The 100 Greatest Neil Young Songs

“Too Far Gone” is a lovely, plaintive song that Young originally recorded during the sessions for 1975’s Zuma, with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on mandolin. It’s an aging-hippie’s lament for a love that fell apart, and a classic Young evocation of the emotional wreckage of the Sixties: “We had drugs, and we had booze/But we still had something to lose,” he sings. It was a live favorite all throughout the Seventies and Eighties, finally seeing official release on 1989’s Freedom. Sampedro was on mandolin this time too, joined by Ben Keith on pedal steel — proof that some bonds do stand the test of time.

This 16-minute travelogue, which recalls “Powderfinger” and “Like a Hurricane,” unspools over multiple verses and guitar excursions, with Crazy Horse chugging along like an old steam engine. It tells a story of a couple who are in it for the long haul. “So many years now together/All those good times, ups and downs,” he begins, as the team travels through time and space, surviving imperfectly. “Every morning comes the sun,” Young sings, guitar aimed straight at it. “Ramada Inn” came with a video that combined home-movie-style footage and psychedelic imagery — looking backward through a haze.

Young had already quit Buffalo Springfield three times when the group recorded this sweetly nostalgic tune in December 1967, and the lyrics make clear he was ready to bolt for good. “Now I won’t be back till later on,” he wrote. “If I do come back at all/But you know me and I miss you now.” As with many Young songs of the era, “On the Way Home” was sung by Richie Furay because the band’s label felt he had a more commercial voice. Stephen Stills thought the song was written directly to him, and it serves as a bittersweet endpoint for a band that, in Young’s words, “never achieved [its] potential.”

After ostentatiously bummed-out albums like On the Beach, which contained three songs with the word “blues” in the title, Frank “Poncho” Sampedro came to Young with a question: “Here we are in L.A. There’s beautiful chicks everywhere … isn’t there something else to write about?” Young’s response was another “blues,” this one a curt, catchy Crazy Horse rocker. Brilliant stream- of-consciousness lyrics roll off Young’s tongue, apparently the product of a hazy late-night creative rush. “We came home from the bar, and I wrote that song,” says Young. “I woke up, and I went, ‘Fuck!’ I couldn’t remember writing it.”

Young once called On the Beach “one of the most depressing records I’ve ever made,” and the depression peaks with its seven-minute bad dream of a title track. “The world is turning,” Young moans over languid, despondent strumming. “I hope it don’t turn away.” Backed by a Frankenstein band featuring Crazy Horse’s Ralph Molina on drums, Graham Nash on electric piano, and Tim Drummond of the Stray Gators on bass, Young sings about career anxiety, aloneness, and the desire to escape life entirely. Perhaps because the song is so intensely downcast, Young has played it live only four times since 1975.

“Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi/Ain’t singin’ for Coke,” declares Young in this wicked sendup of corporate-sponsored music. His backing is bar-band blues, courtesy of his short-lived group the Bluenotes. And when he adds, “Don’t sing for Bud,” it’s clearly a shot at Eric Clapton, who had recently done a Michelob ad. The song’s hilarious video was banned by MTV, probably so no advertisers would be offended, yet it won Video of the Year at the Video Music Awards. “When I thought of [the line] ‘This note’s for you,’ ” Young said, recalling an epiphany on his tour bus, “I laughed my ass off. For miles and miles.”

For his debut solo album, Young worked for the first time with producer David Briggs, and this menacing rocker — which blends Young’s fuzz-tone guitar with an orchestral interlude — was one of their finest early hours. “The Loner” was later covered by Young’s friend/nemesis Stephen Stills, fueling the rumor that he was the subject of the song (“a perfect stranger, like a cross of himself and a fox”). Young himself has never been clear about any specific inspiration, saying that the songs on the album were “mostly dreams, nothing concrete; they were mostly created as vehicles for record-making.”

Twenty-five years after they’d first joined forces, Young and Crazy Horse demonstrated the enduring potency of their on-again, off-again collaboration with this roiling 14-minute triumph, Young’s first extended-jam foray in many years. Twice as long as “Like a Hurricane,” “Change Your Mind” juxtaposes numerous needling, stabbing guitar solos with lyrics that mull the salvation of love, and its stresses. Given how mercurial Young has been throughout his career, the title could also have been a kind of elusive statement of purpose: “I never believe [if] what I know is good or not, so I’m always scanning,” he once said when asked about the song.

