This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m excited to share a conversation with New York-based writer and musician Sam Sodomsky, whose music criticism I’ve admired for over a decade, and who records and releases songs under the name The Bird Calls. His latest collection, Take Leave, is out next Friday, August 28, and it’s more than a little inspired by Neil. But as we get into in our chat, it’s clear that Neil’s inspiration goes well beyond just sonics. There’s a spirit, an attitude, a free-flowing creative state almost like meditation, which Sam knows well. This is perhaps summed up in Sam’s choice of “Dreamin’ Man,” a seemingly stream-of-consciousness banger from 1992’s Harvest Moon. A live recording of that very song begins with a kind of warning…

“Just a feeling behind this one. There’s nothing literal.”

That’s Neil, strumming cowboy chords at Portland’s Civic Auditorium on January 24, 1992, drifting his way into “Dreamin’ Man.” The song does, in fact, float like a dream from image to image. But the images are there to evoke feelings and maybe capture them (a fool’s errand, of course). That’s why there’s nothing literal about “Dreamin’ Man.” Neil’s a dreamin’ man, you see, and that’s his problem.

Sam Sodomsky knows this. He’s been working on his own music for a long time, releasing his home recordings under the name The Bird Calls for more than a decade. But he hasn’t made being a dreamin’ man his problem. In fact, for him, it’s one of the great mysteries of writing songs or creating anything. “I’ve always felt that all art comes from the subconscious,” he says. “There’s something very similar to dreaming, where it’s like, even if it’s about something specific, the way it’s coming out is filtered through something you don’t necessarily have a ton of control over.”

If you’ve read any of Sam’s great music criticism at Pitchfork, where he’s a senior editor — perhaps a recent Best New Music review of a highly anticipated album by one of contemporary culture’s most talked-about artists — then you understand his devotion to the craft. I’ve long been a fan of his incisive writing as well as his commitment to foregrounding influential works of generations past that may otherwise be slipping into the ether. His essay on The Blue Nile’s Hats, for example, is a wonderful primer on the Scottish atmospheric masters: “Their songs mostly explore the trajectory of relationships, from their glittery beginnings to their plateaus of contentment and their exhausted, haunted finales,” Sam wrote in a 2018 piece. It should be noted that his writing on Hats was published in January of that year, fully six months before The 1975 flipped its standout song “The Downtown Lights” into what’s been called the millennial “We Didn’t Start The Fire” — a.k.a. “Love It If We Made It,” for the chronically offline. (The song ended up Pitchfork’s best song of 2018.)

He’s also written about Neil, of course. But what’s often even more fun than writing about Neil — and as someone who does that a lot, believe me when I say this — is talking about Neil with someone who understands Neil, and understands that Neil is never to be fully understood, the way you do. That’s what our recent conversation, lightly edited below, was for me: a reminder to keep letting the ideas in and worrying about what they might become later.

For what it’s worth, Sam also made one of the best Neil-sounding songs of the year. It’s called “To Everything There Is A Ceiling” and it pulls off a remarkable trick. Yes, it’s got an alt-country groove. Yes, that alt-country groove is quite reminiscent of Neil. And yet, it’s just an all-around good song that helps me understand Sam as a wholly original artist — one who remembers not to be so literal with his artistry.

_{Photo by Jake Fromm}

Sam Sodomsky: Silver & Gold was the newest Neil album when I got into him, and that was really trad Neil. But then Greendale was the next one, I think — maybe Are You Passionate? happened before, but Greendale completely obsessed me when it came out because it was my entryway into Weird Neil. I just remember as a kid spending so much time with that really densely packed lyric book that had the illustrations. Greendale’s kind of sick, and I’m waiting for him to reissue it on vinyl so people will get down with it.

The thing people don’t talk about with Greendale is that it’s a Crazy Horse record. So the band is on it, and it sounds really sick and pared down, and it’s maybe the last record that really has that sound. Psychedelic Pill is sort of like that, but it’s so heavy and epic. Greendale really has that burnt-out Ditch sound to it still, which is just so cool.

Weekly Neil: Listening to Take Leave, I hear you pulling from a lot of the shared Neil stuff that I hear in a lot of other kind of contemporary records, but in a way that does feel studied. You’ve been making music for a long time. Obviously, you’re a great writer, and the essays I’ve read from you over the years require such great discipline in research. But listening to “Some Bands” — “Some bands break up, some bands stay together” — that reminds me of Neil just right away. It’s so deceptively simple, and I’m sure that there’s this iceberg of what we don’t see. I was curious why you chose that as the first song on the record.

Sam: I kind of wrote it and knew that that would be its purpose on the record. It begins with someone leaving town. That line is in there, and that felt like a good way for the record to start as an overture. I sort of knew it would start there and then end with “Take Leave” before I knew what would go in between those songs. The more I worked on it, I maybe even kind of lost faith in that song a little bit. But the guy I make records with, Ryan Weiner, he was always really adamant that it was maybe the best song I’ve written, and I really take him seriously when he says stuff like that. So I kind of trusted him.

The iceberg thing is really true. As I was writing it, I imagined it as one of those songs with a lot of verses and a lot of bridges and a lot of different stories woven into it. But the more I did that, the less true it seemed, or like it felt like maybe I was losing the kernel of the heart of it. By keeping it brief and condensed to just like one or two scenes, I think it actually maybe speaks to more things than it would have if I tried to make it really long and epic. The Neil comparison is accurate, especially in this period where I’m making records in a studio. I feel like Neil is just a really good reference point a lot of the time. This wasn’t the reference point for that song, but I always loved the way “Little Wing” starts Hawks & Doves — so quiet, so sad, so quick. That blast of harmonica to me is one of the saddest sounds ever. I think about a lot when it comes to Neil.

WN: When you and Ryan are figuring things out, are you thinking about sounds, and are you thinking about, “Let’s do this on this track, let’s see how this sounds on this”? In pop music, that’s being done nonstop, and the sound library is pretty deep. But with the framework you’re working with, are you coming in having a general idea, or are you experimenting a little bit in the studio?

Sam: I cede it a lot of that control to Ryan. We’re in the studio together, but you know, like having home-recorded for so long, I think I got really good at manipulating the environment with really limited tools. Basically every record I made until like 2022 or something was on GarageBand, and I just like overdubbed and added effects. I would kind of black out and do it just because I developed like the skills to produce it the really specific way I liked. But part of what’s really fun about the making records I’m making now is that Weiner has this really crazy state-of-the-art studio in his basement, and he thinks about music entirely that way. A really Neil song on this record is “To Everything There Is A Ceiling.”

WN: Totally.

Sam: We were just totally going for “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” in the arrangement. That was him, and I was like, “That’s spot on how I heard this in my head.” But then there’s others that we really struggle with. There’s a song on the record called “Sunny” that I was really proud of, and we recorded it in this really trad (way) — him on drums, me on guitar and vocals, kind of like ‘70s yacht-rock vibe — and it wasn’t inspiring or interesting. We just spent so long redoing it and tearing it apart and building it back up to get to the version we have now. That’s totally new for me. I’m just so used to working quickly and going with my instinct on things and not really being challenged on it. And it opens it up to a lot more surprises and a lot more collaboration.

WN: I love in that song, you sing, “Sunny in the 70s, sunny in the 2010s, times like these don’t come again.” Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

Sam: That song was actually really inspired by Kurt Wagner from Lambchop. That was the voice I heard in my head when I started writing it. I was in a text thread with a friend, and we were just sending each other our favorite Lambchop lyrics, and I was just thinking about like what qualities define his lyrics that I don’t get from other songwriters, which is what led me to some of the lines in the first verse. He’s just good at taking you into rooms you don’t necessarily want to be in.

It was also when that New York Times article about heteropessimism came out, like the woman writing about just how brutal it is to be single and go on dates with this generation of men. That’s where some of the second half of the song came from, really obliquely. I’m not responding to the article or anything, but I was just imagining sad dudes talking about their dates. “Sunny in the 70s, sunny in the 2010s” — I like doing stuff like that. I get excited when I hear things in a song that I haven’t heard someone sing or try to present beautifully. Eulogizing the 2010s felt kind of funny to me, and that felt like a like a funny way to lead into it.

WN: It’s definitely one of the more memorable moments on a first listen, for sure. So you write a song and you’re working with Ryan and figuring it out, and that’s the framework: “Maybe we do our version of that.” I’m sure that that’s where a lot of the fun comes into it, like seeing well, what is it? What does it sound like when we do our version?

Sam: Yeah, and I sort of think that’s why he’s so enduring as an influence because he makes it sound so easy, and you almost get the sense for him it is, like he’s really not overthinking it and really obsessed with the in-the-moment thing, which is ironic because he’s also obsessed with audio quality stuff. But it’s why, across any genre, you can see the influence. Metal bands love Neil. In the ‘90s, he was the Godfather of Grunge. All those guys loved him, singer-songwriters, country, every genre. I feel like he’s an ideal for just following your instincts, not getting too fussy, not being pretentious. I think everyone aspires to that, and most people can’t wear it as naturally as him. Did you listen to the record from last year?

WN: I did, and then I had to sit back and be like, man, what a gift to still be doing this.

Sam: It’s funny because I think people didn’t like it, and I get why. It’s weird to hear him sing about being estranged from his grandchildren, but I’m like, how different is that really from how he was writing in the ‘70s and how direct it was? Instead of singing about friends he’s lost and breakups, this is the heartbreak that he’s channeling when he plays. There’s something really admirable about that for me, where he truly does not care about alienating listeners or revealing thoughts that I’m almost positive a few days thinking on it would make him not want to include.

WN: I have Le Noise in my car, and on that version of “Hitchhiker” he sings a totally different ending from the original, about being grateful for his wife and kids, and then the song just ends. Well, I’m curious why you you picked “Dreamin’ Man.”

Sam: It hit me this morning. That was one of the ones I was maybe gonna pick, but it seemed too minor or something. But I really do love that song, and I love the sound of that song. It’s always a reference point for me. That whole record — how old are you?

WN: I will be 36 next week. (Edit: I am 36 now.)

Sam: Cool, so we’re in the same age range. I think a lot of people our age came to Harvest Moon because of their parents. That was my first Neil awareness. My mom had the CD in her car, and it just soundtracked a lot of family drives. So there’s that element where it sounds really comforting to me. There’s a few like of the ‘70s singer-songwriters who came back in the ‘90s, and they had this sort of starry nighttime adult contempo, really crisp acoustic guitar with synths. Like Joni Mitchell, Night Ride Home, is kind of in that vein, and James Taylor, the record with “Copperline,” New Moon Shine, is kind of that zone. I love that sound, but for me, having done the whole trip with Neil since I was a kid, I still think Harvest Moon is really unique in how it sounds and the atmosphere of it. I know it gets oversimplified as like the sequel to Harvest, which is true, but to me, it’s a lot more surreal than Harvest. And “Dreamin’ Man” to me is the song that represents that. In one sense, I feel like he’s talking about the thing that we were just talking about: “I can’t tell when I’m not being real.” The flow of his creative brain is just so unstoppable and so indistinguishable from the realities of his life. I think that’s like an inspiring thing to write about.

(That line at the beginning of this post, “Just a feeling behind this one. There’s nothing literal,” comes up. It really is the linchpin.)

Sam: I think that’s so important in understanding his work and understanding this record. I could say the same about pretty much any song I’ve written: Nothing that happens is literal. There’s a different logic to it. I’ve always felt that all art comes from the subconscious. There’s something very similar to dreaming, where it’s like, even if it’s about something specific, the way it’s coming out is filtered through something you don’t necessarily have a ton of control over. If you dream you see someone naked, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re in love with them or anything. It can mean a lot of different things. And I think that’s really true of Neil’s songs, even when they seem kind of like cut and dry.

WN: You mentioned “I’m The Ocean” a couple weeks ago via text. That one, to me, is just like a cross-section of his brain. So stream of consciousness. It’s images. He’s all these things, and then finally, you know, he’s the ocean. It is essential if you really do want to understand the kind of artist he is and the way that he makes art. And “Dreamin’ Man” is a lot more simple compared to that.

Sam: It is, but it’s similarly far-reaching in what he’s trying to say and what he’s trying to do with it. The language in that song is really resonant to me. I love “In the meadow dusk, I park my Aerostar,” even when I was a kid. I didn’t know what it meant. There’s a vague image conjured through it, but I just love the flow of the words and the imagery. There’s something meditative about it, which is what “I’m The Ocean” and “Dreamin’ Man” make me think about. “I’m The Ocean” also has that great line, “People my age, they don’t do the things I do,” which I love and feels really raw for him.

WN: I started playing guitar when I was about 11, and I wasn’t really serious. When I was a teenager and I kind of started taking it a little bit more seriously, some of the stuff that really taught me how the instrument works was Neil because I think I’m a pretty heavy rhythmic player. I learned a lot of Dave Matthews Band songs, and he’s a super percussive player, and Neil too. I don’t know when you started playing, but did his playing factor into your your journey as a musician as well?

Sam: I started playing guitar when I was really young, and it took me a really, really long time to even be kind of competent with it. I was just really impatient and I didn’t want to learn other people’s songs. I just wanted to like have enough fluency with the instrument that I could like play my own, and I think because of that, I was really drawn to people who played guitar and made it sound simple, stuff that I could kind of replicate the feeling of. Pete Townshend was really big for me, playing The Who, those big chiming chords with a lot of space between them. John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers was kind of my first guitar hero. I tried learning to play all the solos on Californication and By The Way just because I loved the way they sounded, and they would almost always be played on just one string, on the high E string.

And then Neil, definitely, especially the chords to his songs, because they’re so expressive. Learning how to play “Unknown Legend” was really major for me because it’s simple chords, but the things he’s doing between the chords creates this feeling of momentum, which is kind of like Elliott Smith, now that I think about it. There’s just so much walking between chords. Even “I’m The Ocean,” I remember learning to play that, and it’s E minor and G and D, but it doesn’t sound like it. It just sounds like him. It’s songs that I could replicate and that gave me a different perspective on the instrument, which I think his songs really do.

WN: There’s so much to be said about his guitar playing. I’ve written about this before, but there are songs like “Chevrolet,” which I’m obsessed with.

Sam: Oh yeah, from World Record.

WN: Just a song that is 10 minutes long or 15, and it’s just about this guy wanting to go cruising his car, and you do that over two or three chords. Something about that is so eternal to me.

Sam: It’s worth noting, too: For all the people inspired by him and even imitating him, truly no one sounds like him when playing guitar. It’s just so immediate, knowing it’s a Neil Young guitar solo. That puts him in such a unique category of musicians and speaks to the thing we’re talking about, where there’s a quality to it that transcends rock musician or singer-songwriter accompanying himself. There’s a real depth to it.

WN: To go back to “Dreamin’ Man” for a moment, I love the details in this song. He’s got a loaded gun. “I see your curves and feel your vibration.” “Our homeless dreams go back to the street.” There’s all these really interesting details that linger. In listening to Take Leave, too — the “Sunny” lyrics that I shouted out before are a good example of this. When those details emerge in this kind of framework, a folk-indebted sound or whatever the the situation is, I like that. Neil’s grasp on that, even sort of accidentally sometimes, is really profound.

Sam: I don’t know if he’s a meditation guy, but I am, and I feel like the deeper I’ve gotten into it, the more I’ve tried to recreate that feeling when I’m writing, and part of that feeling is just letting your mind wander, like ending somewhere different than where you began. “Dreamin’ Man” really gives me that sense. It goes all over the place and it always returns to its chorus like a mantra — not necessarily like in a country song, like a chorus-as-bumper-sticker kind of way, which is awesome. I like songs like that, too. But there’s just this circuitous path that the more songs I write, the more I get excited when I get close to that feeling of taking someone on this weird subconscious journey.

The Bird Calls’ new album, Take Leave, is out next Friday, August 28. It’s $10 on Bandcamp.

“Dreamin’ Man,” written by Neil Young, from Harvest Moon (1992)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Tim Drummond: bass
Kenny Buttrey: drums
Ben Keith: pedal steel guitar
Spooner Oldham: organ
Astrid Young: vocals
Nicolette Larson: vocals

One time I was listening to Sirius XM and I heard a DJ refer to “The Jacket” after playing a My Morning Jacket song. I tweeted this and someone posited that every group has its own jam band name. I have yet to confirm the veracity of this theory but it’s as good as any to throw your weight behind. People call the very subject of this newsletter Uncle Neil (including Strand Of Oaks’ Timothy Showalter) and there’s of course his most trusted backing band The Horse. Calling his Ditch-era band The Flyers is a deep cut and worthy of both respect and annoyance.

I first came to The Jacket after hearing “Golden” and mistaking it for Fleet Foxes. This was a very 2010 thing to do, even though “Golden” has a prominent pedal steel guitar part that The Foxes would never dare attempt. “Golden” is an outlier on 2003’s highly jammy It Still Moves, a lovable ballad with vocals recorded in an actual grain silo — or so the legend goes. The songs are long, ethereal guitar rockers that take the best of space rock (without the superfluous psychedelia) and Southern rock (without the baggage) and somehow feel lighter than Cool Whip even as they reach the six and seven-minute marks. “Rollin’ Back,” a dream-pop country song, comes to my mind often. What a novel concept.

Once I’d had my fill — and once I was relatively certainly “Mahgeetah” had become my favorite song of all time for a bit anyway — I moved to Z, a masterful album that begins with a vowel-rich chorus that recalls Gregorian monk chants and distills Jim James’ best songwriting impulses, his penchant for left-of-center interests and the jams themselves into tight compositions. “Dondante” grabbed me first with its melodrama, but as I write this I’m convinced “Gideon” is the peak. You ever see them do that shit on Letterman? They’re with the Boston Pops Orchestra! They’re wearing tuxedos and referencing the Bible! I love it.

When Circuital dropped in 2011, I was completely smitten. (I skipped over Evil Urges given the Pitchfork pan, but it’s easily their most underrated now.) “Victory Dance” made me think that whole thing with Wilco being “the American Radiohead” was actually misplaced wish fulfillment. The Jacket move from a funk song about black metal to one that opens with “they told me not to smoke drugs but I wouldn’t listen” and a simple ode to feeling wonderful originally penned for Sesame Street. As a painfully earnest 21-year-old who would’ve told you his favorite band was CSNY, this was big time my shit. I once turned off the dance-pop music at a college party to play “Wonderful (The Way I Feel)” instead. And I wasn’t even that drunk.

But believe it or not, this is all prologue. The Tennessee Fire, their 1999 debut, is a treasure chest that might actually be my favorite from The Jacket. It’s a fragile folk album with a twang and indie rock sensibilities. “Heartbreakin Man” lifts the memory to “I Can See Clearly Now” to unpack the hunter becoming the hunted over ghostly dream-pop howls. “I Will Be There When You Die” is the song I played to get over seeing my ailing grandfather in a hospital bed shortly before he passed. These songs mean a whole hell of a lot to me. So imagine my excitement when I discovered the band performed it live in its entirely at NYC’s Terminal 5 in 2010 — and released the recording in all its amplified glory. This has been a huge record for me for the past year, pretending I was there seeing The Jacket at what was surely a peak.

But man, I don’t even know anymore. I obviously haven’t kept up with their post-Circuital output as much as I wish. The Waterfall albums are nice! There is something, though, about At Dawn that I simply can’t shake. It’s MMJ morphing slowly into The Jacket, maybe so slowly and gradually that it’s borderline glacial. They’re pulled in a million directions. Can you imagine writing a song called “Death Is My Sleezy Pay” or “X-mas Curtain” or “Phone Went West” or “Strangulation!”? These are incredible titles! They reveal James reaching a zenith of what he’s most comfortable doing. One time he played at cafe inside a car dealership on a street corner in Lower Manhattan right outside of the office I was working in. I heard him cover “Raspberry Beret” and saw a huge crowd as I sat typing at my desk. It was surreal but cool. He is comfortable doing stuff like that and I love it.

“It’s just the way that he sings, not the words that he says,” goes one of my favorite songs the guy’s ever written. Nothing else to be said about music as a medium, as far as I’m concerned.

There’s a whole history of The Jacket intermingling with Neil as you might imagine given what James looks like, what his band sounds like, the way that he sings, etc. I don’t have time to write about that here. But I am seeing The Jacket this weekend, which I why I went kinda long here. I’ve actually had these notes about The Jacket saved in a draft for about a year and was waiting for the right time. Maybe one day I’ll ask James what his favorite Neil song is the way NPR recently asked him about his evolving relationship with the Grateful Dead.

I can guess at least a few that he digs. The band covered Buffalo Springfield’s “Expecting To Fly” with Fleet Foxes back in 2023. They’re on that new compilation series I wrote about recently playing “Like A Hurricane,” a song I frankly don’t love, with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, which sounds extremely promising. The Jacket and Wilco did “Cinnamon Girl” in 2013; shockingly it is highly pleasing to mine ear.

And The Jacket have been known to cover “Harvest Moon” with the exact kind of gentle touch that the song needs. Last year, they played it with Grace Cummings, someone whose voice is not a sound I would characterize as “gentle” (it is, in fact, a force) yet the blend of their sensibilities seems to work wonders. I think “Harvest Moon” is bulletproof. That certainly helps. (“The pedal steel, I feel like that sound sounds like what a lot of bands are after,” Wild Pink’s John Ross told me in 2024.)

Neil cover or no Neil cover, you can find me at The Jacket this weekend levitating. It’s been 16 years since “Golden” wrapped me in its gigantic cozy blanket of twangy reverb. I will never look back.

“Harvest Moon,” written by Neil Young, from Harvest Moon (1992), performed by My Morning Jacket and Grace Cummings on April 12, 2025 in Irving, Texas

People are always asking me “hey man have you seen the news about the new Neil tribute comps” and yes of course I have. When MJ Lenderman, Ben Gibbard, Kurt Vile and other artists are covering Neil, I am aware and very interested. But I read the tracklist for these upcoming releases and was taken with what to me seem like strange pairings: Heart’s Ann Wilson doing fuzzy swirler “Walk With Me,” synthpop group New Constellations tackling dusty ballad “Unknown Legend,” earnest singer-songwriter Emily Hackett stepping up for the alt-country Urtext “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.”

But the more I think about these, the more I am genuinely stoked to hear them. One of the best things I did in summer 2011 was downloading Stereogum’s STROKED: A Tribute To Is This It and letting the songs on the first Strokes record — the one Craig Finn once tweeted were written by God himself — take much different shapes. Real Estate’s take on “Barely Legal” got a Best New Track, after all, because it wisely slows the original’s speed-freak charm to a suburban crawl. Chelsea Wolfe’s doomy, stomping take on “The Modern Age” is so good, man. (“I decided to pretend it was an old folk song,” she said back then.) And hearing Peter Bjorn and John rock the hell out and make the title track a proper banger is downright surprising and awesome. PB&J! The “Young Folks” guys! Those are only the first few tracks!

I guess what I’m saying is covers are great and I will always be down to see how musicians continue to evolve the American (Canadian-American, in Neil’s case) songbook and put their own spin on it. Ann Wilson has the pipes and the rock edge to make “Walk With Me” sting like a snakebite if she wants. “Unknown Legend” could absolutely work in a pop format. “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” meanwhile, is just a great song. And great songs tend to sound great no matter the context.

Some other gifts these new tracklists gave me: The very concept of Lucinda Williams singing “Don’t Be Denied” in her wonderful drawl is already complete in my mind, despite having not heard it yet. What a perfect pairing. MJ Lenderman, no stranger to this newsletter, and “Separate Ways” are a match made in bummer-folk heaven. Considering one of his best songs is in fact a cover I’m doubly excited.

Give me anything but faithful recreations of the original versions. This is an old and possibly stale take so please forgive me but you’re not going to outdo what Neil did the way he did it so just do your own thing. And it goes for covers anywhere, anytime by anyone. In advance of the release Draco Rosa shared “After The Gold Rush,” a song that needs no more covers, and yet I’m struck by two things: how strikingly different his wounded, gravelly voice is to Neil’s high and lonesome howl, and how well his talking blues-adjacent approach works with a highly organic, all-string arrangement of the piano track. The closest thing I can liken it to is Beck’s lowdown records (Sea Change and Morning Phase). Sounds great! Makes me feel things! Hell yeah music!

As I write this dispatch, a man named Dan is talking about how AI will impact the inbox (his words not mine). I’m in Palm Springs for the first time ever, which I can’t believe, at the AAN Publishers conference where I’ve attended a dozen seminars about changing media-industry trends and newsletter best practices and things like that. It was extremely cool to be here chopping it up with other journalists, especially folks from alt-weeklies across the country, while we looked at massive rock mountains in the desert. I tried to make a list of what they looked like because I had never seen anything like them (it was my first time in the desert after all) and I came up with the following: sand, dirty snow mounds in parking lots in late March, dirt. My brain was making new neural pathways. I told many people this because I was very excited. It was truly psychedelic.

I don’t really know what I wanted out of the desert, maybe something like what Tony Soprano found after taking peyote and gazing at the Red Rock Canyon with a stripper. But I got some version of that, whatever it might’ve been, probably just insight and a reminder that the world is much larger than we ever get to truly know. I bring this up because well this is a newsletter but I have no plans on changing anything about what I do here because of AI or changing trends or anything like that. Not that you were worried.

Last year for my 35th birthday my wife gave me a copy of Shakey, the legendary Neil biography written by Jimmy McDonough. I have yet to read it but I make this pledge that I’m going all in as soon as I turn 36 next month. Seems like as good a time as any to dig in.

As for this edition, there’s a lot more I could say about “After The Gold Rush.” Its origins on a soundtrack for a movie that never got made (speaking of unrealized film scripts, how about that Olivia Tremor Control news?). Its bizarre, genre-fusing imagery blending knights with spaceships and environmentalism and drugs. Its many, many notable covers that push its legacy forward.

But I’ll leave it like this: “After The Gold Rush” to me is California. The song represents a far-away place — for me, it’s the West Coast and an entire stretch of local history I do not know nor did I live. For Neil, it’s a time machine. What happened in the Golden State after the 1850s?

“When I look out the window, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way this place looked a hundred years ago,” Neil wrote in his 2012 book, Waging Heavy Peace.

He cut the album version on March 12, 1970 at his home studio in Topanga, California, much closer to the actual edge of the world than his previous home in Laurel Canyon. “After The Gold Rush” features Neil on piano and vocals with only one other musician, Bill Peterson on flugelhorn. I can confidently say this is the only song I’ve written about in this newsletter that features only those two particular instruments. The solo could’ve easily been a harmonica. It could’ve been any number of instruments Neil plays himself. But this was 1970, and California had only joined the Union about a century prior, and things were getting heady in those hills.

I am out of words on this particular topic so I’ll cede the ending to music producer Bill Bentley, who captured it thusly on Neil Young Archives back in 2020:

Bill Peterson’s flugelhorn solo defines what an instrument can do to create a brand new world. The sound takes us to a place we don’t normally go; it’s like the time zone has changed for two minutes. The last verse remains unequaled in pulling the curtain back on a possible future that still cannot be truly contemplated. It is too overwhelming. Once again, time stops.

Sounds like you just gotta hear this one for yourself.

“After The Gold Rush,” written by Neil Young, from After The Gold Rush (1970)

Neil Young: vocals, piano
Bill Peterson, flugelhorn

Have you seen Gary Farmer’s work on the brilliant series Reservation Dogs? The man is incredible — hilarious and fearless — as the hermit Uncle Brownie. (The editorial staff of Weekly Neil [me] highly recommends the show.) He’s also a harmonica player and blues singer in his band The Troublemakers, which has performed near me a handful of times. I’ve never gone but have always been tickled by how this immense screen talent is playing music a stone’s throw from where I live. Kevin Bacon and Kiefer Sutherland have done the same and for the record I haven’t gone to those shows either.

But those guys aren’t Gary Farmer. There’s only one Gary Farmer.

I first saw Gary Farmer in Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man, a dark and cerebral Western where he plays opposite Johnny Depp. Depp, as an accountant named William Blake, kills a guy and spends the rest of the film hunted (and haunted). Gary Farmer, as an Indigenous exile named Nobody, does not understand how two white men can have the same name, leading to long discussions of identity and quoting of Romantic poetry. Frankly I can’t believe I’ve never written about Dead Man in detail before but I guess now’s as good a time as any.

Neil did the soundtrack. Admittedly that’s a weak verb to use for the wild process he actually undertook to make the damn thing. Here’s what he did because he’s insane.

Jarmusch had the idea. “I’d been a big fan of Neil Young’s music but most particularly his electric guitar playing and his work with Crazy Horse, his band, which is his most wild side of Neil’s music,” he explained in 2014. Jarmusch arranged a meeting in Arizona during the shooting of the film. Neil did not disappoint. “He said, ‘Yeah yeah, I heard you want to talk about your film. Have you finished it yet?’ And I said no, we’re still shooting it. And he said, ‘Well, I don’t plan anything, so here’s what you do. When you have a rough cut of the film, send it to me and I’ll get back to you very soon, I promise you. But I don’t know — reading a script, it doesn’t mean anything to me.’”

Jarmusch finished the film and sent it to Neil. A day or two later, Neil called him and asked him to fly out and stay on his ranch so they could talk about the film. Jarmusch brought up Eric Clapton’s title score for the film The Hit and said he wanted to do something similar. Neil, apparently, had considered asking Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl — the surviving members of Nirvana — to work on something with him. But by the next day, he’d changed his mind. He was going to do it himself.

They went to San Francisco, got a warehouse and converted it to a recording studio. The film played on a large screen, and Neil played his trusty electric guitar Old Black along to it. But not just Old Black. He strummed on an acoustic. He utilized a pump organ. He had monitors everywhere playing the film so even if he looked away or walked a few steps to grab another instrument he couldn’t escape it. He conjured some themes over the action of the film, some of which he had already played for Jarmusch, much to the latter’s enjoyment. He did this three times until he felt he had enough material for the score. And that’s Dead Man.

There was some concern on the filmmaker’s end that Neil, playing along to a rough cut of the film, might produce something beautiful that, ultimately, could become unusable if changes were made to the final edit of the picture. Jarmusch shared this worry with the editor, Jay Rabinowitz, during what he thought was a private moment, only to realize Neil had heard them on studio microphones. His refrain? “Don’t worry about it, man. It’s gonna work.”

And it did.

You would think that a song called “Dead Man Theme” might appear on the soundtrack to the film Dead Man, perhaps in a prominent early spot in the tracklist as its theme (just spitballing here). And buddy you’d be wrong. “Dead Man Theme,” as Neil wrote on the Archives, plays “right at the beginning of the picture” but cannot be found on the actual album called Dead Man which Neil made in that warehouse. “An example of something that should have never been left out!” he continued. You could argue the other “Dead Man” variations — 1 through 6, sometimes labeled on the tracklist as “Guitar Solos” — are in fact the same song as the theme because they follow the same chords and general leitmotif. But in fact “Dead Man Theme” is just a little too tidy, just a little too Neil that it’s more atmosphere than composition within the context of the film at all. In other words it’s an amuse-bouche. The rest of Dead Man is the entree.

Listen to it. An acoustic guitar playing B minor and E major — “Out On The Weekend” as hell. A muddy electric guitar crusting it up with curlicue lead lines. We know the moves. It sounds good as hell. And maybe it sounds a little too much like Neil? Or maybe because it opens with that acoustic strumming it was jettisoned in favor of the grungier, spookier, heavier distortion.

“Dead Man, No. 1,” however, takes that same ghostly cowboy melody and plays it through only once, at the end, after four minutes of E minor guitar swishing that sounds like a howling windstorm. The dude knows what he’s doing.

(As a side note, the first time I heard “Organ Solo,” I considered sending a legal notice to Thom Yorke on Neil’s behalf. I mean, Radiohead — named after a Talking Heads song from an actual movie — releases a song literally called “Motion Picture Soundtrack” five years after Dead Man that borrows the entire vibe and general chord progression from Neil, an artist they openly love and cover? Insane but also I guess good artist borrow while great artists steal, etc.)

If I was braver this entire entry would be dedicated to “Dead Man, No. 4,” which runs nearly 15 minutes. It helped me study for my final English oral comprehensive exams in college. It’s helped me so many times while writing on deadline. It is, through its lack of pretension and because it exists solely in the present tense, a masterpiece. But “Dead Man, No. 1” sets such an immediate mood and tone and auditory landscape that I have to celebrate it. “Dead Man, No. 4” is a little too Arc for me to fully love it.

“Dead Man, No. 1,” meanwhile, cultivates dread. Everything about Dead Man, from its title down to the black-and-white print of the film itself, cultivates dread. Yet I don’t experience “Dead Man, No. 1” as bleak. The long spooky intro of wind-whipped guitar strums rises like thick smoke into clouds, yes. But when the clarity arrives, first as a brief parting around three minutes in then as that crackling smattering of notes nearly three minutes later, it’s so vivid that it feels like narcotics hitting. (I imagine.) Glowing sunset cutting through a fog. The last breath of sunlight before midnight arrives with a dead moon in its jaw, and so on.

I’ve been dealing with some realizations lately about myself and my own relationship to dread and catastrophe and wondering how much of it is cyclical, do I put myself in these dark loops because I’m addicted to spinning my wheels, am I so afraid of idleness that I’ll create more hardship just so I have to navigate it, and things like that. Feels good to unpack this! Frankly it feels better than watching the film Dead Man, which has left me in a rattled mood both times I’ve watched it. (Something about violence and depravity, I guess.) But I can simply hear Neil’s winding guitar anytime. It comforts me even as it occasionally suggests gathering darkness. “Dead Man, No. 2,” by contrast, is largely made up of two major chords splashed with reverb, jangling in the breeze like wind chimes. That’s the good shit. And it wouldn’t sound as bright without the of menace of “Dead Man, No. 1.” Everything in balance.

There’s no good segue here but recently I’ve been taking in some good headlines related to Catholicism. In the small city of Olean, a professor of Franciscan studies at St. Bonaventure University, my alma mater, won the Democratic primary for New York’s 23rd congressional district. This fall he’s run against the GOP incumbent, Nick Langworthy, on a platform of universal health care, affordable housing, food security and the general belief that “a good life should not be a luxury.” As we all learn at Bonaventure — literally “good journey” — St. Francis left his privileged life behind in favor of one of service and meaning in communion with his fellow man. He did the work even when it was hard. Pope Leo, who declared 2026 as a special year of St. Francis to commemorate the 800th anniversary of his death, recently sounded a similar message.

“We need you. We need your imagination, your narrative creativity, and your lively thinking. We need these to create spaces of freedom and authenticity, within which divine grace can make the promise of consolation and peace resound.”

He was speaking to writers. This is tempting and easy to use as ego inflation — writers don’t need any more of that — but what he’s really saying is that writing helps spark imagination and empathy with the way others see and think and feel. “Without such empathy, there can be no solidarity, sharing, compassion, or mercy,” he continued.

Pope Leo wouldn’t ever tweet “FUCK AI” but this is basically what he’s saying. And that rules. Don’t let the machines think for you while they line the pockets of the already fabulously wealthy (and miserable). Don’t let them steal the hard work. Do the work. The work is what we have.

Hole up in a San Francisco warehouse and score a twisted meditation on death with guitars and organs and do it three times until you’ve got what you came for. Or whatever your version of that is. Let Neil’s guitar lead the way, like it leads me. Better yet, let Gary Farmer be your guide. His character Nobody has another name in the film: Xebeche, or “He Who Talks Loud, Saying Nothing.” Sounds like AI to me.

“Dead Man, No. 1,” written by Neil Young, from Dead Man (1995)

Neil Young: electric guitar

Quick question: Have you heard that the boys are gone this time?

If you have then buddy I’m pleased to offer you a hell yeah. But if not please allow me to introduce you to my personal favorite song of the year (so far). It’s called “Kick Stones (The Boys)” and it’s by the great new Manchester band Westside Cowboy. I told a friend recently that they’re the Geese of 2026 but I mean that only in the sense of their personal significance to me, which is great, and not in the likelihood that they will be the breakout act of the year. But they might! What the hell do I know.

“Kick Stones (The Boys)” is so good. It is many things. The band was inspired by a live version of The Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On,” and you can hear it. “Kick Stones (The Boys)” sounds very much like an update of “What Goes On” but also like its own beast. Westside Cowboy is very good at doing the VU drone thing — they’re well practiced in those dark arts — while adding plenty of more contemporary indie-rock flourishes. There’s no mistaking “Kick Stones (The Boys)” for an old song is what I’m saying. It’s four minutes long and the band plays around a simple chord progression in D for the first two minutes, straying occasionally but always returning to the center. Each time it loops, the sound grows more intense. When the refrain kicks in at the end — “Have you heard that the boys they’re gone this time?” — each new iteration feels like a revelation. I love this song.

There’s also the music video, shot as an homage to the band’s hometown football club FC United of Manchester. “FC UTD is entirely fan owned and has strong ties to numerous socialist and humanitarian causes,” the band said in a statement, per Stereogum. That rules.

And then there’s the live video of the band performing the song recently on Later… With Jools Holland. I don’t really know what else to say about this except it must be seen. Another solid entry in the catalog of “we’re rocking so hard I gotta whip my glasses off to keep rocking.” Might even be the urtext of that particular category now.

Westside Cowboy have never covered Neil (yet) that I can find. But they did mention him in a recent interview in the context of alt-country. The band has two EPs out right now (one good, one excellent) in which their sound evolves across the 14-minute runtimes. “The Wahs,” a great one, is a busy and bright power-pop tune that people would probably say “has shoegaze elements” because of a dreamy breakdown in the middle that yields to a tidal wave of guitar distortion. (Everything is shoegaze now, even the stuff that’s not.) This is something the band actually spoke about with some authority in that recent Needle Drop interview.

I mean, as people who were in shoegaze and shoegaze-adjacent bands, we've realized that it's kind of a hack to making quite good music fairly fast — that’s what we did. All you do is make a vibe and sound. But also, we love a lot of shoegaze music; we used to have fucking pedals coming out of everywhere. We left because we found it to be lacking a lot of substance all the time.

No one who made “Kick Stones (The Boys)” could be accused of lacking in substance. I’m glad they changed it up, returning to the eternal spring that is the VU and in a way cycling back to 2010s indie powerhouses like Parquet Courts (albeit perhaps indirectly) instead of the ‘90s obsession that seems to have taken hold in every corner.

Anyway they also mention alt-country as a genre that seems like an easy hack these days: “There are gimmicks that you can just use. Like, again, going back to shoegaze, it's like: have a load of pedals and an open tuner. With post-rock: have a violin and record it with loads of reverb. Alt country: pedal steel, mid-tempo, something vaguely Neil Young-ish with the guitar.”

True that. I’ve seen the memes. It always has been.

As much I would love to continue to write about Westside Cowboy — and perhaps I will should they decide to cover Neil — their comments got me wondering about the connection between the VU and Neil and if there was one at all. Simply, what song of his sounds the most like it could hang with the eternally cool NYC crunch-noise catalog? In theory, most of them should. But the twang pervades even when it’s not central. “Down By The River” is basically a country murder ballad. “Tired Eyes,” the tale of drug woe, feels VU in spirit but sounds too loose and not twitchy enough for the downtown streets. It’s too California for New York. You get the idea.

There’s a great story about Neil seeing the VU in 1966 in Los Angeles preserved here. Highly recommended reading.

I’ve listened to a bunch of Neil’s solo acoustic recordings from the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Neil loves his thick, downtuned guitar arrangements. DADGAD and such. This to me is about as close to the VU as he gets in this time period anyway. And few songs personify that rich warmth better than “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.”

On record — 1970’s After The Gold Rush to be specific — “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” passes for adult contemporary. The only edge to be found is the crackly edge of Neil’s voice. Otherwise the lone guitar, bold and downtuned though it is, competes with Nils Lofgren’s piano for the role of primary melodic instrument. This yields an arrangement — recorded in March 1970 — that needs a bit more muscle. Loathe as I am to suggest drowning this delicate composition in electric guitar fuzz, it might’ve worked better to help convey the drama.

Stripping away the piano (and even the cozy rhythm section of Greg Reeves on bass and Crazy Horse’s Ralph Molina on drums) does the song a service, as heard on many of those acoustic offerings. The CSNY 4 Way Street version has that same strange voice crackle that sounds to me almost like that famous Jimmy Fallon parody. Why am I saying stuff like this? I don’t know! I love this song! But I guess what I’m getting at is I’ve always wanted someone like Sonic Youth or Yo La Tengo to take this song and run with it. Disappear into the chemical sunset with a serrated version burning fumes. A quick YouTube search yields many, many covers that all maintain the framework of the original. This is a serious song, they seem to say. I like how Annie Lennox buried it in thick keyboards to give it an icy remove. Victoria Williams did a ragged and proto-freak folk rendition in the late ‘80s. But a drone version would be sick. This is all I’m saying. Me, some dude online, wants to hear this beloved Neil song done with electric guitars that may very well sound like crap.

In fact, maybe I should be careful what I wish for?

Neil, ever the self-deprecator, introduced the song thusly on the aforementioned 4 Way Street record: “It sorta starts off real slow then fizzles out altogether.” Possibly true! And possibly like life? Well now I’m reaching. Better to just get on with it. Say, have you heard that the boys are gone this time?

“Don’t Let It Bring You Down,” written by Neil Young, from After The Gold Rush (1970)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar

We’ve been here before, haven’t we?

Well not exactly here but close. Rolling in that Chevrolet and dancing across the water and those other long jams that unspool forever like highway lines. “Walk Like A Giant” is like that. It keeps walking and walking and eventually becomes so much heavier that its previously established gait takes on the character of a stomp. The song runs 16:30 in length. It is decidedly not the type of song you’d offer to someone who’s “trying to get into Neil Young” unless your aim is a baptism by fire.

“Walk Like A Giant” is a great song. I fucking love it. But it is simply not a starting point in any conventional sense, except to tell a prospective fan that this is his essence, which I would argue it absolutely is. Backed by Crazy Horse, head in the clouds, shredding in a minor key. Kurt Vile told a great Neil story on The Adam Friedland Show recently, which I’ll transcribe here for maximum effect:

I told him, “I’ve seen you a million times, and this was the best by far. When you played ‘Down By The River,’ you were underground and in outer space at the same time.” And he just looked at me, like, “Oh yeah, we can go to outer space whenever we want.” And then he said it again: “We can go to outer space whenever we want.”

“Walk Like A Giant” goes to outer space, man.

I was lucky enough to live in New York City the year Neil put out two albums with Crazy Horse (Psychedelic Pill in October and Americana in June). They were booked as the headliners at the inaugural Global Citizen Festival in Central Park and, as I think I’ve written about before, they were insane. “Walk Like A Giant” hit right after a genteel number called “Born In Ontario” and occupied approximately a third of the band’s entire set. I was young — much like the protagonist of “Powderfinger” (also performed), I had just turned 22 — and was anticipating some hits. I got one (“The Needle And The Damage Done”) and a curtain call “Rockin’ In The Free World” with members of the other bands who played before The Horse (Foo Fighters, The Black Keys, Band Of Horses, K’naan). But I was green and hoping for, I don’t know, “Southern Man” or something.

What I got was an education. You want to see The Horse? Alright kid, get ready to ride. “Walk Like A Giant,” that big ass stomp, hit like a Mack Truck: steady, powerful, weighing as much as, well, a giant. I stood in awe watching the swampy green and purple lights from the stage consume the entire evening. Around this time my friend had texted me something like, “Van Morrison is IT, man. He’s just it” and I told him well I don’t know about all that because I think deep down I knew that for me, it was Neil and only Neil. They played that one, too. They opened with it.

(You might think a grainy 2010s cell phone video of Neil and Crazy Horse playing “Love And Only Love” is unnecessary in 2026 but brother I gotta say you’re wrong. Someone, perhaps the person who filmed this, screams “NEIL YOUNG!” near the beginning of the video. The guitars all sound like jagged metal bits spinning round a dryer. The snare drum pops oppressively. Neil himself sounds hoarse and blown out because of the primitive technology capturing him — Pono this is not. And yet it’s fucking real. It’s almost alive.)

A few months after Global Citizen a friend emailed me asking if I’d seen any good concerts to write about for a new DIY magazine he was assembling. I had in fact seen several and the very first one I thought to chronicle was Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Central Park on September 29, 2012. Below is what I sent him. It is every bit as overwrought and purple as a piece of writing from someone who absolutely considered himself a Writer but who had yet to be paid for it (or, for the record, meaningfully edited). But it was real!

One September evening, I found myself awash in amplified guitar white noise and monolithic LED screen grandeur. I was in the belly of the beast, in the oxymoronic grasslands of the big city blinking, lending ears and eyes and soul to a tattered war hero and his band of rough riders. With each strum and screeching bend, Neil Young strode across the stage in his labored way, with his raggedy flannel catching the wind each time his torso turned to face his crew. And Crazy Horse were a particularly loud crew, despite their leathered faces and sagging tattoos. The four horsemen ripped through “Walk Like a Giant” like a posse of thieves pillaging the shiny city. By the time it was over, nearly 20 minutes had passed. I really can’t stress this enough – it was fucking loud, and this is a gigantic open space we’re talking about. Occasionally, the crash of a cymbal would whip against the bordering towers a split second late, creating a dizzying reverb of percussion that gave the event a slight air of whimsy. But this was rock and roll, plain and simple, with 60,000 fellow eardrum masochists surrounding my neat little world of sight and sound. Too violent to be spiritual, too staggering to be transcendental – it was live, it was loud, and it was all it needed to be.

Remember: I had just turned 22. I was wonderin’ what to do. And the closer they got, the more those feelings grew.

“Walk Like A Giant,” written by Neil Young, from Psychedelic Pill (2012)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Frank “Poncho” Sampedro: guitar, vocals
Billy Talbot: guitar, vocals
Ralph Molina: drums, vocals

Interviewing artists is an art unto itself. This is a cliché, but like all clichés, it is true. Some journalists pride themselves on creating a confrontational atmosphere with their subjects. This can be an effective approach because it creates tension, and tension often yields unexpected candor and thus interesting responses. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s the kid-gloves approach that has taken hold as the dominant form of interviewing — led by flattery, fandom, and an overwhelming urge for your subject to like you. It’s embarrassing, sure, but more than that, it’s just straight-up boring. Who wants to read (or, more accurately these days, watch) artists and interviewers say thank you to each other over and over again while regurgitating the same stock answers they give every press cycle?

I’ve certainly fallen into this trap before, so any stones I throw here should be promptly cast back at me. And I’m certainly no David Marchese while sitting across from heavy-hitting cultural figures, on the rare chances I actually get to do that. I like to think I’m somewhere outside of this binary — not adversarial but not fawning. We have a nice conversation, then it melts away like ice on a heated windshield. Remember what Rusty tells Linus in Ocean’s Eleven? “He’s gotta like you and then forget you the moment you’ve left his side.”

Sometimes at the end of certain interviews I’ll ask what’s called a runner, a stock but specific question that multiple people answer in a multitude of ways. The results can be illuminating; see Stereogum’s recent excellent survey of 80 musicians talking about their favorite Neil Young song.

I’ve also asked some artists about their favorite Neil songs. That’s kinda the whole deal with this newsletter, in fact. Starting with a conversation I had with Alex G in 2019 and continuing through chats with Mac DeMarco and others, I kept collecting very interesting and worthwhile answers. I’ve published most of those conversations already (see the archive here). But there’s a few I hadn’t gotten around to transcribing. Until now.

Enjoy the grab bag of answers below. Happy holidays. See you in 2026 with an important update.

Alex Bleeker: I’m obsessed with Neil Young. I happened to be in New York for the Crazy Horse Forest Hills show [in 2024] and I was just like so jazzed to reconnect with that music. Crazy Horse in particular — if you’ve listened to my first solo album, it will be very obvious that I’m obsessed. But I think for me, I definitely can name specific songs. I did come up with a classic-rock background. That was my window into becoming a person who plays music and a music obsessive. Literally, classic-rock radio was my first sort of music education. And then I had the internet, right, so I could explore from there. But Neil, I mean, I knew the hits at that age and CSNY stuff. But I think Neil Young really, really hit for me when I was getting older and sort of was starting to understand the DIY and punk ethic in music more. He’s like this figure who kind of works — it’s like, this is a classic-rock figure who is uncompromisingly himself and is one of my favorite guitar players, but not a highly skilled guitar player. All of these things made it really relatable. I could listen to this solo, you know, this one-note Neil Young solo and feel like, of course he’s singular and genius, but it’s like, I could do that, you know? It hits me in the same way that — it’s like one part Grateful Dead or Beatles, and then one part Pavement, which I also hold in high regard, and that’s something that makes a person like me feel like, I’m not John Lennon but I could maybe write a song like that, you know? At a certain point, all of Real Estate, we got really into the record On The Beach and that song in particular, which is now beloved but maybe wasn’t among the canonized tunes originally. It was kind of like a late bloomer, that album. That just really, really sticks out to me. It’s in no hurry to go anywhere, and I can just live inside that song for half an hour, as I’m sure some people have. That’s my little Neil Young diatribe. You’ve fully successfully gotten me talking about something that has nothing to do with this book but your like, your tactic worked. I love Neil Young.

Alex G: I just really fucked with [“Natural Beauty,” from Harvest Moon]. It takes you out of the studio for a second.

Ben Morey: “Flying On The Ground Is Wrong” from Live At The Cellar Door. Everything about it hits for me, the piano, the chord changes, the lyrics, the vulnerability of the vocals. The five minutes of really strange and funny stage banter before he plays it. I don’t think a studio version could ever compete.

Christone “Kingfish” Ingram: He has the song “Rockin’ in the Free World,” something like that? That’s not my favorite, though. I like the song — and I actually found out about this song through Vampire Weekend because I would sit in with them and play it — but it’s a song called “Vampire Blues.” I can dig it.

Colin Burgess: My favorite Neil Young song right now that I just learned about, and I’ve been listening to a lot, is “Razor Love,” a later Neil Young song. And now I like that whole album.

Eric Slick: I love Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. I think that album is perfect. It’s sort of like the mission statement of Crazy Horse. There’s just so many gems on that record. The guitar solo in “Cowgirl In The Sand” is one of the best guitar solos ever. I always go back to that one. I guess second place would actually be Trans. I know that’s kind of a funny thing to say because that’s such a divisive record, but Trans had such a huge influence on New Age Rage, if you can’t tell. I was watching so many Trans live videos in the making of New Age Rage because I was just like, I love that this is sort of a discarded era for Neil because everyone wants him to be this, like, barn rocker dude, but he was always very progressive and trying to push the limits of his own artistry. He’s an artist with a capital A. I think all those things that he did that were so divisive in the ‘80s are actually kind of like diamonds in the rough. I got to see Neil on the Psychedelic Pill tour, and he closed with “Mr. Soul.” I thought that was really amazing because that set was just such a big middle finger to everybody. He played no hits. It was just all songs from Psychedelic Pill, including “Driftin’ Back.” People were booing and stuff. It was great. I haven’t listened to his last couple records, but they always creep up on you. Even ones like Greendale and Prairie Wind. If you revisit those records, they’re awesome. Maybe at the time they didn’t get their fair due, but god, there are some amazing Neil Young songs from that era. “It’s A Dream,” that song. Neil rules, man.

John Comune: It’s probably a tie for me with Tonight’s The Night and On The Beach, the albums, but the song “On The Beach” is very high up there for me. I wasn’t super into Neil Young, and then the Shakey book came out, and I kind of went through all the albums chronologically as I read the book. That’s how I came to that conclusion. And then it was like, oh, everybody else thinks this is the best album too [laughs]. I get it. I was always like “eh” growing up [on Neil]. Like, he has good songs but he wasn’t my favorite. Now he is definitely one of my favorites. He has the idea and he has to do it right now, which I respect, and it’s cool that he can do it. It’s not that easy for everybody, obviously, but he’s made it easy for himself, which is great.

There is no time for me to unpack Neil’s post-9/11 album Are You Passionate? from 2002. I’m really sorry about it. I just can’t devote a chunk of my brain to the rabbit holes that the song “Let’s Roll” — named for exactly what you think — presents. And there’s a future edition of this newsletter that will, I’m sure, delve into the whole Living With War saga, Neil’s take on the George W. Bush presidency, and the like.

But friends, I just can’t do it today. Also, what’s really left to say? Neil’s been an outspoken critic of right-wing administrations dating back to dropping Richard Nixon’s name on “Campaigner”. He’s currently embroiled in an ongoing feud with President Trump (but who isn’t?) and occupies a unique spot in culture wherein his music can be read as patriotic when it very much is not—and seemingly only dolts think it is.

Anyway none of this really bleeds into “You’re My Girl,” the leadoff track from 2002’s Are You Passionate? that seemingly has nothing to do with 9/11 (phew). It does, however, feature Booker T & the M.G.’s, as nearly all of the album does. This presents a special kind of sound for a Neil album; namely, it’s dipped in a neat soul style that immediately robs it of all its idiosyncrasies. This might sound like a knock, and maybe it is, but it’s also true. Booker T’s organ sounds good over Neil’s retro songwriting, and “You’re My Girl” is undeniably a love song, though I hear it as parental, not romantic. It is, to me, very much a follow-up to “Razor Love” without all the warmth and character that makes “Razor Love” a specialty in his catalog.

Listening to “You’re My Girl,” it is impossible to feel anything but what the song presents. And the song presents happiness.

To that end, there’s this note that Neil posted on his Archives website on October 18, 2018, referencing the song by name:

Well, that certainly settles that.

I really don’t mean to be glib here and if I had more time (and energy) I promise I would do a proper examination of the camouflage jacket on the album cover, the rose, the old-timey photo of people in love, and the seeming reactionary vibe of Are You Passionate? It strikes me, a man who has not done the requisite reading, as akin to suburban streets where every house was flying an American flag in the immediate wake of 9/11. Everything was patriotic, even the not-explicitly-patriotic stuff.

There’s a reason why my attention is pulled elsewhere. It’s the same reason why this song pulls at me, spinning a tale of a father who is learning to let go of his daughter as she ages. I’m about to have another one. Any day now. Soon, I’ll have two daughters. And this song, like many others, will hit different.

I once saw Booker T & the M.G.’s perform live as part of the Rochester International Jazz Festival. It was a warm June evening, and “Green Onions” filled the avenue downtown. Good memory. I’ll share it with my girls someday.

“You’re My Girl,” written by Neil Young, from Are You Passionate? (2002)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Booker T. Jones: Hammond organ
Frank “Poncho” Sampedro: guitar
Donald “Duck” Dunn: bass
Steve Potts: drums

There’s a line in the great MJ Lenderman song “Rip Torn” that actually makes me tear up. The whole composition is portrait of somebody who doesn’t know their limits, or perhaps knows them and decides to go past them anyway, for the laugh or for other, darker reasons. In typical Lenderman fashion, it’s funny: Someone gets drunk, passes out in their Lucky Charms and attempts to explain the myriad ways the world works by elucidating the difference between milkshakes and smoothies. Not necessarily in that order.

