For the last five-plus decades, Neil Young has been, along with Bob Dylan, one of North America’s most towering, influential rock figures. He’s that rare musical threat: a multifaceted songwriter, penning universally resonant acoustic ballads, crunchy electric stompers, and cryptic long-form epics; a virtuoso musician, pioneering novel proto-grunge and noise-rock textures and instrumental interplay; and an eternal maverick continually experimenting with sound and defying industry expectations, even at the expense of chart success.
Given the enormous shadow he casts on popular culture as well as a daunting discography (next month’s Homegrown, originally slated for a 1975 release, will be his 40th album), it’s difficult to know where to begin when exploring Young’s musical legacy. After leaving Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the man nicknamed “Shakey” has forged a solo career not only long and winding but also—as in 1982’s Krautrock- and new wave-inspired Trans and 1991’s live noise collage Arc—thorny and more than a little unusual.
Just as there is no definitive Neil Young album—not even 1972’s Harvest, his most successful solo effort—there is no definitive core of Neil Young songs, and any best-of list is bound to leave many dimensions of his musical personality unaccounted for. That said, these 25 songs comprise a guide for the singer-songwriter’s signature brand of rock (“Cinnamon Girl,” “Rockin’ in the Free World”), his mastery of poetic memoir (“Thrasher,” “Ambulance Blues”), and his adventures in bursting structural and stylistic boundaries (“Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Change Your Mind”). Michael Joshua Rowin
25. “Change Your Mind”
“Change Your Mind” is one of Young and Crazy Horse’s most epic compositions. Like “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” “Change Your Mind” possesses a basic verse-chorus framework broken up by extended jams, but this time Young’s solos are reflective and dreamy rather than propulsive and tense. That’s because “Change Your Mind” is about the redemptive power of love, and without being overly sentimental or naive. Indeed, the simple language Young uses to describe this power is often surprising, revelatory, and realistic: Love’s “magic touch” isn’t only “revealing,” “soothing,” and “restoring,” but also “destroying,” “distracting,” and “controlling,” proving it must be properly cared for and harnessed in order to truly, constructively “change your mind.” Rowin
24. “L.A.”
In 1972, on Harvest’s “Out on the Weekend,” Young was sweetly crooning about Los Angeles—his first home in the U.S.—as an idyllic locale where one could hope to “start a brand new day.” But just like the countless dreamers who have tried to “make it” there to no avail, it doesn’t take long for cynicism to set in. Just a year later, over a stinging blues-rock riff, Young was sneering about a “city in the smog” where “the freeways are crammed” and imagining the whole place collapsing into the ground. A standout cut from the once long out-of-print but captivatingly shambolic Time Fades Away, “L.A.” proves that Young at his nastiest was also often at his best. Jeremy Winograd
23. “Harvest”
The subtle title track of 1972’s Harvest has been undeservedly overshadowed by that album’s megahits: “Heart of Gold,” “Old Man,” “The Needle and the Damage Done.” Strumming a lulling, melancholic rhythm on his acoustic guitar, Young spins a mysterious tale concerning himself, a woman, and her mother. Just as Young asks a series of questions to the woman, so do listeners come away from the song asking their own: Why is the mother “screamin’ in the rain”? Who might be the “black face” the woman understands? What is the “change of plan” referenced in the chorus? Even if he refuses firm answers, Young offers several possibilities for his relationship: “Will I see you give more than I can take?/Will I only harvest some?/As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp?/Or fuse it in the sun?” For all its obscure scenarios, the low-key drama of “Harvest” ultimately hinges on the narrator’s full acceptance of and gratitude for love. Rowin
22. “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long)”
Only a heart of stone will remain unmoved by Young’s plea for emotional vulnerability in “Round & Round (It Won’t Be Long),” one of two ballads on 1969’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere that examine the isolating cost of hardened egoism. Built on achingly strummed acoustic guitar chords and a beautifully harmonized vocal by Young and Robin Lane, “Round & Round” shows that repeated failures to recognize and express one’s pain “weave a wall to hem us in” from true companionship. In the final verse, Young hints at a solution: “And you see your best friend/Looking over the end/And you turn to see why/And he looks in your eyes and he cries.” Whether you confront your pain or not, you’re going to experience grief, but in confronting yourself you can empathize and connect with the pain of others rather than suffering in solitude. Rowin
21. “Borrowed Tune”
If Young’s famous mid-’70s “ditch trilogy” was a literal ditch, “Borrowed Tune” would be its very lowest point. Hunched alone over a piano, his voice sleepy and threadbare, and his “head in the clouds,” Young sounds so drunk and worn out that he’s not even able to conjure up an original melody to get his thoughts out (by his own admission, he’s singing a tune lifted from the Rolling Stones’s “Lady Jane”). The level of intimacy Young allows in such a dark moment is as uncomfortable as it is spellbinding. Winograd
20. “See the Sky About to Rain”
After the joyful defiance of opener “Walk On,” “See the Sky About to Rain” gracefully transitions 1974’s On the Beach into the somber mood that will define the remainder of the album. But while most of the songs express bitter anger at specific targets alongside regret, sadness, and longing, here Young is content to explore a single yet deeply felt melancholy caused by simply being human and therefore vulnerable to suffering. Anchored by a delicate Wurlitzer electric piano line into which Ben Keith’s pedal steel guitar subtly blends, Young knows well enough to employ a muted lyrical palette to complement the music: landscape portraiture in the chorus (“See the sky about to rain/Broken clouds and rain/Locomotive, pull the train”) and pensive existentialism in the verses (“Some are bound for happiness/Some are bound to glory/Some are bound to live with less/Who can tell your story?”). Rowin
19. “Down by the River”
Original Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten’s death in 1972 left “so much left undone,” as Young would later put it. The shaggy dual-axe synergy they achieved on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’s guitar epics was titanic, visceral, uncanny, and it’s a tragedy that Whitten and Young never had the chance to replicate it. Fortunately, they weren’t shy about keeping the tape rolling while they had the chance, resulting in this nine-plus-minute tour de force—one of rock’s most famous murder ballads. Young deservedly gets plenty of glory for his violent, jagged solos, but Whitten carefully threads his own licks under and around the frayed edges of the former’s notes like a master weaver, providing the steady bedrock needed to make us wish those incendiary, scabrous solos would never end. Winograd
18. “Thrasher”
Young’s best ballads express an utterly unique sadness: wise, compassionate, fortified, and yet also forever yearning, humbled by the vastness of an incomprehensible universe and restlessly searching for moments of friendship and grace that make that universe just a little less lonely. Nowhere is this sadness better communicated than in 1979’s “Thrasher.” Recorded live in concert for Rust Never Sleeps, the song contains not only Young’s gorgeous 12-string guitar work and a melody so immediately spine-tingling that it feels like you’ve known it your entire life, but also a grand lyrical tapestry that connects everything from rural agriculture to autobiographical artistic and geographical journeys to “libraries and museums, galaxies and stars.” While lamenting the hubris of man’s grasp at ever more money, technology, and civilized comfort, the majestic power and meaning of “Thrasher” cannot be so simply reduced. It is, instead, ineffably transporting as only the greatest of songs are, bringing the listener to a place “Where the eagle glides ascending/There’s an ancient river bending/Down the timeless gorge of changes/Where sleeplessness awaits.” Rowin
17. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”
Young’s first Top 40 hit as a solo artist, “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” feels like a Crosby Stills Nash & Young song in all but name: Its lyrics were allegedly inspired by the breakup of Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, and Stephen Stills’s harmonies are audible in the mix. But the creakiness of Young’s vocals and the plodding beat by Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina give the song a raw vulnerability that transcends its slick L.A. soft-rock veneer. Like all the best of Young’s middle-of-the-road material, its simplicity makes it feel both deeply personal and universal—which may be why it’s been covered by artists as diverse as Jackie DeShannon, Saint Etienne, and Florence and the Machine. Zachary Hoskins
