. “Something else is going on now. That’s what Greendale is about.” Greendale’s finale and highlight is a latter-day combination of a socially aware CSNY homily and a wailing Crazy Horse guitar jam. Leading a chorus in a call-and-response while hollering through what sounds like a megaphone, Young declares the need to “save Mother Earth” against Big Oil and corporate farms that are dumping toxic waste into rivers. “Don’t care what the governments say/They’re all bought and paid for anyway,” he shouts. “The energy [in “Be the Rain”], that’s youth rising out of this,” Young said, adding, “This period is the biggest breeding ground for revolution in this country since the mid-Sixties.”

The experimentation of “Sample and Hold” is precisely the sort of gesture that inspired David Geffen to sue Young for releasing “unrepresentative” music. The Kraftwerk-inspired, synth-heavy tune, on which he sang through a vocoder, was unlike anything he had recorded up until that point. But he wasn’t just being an anti-corporate contrarian: Trans was inspired by his young son Ben, who has cerebral palsy and can’t communicate with language; Young wanted people to feel what it’s like to hear words without understanding them. “Sample and Hold” was partially inspired by a new digital system for controlling toy trains, a hobby Young would later share with his son.