10 Greatest Neil Young Songs (Part 1)

1) Harvest

A guy named Jimmy McDonough wrote a biography of Neil Young called "Shakey" that I read a couple years ago. It's a great book, and the thing I remember most from it is what he says about Neil's song "Harvest", the title song from his best selling album "Harvest". The song is pretty and I always liked it, but I'd never really thought about what it was about.

Some of the lyrics are,

"Did I see you down in a young girls town
With your mother
in so much pain?
I was almost there at the top of the stairs
With her screamin in the rain.

Did she wake you up to tell you that
It was only a change of plan?"


Neil Young was married to an actress named Carrie Snodgress who had grown up with a mentally ill mother. As a child Carrie would frequently be awakened by her mother trying to kill herself. And so the chorus and the verses of a pretty song have a dark, dark core. "Did she wake you up to tell you that it was only a change of plan?". What a way to put it; soft chords and someone's screaming in the rain.





2) I've Been Waiting For You

The one great song off his first, and not very good, album. I couldn't find the original on youtube so here's a live version of it. This isn't close to the original, but here's how he sounded singing it in 2001, for everyone who's ever wondered what that sounded like. I put a David Bowie cover of it up here too because that's how I first heard the song. It's not great but it's closer to what the original version's like. Find it if you can and listen to it, it's a weird record, with a chorus that jumps out and looks you in the eyes. Neil's intense when he's coming at you; and here's the first time there was nowhere to run to baby, the first time there was nowhere to hide.