That images are funny. They get sadder the older you become.

At the end of the song, the thought that Lenderman leaves us with is only funny the way the ending of “Fargo” is funny. Scenes of incompetent violence played for laughs end up punctuated by bloody snow and the lingering existential question of why? Lenderman’s tune has no snow, but the rest is there.

“If you tap on the glass, the sharks might look at you,” he sings. “You’re damned if they don’t and you’re damned if they do.”

I had a friend in my late teens and early twenties who embodied this duality. He was yolked, to evoke a phrase Lenderman might, but he was a lightweight at parties. Two beers would make him do goofy things. The fact that said goofy things were done after only a couple drinks made people laugh more, which led to more goofy things. But among the same crowd, it eventually ran its course, and his tolerance became a punchline. The antics became less funny. The more he tapped on the glass, the more attention he got, leading to some anxiety about being the center of attention (damned if they do) — and feelings of abject failure when the shtick lost its luster (damned if they don’t). Some nights the sharks devoured him.

(I saw him recently. He’s all good now. We both are.)

I think about him when I hear “Rip Torn.” I think about intoxicated or otherwise bored people who crave attention but are in no way equipped to handle it. I’ve perhaps even been one of them in my weaker moments. This is why, when that sawing fiddle cuts through the middle of the song evoking the squawk of “Ambulance Blues,” I start to get a lump in my throat. How can he do it? How can MJ Lenderman understand the seemingly inconsequential plight of guys everywhere and transmutate it into an off-kilter ballad that’s both high and lonesome and also references the film “Men In Black?”

Lenderman can do this because is the poet laureate of jerks, as highlighted by The Fader in 2024, published around the time his album, Manning Fireworks, was released. “The opener and title track traces a man’s growth from ‘perfect little baby’ to ‘jerk,’” Alex Robert Ross writes. “Two tracks later, on ‘Rudolph,’ he asks, ‘How many roads must a man walk down til he learns / He’s just a jerk?’ His down-and-outs are at most a couple of lines from stumbling face-first into a wall of irony. Near the top of ‘Rip Torn,’ someone passes out in a bowl of Lucky Charms.”

The skill is something his contemporary Mike Maple of Michigan power-punk greats Liquid Mike also boasts. Recent ripper “AT&T,” for example, chronicles a phone-store employer punching both the clock and a hole in the wall out of frustration. “Everyday collides with itself,” Maple sings. “What’s the difference when you’re just another jerk?”

Lenderman, meanwhile, epitomizes the kind of skilled songwriter and performer whose true talent lies under the shaggy surface. Ross continues in his Fader piece:

Lenderman sings these misfortunes with a slight croak and a gentle drawl, the types of things that will deepen and knot with age. His delivery sounds effortless, never lazy, just as the songs themselves borrow from alt-country’s slacker side without ever succumbing to sloppiness. Part of his gift — part of what has turned him into this year’s most adored indie musician — is how loose, unstudied, and even naive he sounds in the middle of songs that, on closer inspection, are meticulously poignant.

Who else does that sound like? Let me answer with a tweet:

Neil’s still around, for the record. But the sentiment of the message rings true. Lenderman’s lyrics are often pop collages consisting of wounded emotions and images like a“half-mast McDonald’s flag.” It’s trite to say, but they mirror the experience of the internet, where someone’s mental breakdown is at beast positioned next to a silly meme and at worse becomes fodder for the meme itself.

Neil’s music does not sound like the internet. Increasingly, Neil’s music is becoming harder to find on the internet. He’s never shied away from heart-on-sleeve lyricism, often wrapping his feelings in inelegant metaphors and phrases that fit strangely. He’s certainly not easily confused with Bob Dylan — except one time on a road trip when one of my friends thought “Cortez The Killer” was a Dylan original. And frankly, the tweet doesn’t even need counterexamples of Neil being both profound and less than serious. But naturally, I have a few at the ready.

“Don’t Be Denied,” his own memoir song, presages a schoolyard beating by setting the scene thusly:

When we got to Winnipeg
I checked in to school
I wore white bucks on my feet
When I learned the golden rule

Sing-songy and too easy? You could make the case. How about this one from the psychedelic travelog “The Last Trip To Tulsa”:

Well, I used to be a folk singer
Keeping managers alive
When you saw me on a corner
And told me I was jive

He penned “Sugar Mountain” as an actual teenager, so some grace should be given, but even Neil thought this particular quatrain was a clunker:

Now you’re underneath the stairs
And you’re giving’ back some glares
To the people that you met
And it’s your first cigarette

The list goes on. Neil and MJ Lenderman are kindred spirits in the act of using simple, non-flowery language as vessels for their remarkable voices. The lyrics are the sails. The singing is the wind. This much is true.

For me, the acoustic “Rip Torn” is the most Neil-esque song Lenderman has apart from the wonderfully scuzzy “Tastes Just Like It Costs.” Taken together, they show both halves of Neil’s abilities, as my man Dominic Angelella once told me: “This is why so many people become obsessed with Neil Young, because he is very good at both of these things.” Hearing the skronking fiddle of “Rip Torn” live was big, but it wasn’t even the biggest moment of the night when I saw MJ Lenderman and his band The Wind perform in Buffalo back in May.

After a formidable 20-song main set, the group took the stage once more for an encore, led off by none other than “Lotta Love,” originally from Neil’s 1978 album Comes A Time. I took a video of this for posterity, and the video reaffirms how good Lenderman can turn his voice into an accelerating vehicle. When he sings, “Look in my direction,” the momentarily dialing up of intensity makes the song really pop. And after all, it really is gonna take a lotta love to change the way things are.

In June, Lenderman was in my area again, this time with Waxahatchee and Hurry For The Riff Raff. (The artists behind three top-tier albums of 2024 on one bill? Extraordinary.) He didn’t cover Neil this time, but at both shows, he played “Bark At The Moon,” the stoner loner jam that concludes Manning Fireworks. As much as I can revel in the emotionality of “Rip Torn” and the nod to the elder via covering “Lotta Love,” the six minutes of doomy noise the band conjures after the “song” portion of “Bark At The Moon” finishes might be one of my all-time favorite big swings ever taken at a live gig. Imagine you’re MJ Lenderman, 26 years old, critically adored and guesting on songs by indie folk’s reigning queen and someone even more famous as a solo artist than the other critically band you play guitar in. The crowds eat out of your hands. You can play a song called “Wristwatch” twice at the show simply because you mention the city of Buffalo in it, and the crowd will go crazy both times. (That happened.) If this is your life, why wouldn’t you go all in on a brief stretch of harsh noise in the middle of your set just to remind people you can do whatever the hell you want?

“Down to his outfit. It was all part of it, even the drunkenness,” Lenderman told Steven Hyden in 2023 about the excellent Neil concert album Roxy: Tonight’s The Night Live recorded in 1973. “So you want to wear sunglasses inside? And grow a shitty beard? I guess that’s part of it. It was a little bit dark. But it just sounds way more enjoyable than Time Fades Away or anything after that.”

A little bit dark but still enjoyable. Hey now.

“Lotta Love,” written by Neil Young, performed by MJ Lenderman and The Wind on May 10, 2025.

This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m digging into my own archives to feature a brief conversation with photographer Clay Patrick McBride from 2024. In it, he tells the story of getting assigned to capture a portrait of Neil in 2006 and the mild friction he encountered while on the job.

When Clay Patrick McBride met Dolly Parton, he called her a disco ball.

I couldn’t think of a better way to begin this newsletter than how I started my 2024 profile of McBride, an RIT assistant professor of photography, in CITY magazine. It captures what makes the renowned visual artist such a presence when he steps in front of the lens. “You don’t always have to do a song and dance. But you need to let them know, ‘I’m the artist here. You’re in my little world now,’” he told me. “I don’t say that to anybody. I just try to lead.”

A quick glimpse at Clay’s portfolio is enough to convey his prowess and, in tandem, the subjects whom he’s captured. Jay-Z. Metallica. Willie Nelson. Kobe Bryant. Jake Paul. And, last year for the cover of Sports Illustrated, Los Angeles Dodgers superstar Shohei Ohtani.

This is why CITY sent me to profile him for our Photo Issue, which hit newsstands in June 2024. I met Clay at local cafe Java’s to hear every story he could tell me about his 30+ years photographing some of the most famous people on the planet. But I had one particular interaction in mind. What happened on the day he captured Neil in 2006, yielding a stark but accessible look into the eyes of a brilliant, mercurial artist?

As we sipped our beverages al fresco on Gibbs Street, Clay told me.

I was working for a Sunday magazine called Parade. It comes in the Sunday paper. Its circulation is bananas — millions of people get this paper. So Parade had hired me to go to Sundance [Film Festival]. He was screening a live concert film that he made. [Editor’s note: That would be Jonathan Demme’s 2006 rootsy chronicle Neil Young: Heart Of Gold.]

I have 10 minutes to photograph him. He comes into the room, and I’m talking to him, and [Neil’s manager Elliot Roberts] immediately is on my back. He goes, “You know you got 10 minutes, right?”

I said, “Yeah, dude. I’m going to talk to Neil Young for five minutes because when the fuck else am I going to talk to Neil Young, you know? Like, this is it. I’m never going to be in the same room with this guy again and I got a lot to thank him for.”

So that made Neil Young laugh because I didn’t kowtow to his manager. When I was I was photographing him, I think that really broke the ice, and then I kept kind of calling back Elliot, like, “What am I gonna have to do to get this guy off my back?” I just kept calling back to that part of our conversation and meeting. Also, I played my friend’s music — this guy Joe Moore — for Neil Young. I was like, “You don’t know what it would mean to Joe Moore to know that you’re listening to his music right now. He loves your music.” Just plugging him, you know? Weirder things than that have happened. I think that the thing with breaking down his manager really got him cool with me.

After this, I sensed Clay reaching for how he would’ve liked to capture Neil differently, maybe in another circumstance where he had more than 10 minutes. He mentioned some misgivings about the photo itself, so I asked him about it. “In your mind’s eye,” I said, “seeing an idealized version of it, what’s different about it?”

Clay took a moment to consider this.

I wish he was somewhere like Joshua Tree, you know what I mean? Cracked earth, desert, someplace that felt stripped down and barren and kind of soulful like his music — or he was in a rusty old truck, like those pictures of him with his dogs at his farm. There’s just such good pictures of Neil Young. Mine’s like holding a candle to the sun, you know what I mean? He has such legacy in photography. Those pictures are the pictures of kind of I grew up with and made me want to be a photographer.

With respect, I told Clay that his photo looked pretty good to me. Frankly, that’s an understatement. It’s a wonderful portrait of Neil as he is: guarded but certain, letting the tiniest bit of light shine in. Clay asked if I was a Neil fan, and I told him a condensed version of how big of a fan I actually am. Without any hesitation, he told me he’d give me a print of the photo. This was a very nice thing to say, and I accepted the offer immediately, thinking that this is a busy dude, and while I believed he was genuine, it would be completely understandable if this fell off his list of action items.