16. “Cowgirl in the Sand”
The monumental finale of the monumental Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, “Cowgirl in the Sand” is Young and Crazy Horse’s finest achievement in preternatural electric rock chemistry. Introduced with a half-minute melancholic guitar duet that sounds like the theme to a gloomy, epic western, the song proceeds over the next nine-and-a-half minutes to cycle through extended passages of glorious guitar shredding, wistful verses concerning ephemeral youth and creativity, and choruses that simultaneously exult and question Young’s adoration for the titular heroine and all of womankind. Perhaps. The lyrics are stark enough to offer a limited set of characters and themes, yet oblique enough for listeners to imagine in them endless possible meanings and evocations, as if Young was laying down his rough mesmerism in order to entice us into the same state of feverish delirium he claims inspired this visionary masterpiece. Rowin
15. “Fuckin’ Up”
There’s always been something crass about Young’s work with Crazy Horse: the unapologetically sloppy guitar playing, the off-key vocals, the ambling grooves. At their best, the band’s righteous raggedness can make the trappings of many of their classic rock contemporaries—instrumental virtuosity, slick production, traditional song structure—sound like pointless niceties, or a neutered network-censored version of an R-rated sex comedy. “Fuckin’ Up” turns that subtext into text. But its eminently relatable hook line—“Why do I keep fuckin’ up?”—would be mere novelty if it didn’t come paired with such a powerhouse hard-rock riff. Even though it was released over 20 years into the band’s career, “Fuckin’ Up” instantly became—and remains—one of Crazy Horse’s signature performances. Winograd
14. “Rockin’ in the Free World”
By 1989, Young had written an incredible range of songs but never a true raise-your-beer arena-rock anthem like the electric version of “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The concept seemed somewhat beneath him, or at least not of interest to an odd, gawky Canadian folkie. But the thunderously chugging song shows that Young’s range knows few bounds, and among arena-rock anthems, this one’s hard to beat, defiantly raging as it does against the Ayatollah, drug addiction, environmental decay, and other forces of Reagan- and Bush-era oppression. Young embraced the meathead aesthetic of this style of song: Before performing the song on SNL that year, backed by Charlie Drayton, Steve Jordan, and Frank Sampedro, he pumped himself up by lifting weights, resulting in one of the most intense and celebrated performances in the show’s history. Winograd
13. “Revolution Blues”
Like many of his peers in the late-’60s L.A. music scene, Young had a run-in with Charlie Manson; their meeting, in Topanga Canyon in 1968, left Young sufficiently impressed to gift the wild-eyed aspiring singer-songwriter with a motorcycle. After the Tate-LaBianca murders the following summer, others in Young’s position would understandably recoil from their time in Manson’s orbit. Young, however, took the opportunity to gaze into the abyss. Sung from the perspective of a Manson Family-like sect lurking “in a trailer at the edge of town,” “Revolution Blues” may be Young’s darkest song; certainly it spooked David Crosby, who balked at the sheer malignance of lines like, “I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars/But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.” But it’s a perfect match for the mood of On the Beach, Young’s surreal depiction of post-’60s malaise. Hoskins
12. “Lookout Joe”
Young recorded “Lookout Joe” in late 1972 and debuted it on his 1973 stadium tour, where he dedicated it to the soldiers returning from Vietnam—a generation of Rip Van Winkles waking up in an America they no longer recognized. When the studio recording finally emerged on 1975’s Tonight’s the Night, its polished backing by Nashville’s the Stray Gators stood out against the rest of the album’s rickety, booze-soaked performances, but its debauched themes fit right in. Young’s eponymous soldier has come “home” to a Lou Reedian urban milieu of “hip drag queens” and junkies with Cadillac-sized holes in their arms. But where Reed would align himself with this motley crew, Young’s stance is harder to read: Is the apparent conservatism of the song’s “Old times are good times” refrain genuine or ironic? Given Young’s shattered mental state at the time, one suspects he may not have known himself. Hoskins
11. “Pocahontas”
