Most of Harvest’s material was written by age “24 and there’s so much more”, as he memorably describes himself on the album’s other hit single, “Old Man,” which peaked at #31 on Billboard. This aesthetic would basically become one of the two best-known lanes, to sound like a “Neil Young album.” There’s the more acoustic, country-rock lilt of Harvest, and then there’s the distortion-fueled, electric-guitar frenzy of dust kicked up when accompanied by his long-time band, Crazy Horse. While he may have been accused in ’72 of putting out “ After the Gold Rush with new words and a pedal-steel” in Rolling Stone, the updated template he crafted here he’d go on to faithfully retrace later, on 1992’s Harvest Moon and 2005’s Prairie Wind, as well as the 2006 Jonathan Demme-directed documentary/concert-film Heart of Gold, borrowing its title from the only Billboard #1 single of Young’s career, first featured here. Safe to say that David Geffen would have been much happier, and found it far easier to sell, the Neil Young heard on Harvest. Still, this is a man who has also gone so stubbornly hard in the other direction, that he was famously sued by his own then-record-company, Geffen Records, in the early ‘80s for violating his contract by putting out experimental synth-driven albums like Trans (1982) that were “unrepresentative” of the Neil Young that critics and fans had come to expect. Commercial appeal was something that he has flirted with on occasion, to wild success. Critical commentary is never something Young has ever seemed to court, even if it found its way to him from time to time, particularly on overpraised later-career albums like 1989’s Freedom and 1990’s Ragged Glory. And perhaps part of the reason why this album still sounds evergreen in 2022 is rooted in its eschewing of stylistic, lyrical or sonic innovation. Meanwhile there is enough of a self-referential thread to previous Neil Young work, running throughout the ten songs & thirty-seven minutes, that led fellow musician/ Rolling Stone music critic John Mendelsohn to say it had “the discomfortingly unmistakable resemblance of nearly every song on this album to an earlier Young composition-it's as if he just added a steel guitar and new words to After The Gold Rush” in his less-than-glowing 1972 review.īut while all of that may be true, there is still only one Neil Young. The album’s two deviations into orchestral arrangements, recorded by classical arranger Jack Nitzsche with the London Symphony Orchestra on “A Man Needs a Maid” and “There’s a World,” was a blueprint already laid out plainly in the work of The Moody Blues, E.L.O. The “country rock” synthesis heard here was present in the late sixties work of Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons and the Rolling Stones, to name just a few. This was true in reference to the musical landscape in which it arrived, as well as how it related to Young’s catalog up to that point. Released 50 years ago, there’s nothing on Harvest that sounded new, even by 1972’s standards. This is what makes it somewhat ironic that by the time he was 25, recording Harvest, the biggest selling album in the United States in 1972, Neil Young was already making a killing by sounding old and world-weary. It even somehow ties into whatever he’s doing with those overpriced Pono headphones, consoles and streaming services geared towards audiophile nerds. It’s seen in his activism related to energy and environmental causes. It’s a purpose demonstrated in his collaborations with bands two or three generations his junior, from Pearl Jam in ’92 to Promise of the Real in ’16. (Note: Select sources cite Februas the official release date.)įor the past few decades, Canadian-born singer-songwriter Neil Young, now 76, has seemed to make a career out of remaining (pardon the pun) young. Happy 50th Anniversary to Neil Young’s fourth studio album Harvest, originally released February 1, 1972.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |