YMMV / Neil Young

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• Archive Panic: As of 2022, Neil has released 43 separate studio albums, as well as 2 EPs, 9 live albums, 4 box sets, and 4 soundtrack albums. Additionally, his Archives series consists of 5 additional box sets and 16 additional live albums.
• Audience-Alienating Era: The majority of Young's output in the '80s isn't looked back on too fondly, being marked by a number of erratic genre experiments that were so bewildering to fans and critics that Geffen Records sued him for it. After the electronica-laden Trans, sales sharply dropped for Young, and while his albums still just barely skimmed the top 40 in his native Canada, he wouldn't have a hit album in the US again until Freedom, widely considered the ender of this artistic low point.
• Awesome Music: Frequently cited candidates include Harvest, Rust Never Sleeps, Tonight's the Night, On the Beach, Freedom, After the Gold Rush, and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
  • "Long May You Run". It was even the closing song for the 2010 Winter Olympics!
  • Zuma deserves a mention, particularly its heartbreaking centrepiece "Cortez the Killer". Ragged Glory and Sleeps with Angels have their share of highlights as well.
• Broken Base: Neil's guitar playing (specifically, his electric guitar work) can be rather divisive. For his fans, his loud, grungy riffs and jagged, simplistic soloing are a Most Wonderful Sound that are perfect for the song, but his detractors view him as a sloppy and technically limited player who has no business being ranked in the top 20 on Rolling Stone's list of the greatest guitarists of all time.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Keep me searching for a heart of gold... And I'm getting old." First sung at 25; he's 78 as of November 12, 2023.
  • "It's better to burn out than to fade away", which was memetically mutated into a popular Shout-Out/Badass Boast, until it was used in Kurt Cobain's suicide note in 1994, who often spoke of how influential Neil was upon him. Since then, Neil emphasizes the line "once you're gone, you can't come back", instead. He also revealed in interviews that he had a strong urge to speak with Cobain for about a month before his death. He tried repeatedly, but couldn't reach him.
  • The lyrics to "Ramada Inn", after Young's 2014 split from his wife.
  • The "This Note's for You" video, after the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The controversy over the "This Note's for You" video in 1988, with MTV refusing to play it at first because of its Take Thats toward Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, and Coke, Pepsi, Michelob, Budweiser and Calvin Klein commercials (all of whom were big MTV sponsors). However, Canada's music channel, MuchMusic, aired it immediately (He's a big native star and airing it would comply with Canada's Canadian content rules), giving the video a groundswell of popularity that MTV could not ignore and they aired it. This gave Young a big boost after the slump he'd been through for most of the decade, setting the stage for his resurgence in The '90s (even if the video, the album and the controversy are long forgotten today).
• Signature Song: "Heart of Gold", although "Old Man" and "Harvest Moon" aren't far behind in popularity. By album:
  • Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere: "Down by the River", with "Cinnamon Girl" not far behind. Also "Cowgirl in the Sand" is regarded as a classic and the Title Track is also fairly well-known.
  • After the Gold Rush: the Title Track, "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and "Southern Man".
  • Harvest: "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man". "The Needle and the Damage Done" is also highly regarded as a classic, and "Out on the Weekend" and the Title Track have lately grown in popularity.
  • On the Beach: "Walk On" or the Title Track.
  • Tonight's the Night: the Title Track or "Tired Eyes".
  • Zuma: "Cortez the Killer".
  • Long May You Run: the Title Track.
  • American Stars 'n Bars: "Like a Hurricane".
  • Rust Never Sleeps: "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)"/"Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" (practically the same song in two counterparts, with slightly different lyrics and one being acoustic and the other being electric). Also a classic is "Powderfinger"
  • Freedom: "Rockin' in the Free World".
  • Harvest Moon: the Title Track.
  • Silver and Gold: "Razor Love".
  • For his songs with Buffalo Springfield, it's "Mr. Soul", while for his career with CSNY it's "Ohio", with "Helpless" not far behind.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: In addition to "Mr. Soul", mentioned on that page, "Days That Used to Be" sounds more than a bit like "My Back Pages". Of course, one might say the same about Neil's "Helpless" (1970) and Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" (1973) or Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver" (1976)... Lampshaded in "Borrowed Tune" (whose melody was lifted from "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
  • "Let's Impeach the President", about Bush's failure to help the people of New Orleans after the Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastation, deliberately uses the first melodic line, and only that first line, of Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans."
  • Neil was also on the receiving end of this with America's "Horse with No Name", which sounds so much like him that even Neil's mother thought it was him. The resemblance is more stylistic than melodic, though, particularly due to Dewey Bunnell's singing. Bunnell admits he was trying to sound like Neil. And he knocked "Heart of Gold" out of the #1 spot on the music charts.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Trans. So far as to make his then-current label, Geffen Records, sue him for not sounding like he used to.
  • It went farther than that. Despite him being known as a country folkie, they refused to release Old Ways (a country album) after that since it didn't represent his rock sound, insisting that he do "a rock-and-roll album" instead, which resulted in the rockabilly Everybody's Rockin (deliberately taking the term "rock and roll" to its most original definition). The Old Ways that did get released isn't the original, by the way; it contains a few new songs that were written after the original sessions. It was after those albums that Geffen decided to sue him.
    • Oh, and while Trans IS different on a lot of songs, Young didn't completely abandon country-rock, as he included "Little Thing Called Love" and "Like an Inca" as the opening and ending tracks. In his autobiography, Young admitted the Bookends were meant to "break it to his fans gently" due to the complete stylistic change, but the move failed to work, and he has mentioned regret at attempting it.

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