A sort of spiritual sequel to 1970’s similarly stripped-down “After the Gold Rush,” “Pocahontas” once again finds Young phasing through time and space, surveying mankind’s destruction of something sacred (Native American culture, in this case). It’s one of his acoustic masterpieces, its forward propulsion and intensity matching anything on the electric side of Rust Never Sleeps. By the song’s end, Young places himself around a campfire with two characters famously linked to the Native American experience: “Pocahontas, Marlon Brando, and me” sounds alternately like the beginning of a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke or an enlightened dispatch from the afterlife. It’s silly, strange, and profound. Winograd
10. “Tonight’s the Night”
The title track to Young’s rawest album begins with the tinkling of a piano, as if to suggest the fragility of existence, before Young and Crazy Horse launch into an anthemic blues track that repeatedly switches from death-defying celebratory exclamations to death-anguished cries of despair. Like the album as a whole, “Tonight’s the Night” is nakedly emotional without descending into navel-gazing self-pity, and largely because the song’s subject—longtime friend/roadie Bruce Berry, who passed away only a few months prior to recording—remains front and center throughout lyrics that refuse flowery language in favor of proletarian straight talk: “Bruce Berry was a working man/He used to load that Econoline van.” By the time Young describes Berry’s demise (“‘Cause, people, let me tell you/It sent a chill up and down my spine/When I picked up the telephone/And heard that he’d died/Out on the mainline!”) the stark portraiture makes way for a disbelieving howl of rage too inconsolable to bear. Rowin
9. “For the Turnstiles”
A gnomic indictment of the business of fame (“Singing songs for pimps with tailors/Who charge ten dollars at the door”), what sets “For the Turnstiles” apart from Young’s many other explorations of this theme are his stark clawhammer banjo and strangled harmonies with dobro player Ben Keith, both of which sound like they’ve been beamed in from Greil Marcus’s “old, weird America.” And though it sounds like nothing else on On the Beach —and very little else in the rest of Young’s catalog—“For the Turnstiles” succinctly encapsulates the mood of the album with its terse, oddly uplifting chorus: “Though your confidence may be shattered/It doesn’t matter.” Hoskins
8. “Cortez the Killer”
On paper, “Cortez the Killer” shouldn’t work. Based on a single four-chord pattern that never changes over the course of seven-plus minutes, and offering lyrics that rightly demonize Hernan Cortez but also romanticize Montezuma to the point of defending human sacrifice, the penultimate track to 1975’s Zuma is nonetheless one of the most hypnotic and haunting songs in Young’s vast catalog. Featuring Young’s iconic opening guitar solo, which builds in intensity without ever increasing in languid volume or speed, “Cortez the Killer” also pulls off a miraculous last-act link between the extinction of an entire civilization and a long-dead romance (“And I know she’s living there/And she loves me to this day/I still can’t remember when/Or how I lost my way”) that evokes the irredeemable tragedy of both. Rowin
7. “Ambulance Blues”
Though “Ambulance Blues” is clearly indebted to Bob Dylan’s acoustic epics, as well as Bert Jansch’s “Needle of Death,” no one but Shakey could have written a song as messy yet emotionally devastating. Using a disarming lower register that sounds more like his speaking voice than the birdlike caw that defines his singing, Young spends nine minutes on a digressive rhapsody about his life and career, starting “Back in the old folkie days” in Toronto and ending with the thought that his then-current endeavors amounted to “pissing in the wind” (an alleged quote of his manager, Elliot Roberts). The inscrutably specific references that fill the points in between make it so that, as Young himself admits, “it’s hard to say the meaning of this song.” But the deep, personal place it came from is unmistakable. Stark, rambling, and quietly beautiful, “Ambulance Blues” is both one of the bleakest and most life-affirming songs of Young’s career. Winograd
6. “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”