Cut, like much of Tonight’s the Night, in a tequila haze at Los Angeles’ S.I.R. studio, “Albuquerque” is a crushing road-dog lament. Young had played the New Mexico city with the Stray Gators in March 1973, just two months before the fatal overdose of roadie and friend Bruce Berry; here, he makes the word “Albuquerque” sound like a sigh from the deepest region of his broken soul. Ben Keith’s rich pedal steel adds an extra wallop of pain. “I couldn’t believe all that weird slide,” Nils Lofgren said of Keith’s work on songs like this. “All those shades of melancholy that were in us.” As Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot later said, “It was like an Irish wake on tour.”

The arena tour to support Harvest was one of the most difficult periods of Young’s career. He was physically weakened after undergoing spinal surgery, and band infighting quickly turned the experience into an agonizing slog. Young poured out his pain and frustration each night when he sang “Don’t Be Denied,” a brand-new tune that told his entire life story — from his parents’ divorce to the kids beating him up at school to the breakup of Buffalo Springfield. It’s the best of his many biographical tunes about his early life, and a highlight of his recent tours with Promise of the Real.

Young’s most succinct mea culpa was the product of a short-lived but muscular band of Crazy Horse’s Frank “Poncho” Sampedro with the rhythm section of bassist Charley Drayton and drummer Steve Jordan. It’s the highlight of Ragged Glory, an album that reasserted Young’s bona fides not just as a forefather of guitar-throttling Nineties alt-rock, but also as a musician who still made most of his young acolytes seem pretty lightweight. Fittingly, he played it with members of Pearl Jam when he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. And, a year later, he dedicated a hometown performance of it to his high school gym teacher.

Young began struggling with epileptic seizures around the time he moved from Canada to Los Angeles. After an attack left him in an L.A. hospital for 10 days, he wrote this taut, nightmarish peek into his head, fame, and the increasingly volatile Buffalo Springfield. “A lot of songs take a long time to write,” Young said. “But this one took only five minutes.” Tensions within the group — specifically between Stills and Young — were mounting beyond control. “I don’t know where it came from, but it really tells the story of my life at that time,” Young said of the song, which features a riff unintentionally nicked from the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” (In fact, legend has it that Young briefly quit Springfield when Stills objected to releasing “Mr. Soul” as a single due to its similarity to the Stones song.) For all their clashes, “Mr. Soul” featured Young’s and Stills’ guitars playing off each other in mind-bending ways, all set to a tense, throbbing arrangement. Young returned to the song several times: Stills and Young played an acoustic version of it at Woodstock during CSNY’s set, and in 1982, Young released a synthed-up reboot on his controversial Trans album.

In January 1970, CSNY traveled to London for a headlining gig at the Royal Albert Hall. Paul McCartney was in the audience, as were Donovan, Ahmet Ertegun, and thousands of others eager to see the new supergroup shine. The show was a smashing success, but you’d hardly know it from this bruised ballad, which Young wrote about the trip. Musically, it’s one of Young’s most haunting compositions from that era, thanks to the D-modal tuning also heard on “Ohio,” “Cinnamon Girl,” and “Mr. Soul.” Young later said he favored the tuning for “the way it just sustained. I liked the drone.”

This lilting ballad, as close to a campfire singalong as Young would ever write, was an ode to his first car — a 1948 Buick Roadmaster hearse he named Mort. In 1965, Young tried driving the car from Canada to California, and as the lyrics reveal, it did indeed break down on the way. “I felt that Mort was a large part of my identity,” he said later. The song, introduced in 1974 on CSNY’s reunion tour, was recorded two years later, with Stills, as the title track for their Stills-Young Band collaboration. In the years since, Young has performed it with CSNY and at the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, where the lyrics took on a more universal feel.

The pinnacle of young’s unlikely collaboration LP with Pearl Jam is this seven-plus-minute mini memoir, which Young biographer Jimmy McDonough deservedly called “perhaps the greatest track Young has done in the Nineties.” Over churning guitars, Young conjures ghosts of ex-lovers, the plight of Native Americans and war vets, American blood lust, and his own unquenchable creative thirst. “I tried not to think about what I was writing — I just tried to keep going. And now, when I listen to it, it’s different every time,” Young said the year it was released, when he turned 50. As he explains in the song, “People my age/They don’t do the things I do.”