To my absolutely delight, I saw Clay a few weeks later and he had the print for me. That’s me holding it above. I keep it on my desk at work and look at it every single day. Neil’s expression keeps me grounded. He’s almost smizing, you know? I have plans to hang it up somewhere at home but there’s almost something mystical about the visage. I like to keep it near where I do my writing because writing is a battle and occasionally you get one over on yourself and it feels exactly like Neil’s face here. “That was actually pretty good.”

Between my interview with Clay and when he gave me the print, Clay also took my picture using wet-plate photography, as he did for most of the CITY staff and more than a dozen local Rochester photographers. The results speak for themselves — Clay and his Silver & Salt Studios partner Nicholas Kundrat create breathtakingly stark representations that simmer with life — but I’ve been thinking about how my own image mirrors Neil’s. It wasn’t intentional. But I’ll take it.

“The Painter,” written by Neil Young, from Prairie Wind (2005). Read my profile of Clay Patrick McBride here.

“Have you ever had general anesthesia?”

A perfectionist has not had the pleasure. Certain thoughts arrive at the very mention of such an experience. Going to sleep and never waking up, for starters. Some kind of fear of an incomplete operation — one that requires a second round in the hospital and all that accompanies such a stay — can likewise creep in.

Above all else, it’s a fear of failure, like everything else. A fear that there will be complications and it will somehow be his fault, not the result of decisions made by the medical team to whom he is entrusted.

Whether he knows it or not, a perfectionist chases this fear to odd corners of the world.

There’s a band called Coca Leaves & Pearls. They play Neil Young songs specializing in “Ditch-era Crazy Horse and Stray Gator material.” Translation: primarily songs from the albums Time Fades Away, Tonight’s The Night, and On The Beach released between 1973 and 1975. In other words, when Neil was really going through it. This is the bummer period of intoxicated rock, scraggly and loose, commercially unviable but as real as it gets. But funnily enough, the band’s leader, Chris Forsyth, took its name from the album that followed all that trauma. Zuma is brighter and beachier, and even its epic on the plight of Indigenous North Americans from which the band christened itself (“Cortez The Killer”) is meditative, like a benediction from centuries past.

Coca Leaves & Pearls play in my town next week but I don’t think I’ll be there. For the second October in a row, I’ll miss gathering with like-minded Neil heads and paying homage by listening to crunchified guitar music. Last year, I was just too tired. This year, I’m still tired but I’m also wary of being on my feet for so long. On September 21, on the eve of the autumnal equinox, I had my appendix removed. Two days before, I developed a stomachache I can only describe as insane, in terms of the pain level. It felt like I’d swallowed razor blades that were slicing up my insides. I couldn’t sleep. Then, strangely, the pain lessened and centralized to one spot in my lower abdomen. This, I read, was actually bad. It was likely appendicitis, something I used to fear every time I got a side stitch as a kid but hadn’t thought about in years.

First I went to urgent care to rule out other possible causes. When the health care professionals there couldn’t — “You need to be scanned, and we don’t have a scanner here” — they suggested I go to the emergency room. I arrived there by 7:20 p.m. and had an IV in my arm before 8. All things considered, pretty solid timing. Throughout this, I was oddly calm and centered, not my usual anxious self. I felt relieved when, upon getting the scan around 10 and being told later that my appendix was indeed inflamed, it seemed clear that surgery was the best option. My organ isn’t working anymore? Get it out!

A little over 12 hours later, I was in a gown and on a gurney being wheeled to the pre-op room (there’s probably a more technical name for this). My dad hung with me there and in the ER earlier, which was nice and helped keep my mind at ease. At one point, the care team told me to empty my bladder before surgery. I went into the bathroom to do so and threw myself a smile and a point in the mirror. “You got this, big dog.” Turns out talking to myself like a collaborator or even a friend instead of a sworn nemesis is good for both the body and the mind. When I finally went into surgery around 1, I was slightly nervous about giving up control but I had decided that there was simply no other way around it. I couldn’t take out my appendix myself, even if I wanted to. Time to let the professionals handle it.

A perfectionist after surgery is at peace. He floats through the world slowly and deliberately in sweatpants. Little trips are thrilling snatches of adventure; he feels like he’s getting away with something. Seeing a three-hour movie while wearing an elastic waistband. Picking up groceries (but just a few) and lifting the bag into the truck by himself. Does it weigh more than 20 pounds? Of course not.

But the fact that it might means he’s technically bending a rule specifically outlined on his discharge paperwork.

He soars.

Last night I watched a movie
Movie made me sad
‘Cause I saw myself in everyone
How’d they make a movie like that?

Coca Leaves & Pearls were recently enlisted to create some Neil soundalikes for Aquarium Drunkard’s podcast “All One Song,” a wonderful celebration of his music and legacy. The first episode was all about “Will To Love,” one of the wildest tunes in his whole catalog, so I have to respect it very deeply. Anyway Chris and his band — rounded out by John Murray on guitar, Jordan Burgis on bass, and Joey Sullivan on drums — churned out four dead ringers for Ditch-era Neil tunes. The first, “Stoned Stomp,” is their store-brand take on “Time Fades Away” that preserves its rollicking nature without receding into background noise. No small feat! They’re all named for Neil’s state of mind (and inebriation) in the mid-’70s, with titles like “Wrecked Anthem,” “Honey Slide Stroll,” and “Blasted Dirge.” The level of sonic accuracy is what reels me in.

I had this same thought listening to an absolutely terrific song called “First it was a movie, then it was a book” by the Philadelphia band Florry. The entire thing is built around two chords. That’s the foundation. But the song itself is what happens when the guitars introduce exciting new pathways inside that framework, then take some time to wander around freely for seven minutes. The whole experience is like going on a hike through mountain trails that keep changing colors. Once you think you have a grip on the terrain, something pleasantly knocks you off course and maybe even reveals new information within yourself. It’s psychedelic, yes. But it doesn’t sound like “psych-rock,” the way it might be described on Wikipedia. There’s a generosity of sound and of spirit that can’t be traced in the darker tunnels of stereotypical LSD music.

Florry’s guitar player and drummer are, naturally, John Murray and Joey Sullivan from Coca Leaves & Pearls. Sullivan doesn’t just keep time but paints. Murray isn’t flashy. There’s no striving or posturing in his guitar work. He’s an astronaut. The vocals that dance on top of this whole operation belong to Francie Medosch, who sings the above lyrics with a mixture of exultation and humor (and who is credited with those ripping lead lines). The sadness is baked into the words but not into Medosch’s delivery. In fact, Medosch evokes Neil himself on “Speakin’ Out,” one of my favorites from that Ditch era, when he starts talking about the big screen and calling the plot of a movie “groovy” and “out of sight.” I wrote about it two years ago and tried to unpack why that’s so endearing to me. “It’s simply a good hang,” is what I ended up with. That goes double for Medosch and company.

When Florry’s screeching guitars wind around the verses, it’s like caffeinated Crazy Horse — country rock that seems hellbent on burning down the barn. But really, the closest analog I can think of is listening to “Dream House” by Deafheaven. There are no valleys. Somehow, the entire song is a peak. It just keeps getting higher.

The next track on Florry’s great album Sounds Like… is even more of a Neil-inspired tune. “Waiting Around To Provide” features the kinds of minor-chord drops that characterize Neil’s best work, worked in between harmonica melodies and a rhythm that borders on swinging. It’s no surprise that a bit of searching “Florry + Neil Young” yields some fun results, including an EP of covers studded with a faithfully ramshackle take on “Vampire Blues” and a gingerly “Harvest Moon” presented as a psych-folk soirée.

A few days out from surgery, I was feeling peaceful but mildly slothly. I watched the Rob Reiner film Misery because it’s about a writer (ha) who’s laid up in bed (haha) and tortured but not actually by his own self-doubt but by a crazed fan whom Stephen King perhaps wrote in the novel to be a representation of the boxes that writers get put into either by the book-buying public and their relentless expectations or their own misgivings about creativity in general (hahaha). Anyway Misery was a book and then it was a movie but you can see how the chronology might get screwy if you watch the Oscar-winning movie first, like I did. In the Florry song, Medosch evokes Holly Hunter, who is not in Misery but who is an extraordinary actor. Kathy Bates and James Caan square off in the film largely via their smoldering looks at each other but then at the end (spoiler alert) there’s a violent and fairly gruesome denouement that genuinely took me by surprise. It made the non-gore of my three tiny incisions look puny by comparison.

I also watched the extended edition of The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. Good movie. Made me happy.

A perfectionist looks back at his own time in the hospital in the lead-up to abdominal surgery, mere weeks out from his wife’s own abdominal surgery, with gratitude. It’s the same hospital. He hadn’t been there since his wife’s complications after the birth of their first child. He dreaded walking in and reliving that incident where he had no control, walking those same halls and riding those red elevators. But he had his own experience instead. The elevators took him to a similar operating room — “I guess these all look the same,” he thought — and he was conscious for about 90 seconds before things drifted away into a white blur of overhead lights.

There were no complications. A perfectionist woke up, groggy and confused and one organ lighter, but completely fine. He had no control. He had plenty of questions. And he had a fine time. He made it.

A perfectionist after surgery is healed physically but not mentally. A perfectionist after surgery is still a perfectionist. But he’s working on it.

“First it was a movie, then it was a book,” written by Francie Medosch, performed by Florry, from Sounds Like… (2025). The excellent album is $10 on Bandcamp.

Good news: We made it through the tunnel.

I didn’t mean to go four months without posting but it happened anyway. Life just continues on, you know? A notable Neil update up top is that his band The Chrome Hearts are set to tour this summer. I will likely not be there but if you go I sincerely hope you have a great time.

Meanwhile, the new Bong Joon Ho sci-fi movie Mickey 17 is still in theaters near me and I very much want to see it, most of all because Robert Pattinson always commits to being an intense idiot. That’s enjoyable to me. So two weeks ago I had some free time on a Saturday and drove to my local indie cinema with the intention of a Mickey 17 matinee, only to be foiled by the St. Patrick’s Day Parade route and its many street closures. The whole process was dumb but kind of funny, so I spent the time navigating through traffic and around pedestrians clad in green listening to Le Noise on CD. What a record! I don’t think I’ll ever get my shit together enough to submit a proper 33 1/3 book pitch, but if I do, Le Noise is absolutely in the running. What a cool record, man. Neil and Daniel Lanois, chief atmosphere architect for U2 and Bob Dylan, hanging in Silver Lake and conducting experiments in stereophonic echo. Lanois also nearly died in a motorcycle accident during those sessions, which is a hell of a story for an album that touches on death and disintegration.