Crazy Horse wasn’t known for brevity. But in under two-and-a-half minutes, they bang out a thorough distillation of the back-to-the-land movement and concurrent country-rock boom of the late ’60s—as well as provide definitive evidence that, despite their rough edges, the band could nail some tight harmonies when they wanted to. “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” also heralded a new era in Young’s career, and not just because it marked the beginning of his work with Crazy Horse. As the first single from the 1969 album of the same name, it put to rest the notion that Young’s primary songwriting mode was weird, dreamy, orchestral folk, as established through his work with Buffalo Springfield and his first solo album. No, this was a happy-go-lucky shit-kicker, churning out hooks as catchy as any Beatles song and twangy as any redneck band’s best work. Young has never stopped mining that Americana vein, but he’s never quite topped this song as far as that particular style goes. It’s arguable that no one else has either. Winograd
5. “Albuquerque”
If the majority of Tonight’s the Night sounds like the result of a drug-sodden, despondent Saturday night, then “Albuquerque” is the bleary-eyed Sunday morning after: a melancholy snapshot of Young on the road, looking for “fried eggs,” “country ham,” and a place “where they don’t care who I am.” In another context, perhaps, the song could be seen as slight, but on Tonight’s the Night it’s a welcome respite, with Ben Keith’s pedal steel and Nils Lofgren’s elegiac piano offering aching beauty amid so much unvarnished ugliness. The chorus, too, demonstrates that even an album with such a bleak reputation can have its moments of wry humor, as Young, Lofgren, Keith, and Ralph Molina stretch the name of New Mexico’s most populous city into a wistful sing-along. Hoskins
4. “Powderfinger”
Originally recorded as a solo acoustic track for 1975’s Hitchhiker, “Powderfinger” is a folk song at heart: the tragic first-person narration of a 22-year-old frontiersman who dies in a suicidal attempt to defend his home from an attacking gunboat. The lyrics are novelistic in their level of rich narrative detail; even a passing line like “Big John’s been drinking since the river took Emmy Lou” seems to beg for a separate song of its own. But while “Powderfinger” is impressive in any form, it’s the live version with Crazy Horse from 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps that has rightfully earned its place in the classic rock canon, with a twin-guitar line by Young and Frank “Poncho” Sampredo that sends the end of every verse rocketing into the stratosphere. Hoskins
3. “Tired Eyes”
Sequenced after “Lookout Joe” on Tonight’s the Night, “Tired Eyes” occupies a similar ’70s-noir universe. Here, though, Young casts his lot squarely with the misfits: people who, like the song’s ill-fated protagonist, “tried to do his best but…could not.” The performance by Young and backing band the Santa Monica Flyers is appropriately bleary, shambling from the slow build of the verses to the chorus’s plaintive entreaty to “open up the tired eyes.” But its most affecting moment comes when Young adopts the role of a gossip-hungry listener, prying for the narrator to tell them more about the guy who “shot four men in a cocaine deal”: “I mean was he a heavy doper, or was he just a loser? He was a friend of yours.” The note of self-recrimination in his voice cuts through the sordid subject matter, exposing the humanity underneath. Hoskins
2. “After the Gold Rush”
Part eco-philosophy thesis, part sci-fi short story, “After the Gold Rush” is perhaps Young’s most starry-eyed, psychedelic song. But in characteristically iconoclastic fashion, it contains none of the trappings associated with psychedelia at the time of its release in 1970. It’s just Young alone at the piano, his solitude broken only by a haunting French horn solo. He needs only his words and strange, warbling tenor to create a lost-in-a-dream depiction of “Mother Nature on the run” throughout the ages. The arrangement may be stark, and the lyrics vexing, but a melody so pure and heavenly is impossible to deny. Winograd
1. “Cinnamon Girl”
“Cinnamon Girl” was the world’s introduction to one of the all-time great garage bands: the scrappy trio originally known as the Rockets and rechristened by Young as Crazy Horse. In “the Horse,” Young found collaborators who shared his penchant for primitivism (infamously, the guitar solo on “Cinnamon Girl” is little more than a repeated D note, a brilliant proto-punk riposte to the late-’60s muso super-group ideal). But they also unquestionably elevated his sound—particularly Danny Whitten, whose soulful harmony vocals are actually more prominent in the song’s mix than Young’s. If it seems strange that such an unqualified group performance would top a list of Neil Young’s best songs, it just speaks to his symbiotic relationship with the band. It’s a testament to both Young and Crazy Horse that “Cinnamon Girl” remains vital over 50 years after its recording. Hoskins
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