Although Young was heavily influenced by the punk explosion for Rust Never Sleeps, “Sedan Delivery” is the one track that could pass for an actual punk-rock song, pure high-speed aggression. A slower, sludgier version was released in 1977. But Young revved it up for Rust Never Sleeps. It’s the flip side of “Tonight’s the Night” — if that song was about a workingman destroyed by drugs. “Sedan Delivery” is about the workingman who happens to be the drug dealer. The pressures of the job are getting to him (“I just can’t accept the stares”). But he cynically shrugs it off and goes back to the hustle: “Sedan delivery is a job I know I’ll keep/It sure was hard to find.”

The terrifying “Revolution Blues” is written from the perspective of a Charles Manson–type murderer. “I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars,” hisses Young, who briefly knew Manson. “But I hate them worse than lepers, and I’ll kill them in their cars.” David Crosby played guitar on “Revolution Blues,” even though the subject matter freaked him out. (The Sharon Tate massacre took place at the former home of Terry Melcher, who had produced Crosby in the Byrds.) “I thought it was kind of a creepy song,” Crosby says today. “I didn’t want to censor him, though I don’t want to celebrate murderers in my own songs.”

The lone Crazy Horse track on a set otherwise powered by Booker T. and the MG’s, this grinding rocker is a quintessential Young reverie, with images of Custer “making his last stand/With the Indians all around,” a man (maybe the singer) “slicing through the culture,” and an elusive woman reaching transcendence in her car while the radio plays. It was originally recorded for a shelved Crazy Horse set called Toast, which included many songs later recut with the MG’s for Are You Passionate?. But Young left this nearly nine-minute steamroller alone. It remains one of his most powerful latter-day moments.

This gorgeous, harmony-driven lament was originally slated for a Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young record in 1973. That project was derailed, but Young ended up repurposing the song five years later with singer Nicolette Larson. Its title also got recycled when he used it for his notorious 1982 film with Dennis Hopper, Dean Stockwell, and Devo — a movie about the day the Earth ends, as Young once described it, “made up on the spot by punks, potheads, and former alcoholics.” Human Highway flopped, despite costing Young $3 million. But it did generate collateral ideas, among them the title for Rust Never Sleeps.

Young wrote this cathartic moaner with CSNY in mind, and it’s fun to imagine their harmonies merging with his fraying yowls. But even though it’s one of the most tuneless moments on an album Young called “the most out-of-tune thing I ever heard,” it captures a mood, especially the way he squawks the phrase “ain’t got nothing.” “I still get chills when it gets to that fuckin’ note,” drummer Ralph Molina said. “It’s so real.”

The title track of what Young called “the quietest record I’ve ever made” was a delicate beauty that tipped its hat to the Everly Brothers’ “Walk Right Back.” The song reunited Young with most of his Harvest-era band, the Stray Gators, as well as Linda Ronstadt, who’d sung on “Heart of Gold.” “I wanted to feel the feminine side of the content of the songs,” Young said at the time, referring to Ronstadt’s swooning harmonies. Ronstadt, Young said later, “really made that record what it is.” One of his most straightforward and sentimental love songs, it was augmented by a music video in which he’s seen dancing with his wife, Pegi, in a bar.

Young’s third solo album became a singer-songwriter classic in part due to this simple but sturdy ballad. Its lyrics, which offer advice for the hippie lovelorn, were so relatable that it became Young’s first Top 40 hit, peaking at 33 on the pop charts. Addressed to “a friend I’ve never seen” who needs to “lose the down that he’s found,” it was supposedly inspired by Graham Nash’s breakup with Joni Mitchell, which took place around the time Young was recording After the Gold Rush. Given that Mitchell ended things with Nash by way of a brief telegram, Young’s words must have been extra-comforting.

This surreal psychedelic-folk meditation begins by invoking Native American genocide, confesses lust for its titular muse, and ends up sitting by a fire talking shit with Marlon Brando. But for all its loopy free-associating, the unplugged Rust Never Sleeps standout is one of Young’s most piercingly sad performances. It was written in a mid-Seventies creative outburst that astonished longtime producer David Briggs. “I’m talkin’ about pickin’ up a guitar, sittin’ there and lookin’ me in the face, and in 20 minutes — ‘Pocahontas,’ ” Briggs marveled. “No lyric sheet, no pen, no paper, none of that bullshit. Just picks up the guitar and the demon takes control.’ ”

“Danger Bird” is one of several songs on Zuma that dissect Young’s failed relationship with Carrie Snodgress. It evolved out of a song he wrote but never recorded called “L.A. Girls and Ocean Boys,” based on a trip he’d taken to visit Snodgress in Hawaii, only to learn she’d been cheating on him. One of that song’s lines — “ ’Cause you’ve been with another man/ There you are and here I am” — made it into the grueling seven-minute “Danger Bird,” amid bleary riffs and divebombing solos. “Sometimes that’s what happens,” Young said. “One song doesn’t come out. I’ll be writing another one and say, ‘Oh, that fits.’ Bang! Drop it right in.”

Like “Expecting to Fly,” this cinematic montage reflected the psychedelic experimentalism coursing through pop in 1967. It interspersed lyrics about the perils of fame with interludes of jazz piano, circus music, and Buffalo Springfield drummer Dewey Martin singing bits of their song “Mr. Soul.” Young wrote the song during one of the many periods during which he was at odds with the rest of the band. “I wrote this after quitting the group in ’67, due to one of many identity crises,” said Young, who chose the title image because it evoked “being scared and mixed up.” Young and producer Jim Messina painstakingly pieced it together from “over a hundred takes,” as Young later recalled.

Young had already finished most of Harvest when he made one more trip to Nashville to record additional material. Out of those sessions came this lonely-guy ballad, since covered by everyone from Lady Gaga to Deer Tick’s John McCauley. The song’s self-pitying lyrics are almost a parody of the singer-songwriter genre that Young would soon abandon — previewing the song for a film crew before he cut it, he chuckled at the words as he sang them, as if they were a joke. But his quavery delivery, Ben Keith’s high-lonesome pedal steel, and the spare, terse accompaniment of the Stray Gators show how Young could add depth to a trite sentiment.

“Zuma was breaking free of the murk,” says Young. “My best records are the ones with Crazy Horse.” Zuma brought the band back together after a three-year hiatus, with new guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro and a restored energy. The LP kicks off with “Don’t Cry No Tears,” which takes its melody and many lyrics from “I Wonder,” a song Young recorded with his high school band the Squires more than a decade earlier. He refashioned the old tune to address his disintegrating relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress. “I would be so overwhelmed with my feelings I would start to cry,” she said years later. “It made Neil crazy.”

Young’s hugely successful 1992 album, Harvest Moon, was touted as his long-awaited return to the acoustic country rock of his biggest hit, Harvest. But the album’s centerpiece ballad, “From Hank to Hendrix,” was a million miles away from wide-eyed post-adolescent yearning. Young mourns a relationship that’s seen big changes come and go, both personal and cultural: “From Marilyn to Madonna, I always loved your smile/Now we’re headed for the big divorce, California-style.” He sang it solo in a memorable Saturday Night Live performance, casting a spell that few performers his age could match — a rock elder sharing a little of his hard-won wisdom.

“It’s much bigger than Southern Man,” Young said. “It’s White Man.” He was in the midst of a furious fight with his wife, Susan Acevedo, when he recorded “Southern Man.” “She was angry at me for some reason, throwing things,” Young said. “They were crashing against the [studio] door.” The song was an FM staple, inspiring proud Southerner Ronnie Van Zant of Lynyrd Skynyrd to write “Sweet Home Alabama” as a response. Young took it as a good-natured barb, and Van Zant began wearing a Tonight’s the Night T-shirt onstage to show there were no hard feelings. “I’d rather play ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ than ‘Southern Man’ any time,” Young told Rolling Stone.

A Topanga Canyon cocaine deal in 1972, at a house with an orgy going on: It should have been the ultimate California hippie dream, but it turned into a driveway gun battle and a couple of dead dealers. Only Young could have turned these murders into such a beautiful song. “That actually happened to a friend of mine,” Young admitted. “My friend was the guy who shot the other guys. It was just one of those deals that turned bad.” “Tired Eyes” is the elegiac centerpiece of Tonight’s the Night, mourning the casualties of the Sixties, wondering how it all went so wrong. Young strains for high notes he can’t hit, over the ghostly lurch of Ben Keith’s pedal steel and Nils Lofgren’s piano. Young mumbles the chorus — “Please take my advice/Open up the tired eyes” — over and over, as if he’s trying to wake himself up from a nightmare. In the America of the 1970s, he sure wasn’t the only one who knew that feeling. “We all got high enough,” Young later said of the Tonight’s the Night sessions, “right out there on the edge where we felt wide open to the whole mood. It was spooky. I probably feel this album more than anything I’ve ever done.”

Due to painful back problems, Young played acoustic guitar on much of Harvest. “The doctors started talking about wheelchairs and shit, so I had some discs removed,” he said. After surgery, he recorded some songs on electric guitar, including this twisting jam, with guest vocals by Stephen Stills and Graham Nash. A 16-minute version appears on 1972’s Journey Through the Past.

This gleaming, gut-wrenching love song was first performed by Young solo-acoustic at a club show in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1968, and then cut with Crazy Horse the following year. It was shelved until 1974, when it was rerecorded with Ben Keith’s pedal steel standing in for the late Danny Whitten’s guitar. Nixed from the final version of Tonight’s the Night, it finally saw the light of day as a surprise highlight of Decade. For a sense of the Crazy Horse original, check out the serrated version on Live at the Fillmore East, where Whitten and Young poignantly join voices.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere closes with this heady 10-minute jam, a perfect distillation of the chaotic beauty of Crazy Horse’s first incarnation. Young wrote it while he was sick with the flu and recorded it with the band in a single day at his Topanga Canyon basement studio — the same day they knocked out “Cinnamon Girl” and “Down by the River.” “There wasn’t much need to discuss it,” said bassist Billy Talbot. “Cowgirl in the Sand” has gone on to serve as the centerpiece of many Crazy Horse shows over the following decades, often stretching out to 18 minutes or longer (for a definitive experience, listen to the version on Live at the Fillmore East, from 1970). One reason for its live power, according to Young, is the dreamy vagueness of the lyrics. “The words to ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ are very important because you can free-associate with them,” he said. “Some words won’t let you do that, so you’re locked into the specific fuckin’ thing the guy’s singing about. … This way, it could be anything.”

In the final months of the 1980s, Young suddenly roared back to life. “Rockin’ in the Free World” delivered what most of Young’s work in that decade had totally lacked: passion, noise, energy, and that madcap Neil Young grin. Guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro remembers coming up with the iconic phrase after seeing newspaper photos of Iranian protesters burning American flags. “Whatever we do, we shouldn’t go near the Mideast,” he remembers saying. “It’s probably better to keep rockin’ in the free world.” Young thought the phrase was “such a cliché” that he had to use it. Two versions of “Rockin’ in the Free World” bookend Freedom – first a live acoustic version, then a stomping electric finale, with Young shredding away on guitar as he rants its lyrics about crack, poverty, the military buildup, and environmental disasters. He introduced the song on Saturday Night Live, raging on guitar in an Elvis T-shirt, as if he’d woken up from a coma, shocking fans around the country. His massive creative resurgence was just beginning.

According to collaborator Jack Nitzsche, this trippy piece of orchestrated melancholia dealt with Young’s “fear of making it with a girl.” But the song was also a testament to his singular vision at the dawn of his career. Although credited to Buffalo Springfield, it was recorded with session players including drummer Jim Gordon, bassist Carol Kaye, and backup singer Merry Clayton. Young and Nitzsche, his fearless co-producer, spent weeks crafting the grandly spacious record, even the singing. “I overdubbed my vocal line by line to get it in pitch,” Young said. “Studio singing was still very nervous for me then.” When the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” was released just after “Expecting to Fly” had been completed, Young thought the two songs too similar (particularly their shared hovering, sustained finales) and worked on his track some more. “We had it all ready to go,” he said, “so we just went back into the studio and changed it around.” He needn’t have worried: “Expecting to Fly” is still unlike anything Young had created before — or since.