One more quick story about noise. Earlier this year, I saw local artist The Dipper Stove perform in a record shop here in Rochester, and it gave me a deep appreciation for drone. One guy, a keyboard with some keys taped down, a guitar, and a bunch of pedals. Sounds like a good time to me. Anyway at the show I ran into Joe Tunis from Carbon Records, who released the most recent Dipper Stove collection, and we chatted about Neil for a bit before I picked up 1989’s The Bridge: A Tribute To Neil Young for $5. I assumed that, as a purveyor of weird noise recordings, he was a huge fan, but he told me the first Neil stuff he vibed with was the gentle acoustic songs (and then, naturally, he made his way to Arc). Every path is valid. All roads lead to love and only love.

Just a bit rundown here at the moment…

I’ve published this newsletter for about two years now and somehow The War On Drugs have never really come up. That seems unlikely for a Neil Young project. But better late than never. And so in that spirit I say that “Thinking Of A Place” is the pinnacle of Adam Granduciel’s work as a professional musician and that, despite his reverence for all things Neil and the great covers he’s submitted over the course of his career, I’ll always want to listen to that more than any interpretation he can offer.

Why does this matter? Because brothers, man.

Back in November, I saw Wild Pink live in Buffalo with my own brother, Pete. Fairly standard Saturday night, except it wasn’t. He’s 39 and I’m 35 and yet it was somehow the first time we’d ever seen a concert together. This fact became apparent sometime in the alcohol-fueled hours between an afternoon Buffalo Sabres game and the 9 p.m. set time of the band — too many bars visited, not enough restaurants — and once it took hold in my brain, I fixated on it. This night means something. I ran into people I knew at the show and told them, hey, this is our first show together and I mean ever. No one seemed as tickled as me. Go figure.

But I really was tickled. Pete and I have a good relationship but we don’t share many creative interests. I got a large portion of my adolescent taste in music from him (The Wallflowers CD did wonders, and later, so did Korn’s Follow The Leader) but it’s never been a “hey check out this song” kind of vibe between us. (For the record, he enjoyed Wild Pink. He was not crazy about the opener, Friendship, though.) To see a show together was a way of deepening a relationship that at times feels like it has plateaued due to the natural forces of our respective families and careers. When we see each other it’s usually on a Sunday and we’ve got our kids in tow and that kind of environment doesn’t lend itself to sitting down and shooting the shit about music or anything culturally really.

Not counting nostalgic look-backs, there’s one contemporary band that we share a fondness for. It’s one we exchange lyrical allusions via text and one that even compels us to mention our favorite songs. That’s right. It’s the holy goddamn War On Drugs.

Here’s a sample. Not long ago he texted me: Man that “I don’t live here anymore” I’m about to delete on the way home is simply gonna hit. This is an objectively hilarious text to receive from anyone, but it’s even funnier coming from a guy with an MBA and two kids under 8. (Or maybe The War On Drugs is music for guys with MBAs? I always thought it was the soundtrack to IPAs, but what does the middle of the Venn diagram for those two acronyms look like anyway?) Another time we traded riffs on the chorus to “Thinking Of A Place” and cracked ourselves up. When I asked what he was up to that night, he dug in: I’ll be real, I’m considering moving through the dark. Tremendous.

It’s a way to pass the time but it has genuinely deepened our fellowship in ways I never would’ve considered. I expected this from our father, a fan of the WOD’s primary influences (Bruce, U2, Neil, etc.), so it made sense when I visited home sometime in 2015ish and saw a Lost In The Dream CD lying on the kitchen table at our parents’ house. “These guys are pretty good,” was the review from our dad. And he’s right. My brother’s tastes, on the other hand, are more unpredictable. Texting about a 10-minute song with both an extended ambient introduction and an extended ambient interlude — a song that we both love! — is absolutely enthralling. There’s some meme shit at play, of course. Granduciel calling his band’s 2020 concert album LIVE DRUGS made it an easy sell; 2024’s LIVE DRUGS AGAIN felt like a victory lap (both in sound and title).

So here we are, two guys who cried watching The Iron Claw and who have often weaponized its final scene to razz each other, texting about a band famously started up by two long-haired dudes with strikingly similar musical palettes that might as well be brothers anyway. And there’s, of course, The War On Drugs song “Brothers,” which features those guys — Granduciel and Kurt Vile — at their melodic best. I’ve been obsessed with the song lately. It’s called “Brothers” but Granduciel sings it to someone he calls “babe.” It’s definitely a love song, though it’s dark and maybe the love is a bit faded. Maybe the “babe” is an actual baby, or a baby brother. (Granduciel is a year older than Vile, for what it’s worth.) I like thinking of calling your brother “babe,” the way Yasi Salek calls people “babe” on Bandsplain. It’s a term of endearment. It’s borderline honorific.

“I love you babe and I’ll be there ‘til the end,” Granduciel sings. “but until then it’s crowded babe.”

Pretty much every time I listen to The War On Drugs I think of some of the great music writing that folks have done inspired by their songs. Their sound, ever-changing and familiar but blurry and alternately keyboard-heavy and not, lends itself to descriptions like the following:

Imagine the exact midpoint between Disintegration and Tunnel Of Love, and you get The War On Drugs’ marvelous 2011 breakthrough, Slave Ambient. (2014)

I cannot help but imagining that this is what would have happened had Neil Young, during that ‘80s period when David Geffen was [suing] him for not sounding like Neil Young, sacked Crazy Horse for Talk Talk, brought in Talk Talk’s producer Tim Friese-Greene and co-written with Bruce Springsteen! (2017)

And others that get more abstract and less concerned with reference points:

There’s one section here that sounds like a small free-jazz/noise ensemble trying to recreate the visceral effect of a July sunshower using, I dunno, a bassoon, a xylophone, and assorted other tools. (2017)

People elide over the more esoteric reference points Granduciel mixed in. The noise drones and krautrock rhythms, the shoegaze demeanor and new wave glistens, the engulfing ambience that blossomed from it all colliding. They miss the more off-the-beaten-path names that Granduciel cites as important influences, like The Waterboys. (Play the latter’s “A Pagan Place” alongside the horn-driven build of “Under The Pressure”; As it happens, Granduciel covered that Waterboys track in the years leading up to Lost In The Dream.) (2018)

And still others that are simply funny because they’re true:

The songs of The War On Drugs exist in a world between knuckle tattoos: love, hurt; home, away; dark, light. They usually begin in medias res, with our hero, the tressy and lovelorn Adam Granduciel, wandering the empty plains of grief with a guitar strapped to his back. He’s down bad; he’s rudderless; he’s desperately trying to find his way out of the rain or pain or chains. Heartbreak is behind him but hope is always just ahead, a pin-light through the clouds in the shape of a mythological figure known only as “babe.” (2021)

So, to use an overused idiom, this is what we talk about when we talk about The War On Drugs. But do we talk about Neil much? Sometimes we do! Sometimes Granduciel rips “Like A Hurricane” and preserves its essence as a screeching guitar blazer but also amps up its folky bones. I’m into that for sure, but I’m also into the quieter moments. Covering “Look Out For My Love,” a tender countrified tune, a few years later and stretching it into a mile-long celebration of crystalline yet exploratory lead-guitar lines.

Granduciel talks about Neil, too. In 2017, while discussing the new album A Deeper Understanding (my favorite of the bunch, if you’re keeping score), he told Grammy.com about how spiritually, Neil played a large part in the recording of the album, and how his influence can be felt quite specifically. Because the internet is simultaneously a landfill and a void, that video is missing from its landing page. But the caption specifies that “Granduciel recalls watching Neil Young wield his famous Gretsch White Falcon guitar with a Bigsby tremolo system from the side of the stage, and how it inspired him to make new types of guitar noises to serve his songs.” Seems very cool!

This is the exact kind of gear talk that makes my ears close up but that I know means a lot to dudes like both Neil and Granduciel. It means a lot less to me and my brother, Pete. We talk about other stuff, though. I’m realizing I’ve never directly asked him what he thinks about Neil and I should probably do that. The reply would be interesting at the very least. (My dad, for his part, is a fan, though too much harmonica can be a dealbreaker for him. Fair play.)

As I’ve mentioned before about a dozen times I grew up Catholic and when you’re Catholic you make sacraments including but not limited to baptism, first eucharist, reconciliation and confirmation. The third one of those, reconciliation, is also called penance and involves telling a priest all your sins and receiving instructions on how to be absolved in the eyes of God. I did this at age 10 in the year 2000 (and not, like my parents, in the more conservative era of the church, the 1960s) so luckily it was all very open and positive — no confessionals or rosaries, just a younger priest with a warm smile. Because I was 10, all my “sins” were things like yelling at my brother, throwing things at my brother, swearing at my brother, and so on. My penance was simple. “Do something nice for your brother,” Father Mayer told me.

I genuinely don’t know if I ever did! I mean, I’ve done nice things for him in the past 25 years but I’m unsure how many of those were done with the explicit intention of reconciliation in the eyes of the Lord. But the next time he texts me and asks what I’m up to, I’ll say: Just a bit rundown here at the moment, bruv. And he’ll laugh, because it’s dumb and funny. That’s a nice thing. We might all be walking through this darkness on our own, but we can always be forgiven.

“Look Out For My Love,” written by Neil Young, from Comes A Time (1978) and Chrome Dreams (2023)

Every night when I clean up the kitchen after dinner some stray thoughts pop into my head. Idle work will do that. As I’m scraping my toddler daughter’s uneaten meal into the garbage for the fourth night in a row a distant memory will emerge like a ship in the mist and I’ll once again be face to face with actor Andrew Rannells, whom I spotted ordering tuna salad (I think) at Starlite Deli on 44th Street in Manhattan during his run in The Boys In The Band on Broadway. This was June 2018. It was a crazy day. I worked across the street and we were already a skeleton crew at that point because of unnecessary but financially dictated staff cuts, so me and another guy held it down while the other half of our team was out in Los Angeles for a broadcast television event. We’d already worked most of our day before the West Coast folks signed on and they were setting up shop for the show anyway when we saw some news that required our full attention. The young emo rapper XXXTentacion had been shot and killed in Florida. This was shocking and kicked off a slew of deaths (some murders, some overdoses) in the following 18 months that included high-profile names like Mac Miller, Juice WRLD, Lil Peep and Nipsey Hussle and that prompted the critic Craig Jenkins to posit, “We’re losing another rap generation right before our eyes.”

Working in news is psychologically draining because you’re constantly exposed to both the horrible events and the reactions to them in real time. It puts you in crisis mode and your body stays in it even after you leave for the night to try to sleep but find yourself checking your phone again and again, like you’ll somehow glean more understanding by absorbing more blue light. It also makes you hungry. I needed “lunch,” even though it was roughly 5 p.m. when I stepped outside, and I decided to grab a bag of chips at the Starlite. There’s this thing that happens when you live in New York City long enough where you see famous people around and it becomes somewhat normalized, though for me it never stopped being novel and exciting. The stakes do get slightly lowered. If you spot a well-known musician at a bar in your town where they’ve just played a show, by contrast, there might be an impulse to approach them. After all, this may never happen again. But in New York, it could happen again, and likely will, though perhaps not with the same person (although maybe). So these NYC run-ins, while enthralling, aren’t imbued with the same once-in-a-lifetime stakes. All of this is what compelled me to speak to Andrew Rannells but keep it brief and just say, “I love your work,” which is true. He’s excellent on Girls. That’s pretty much all I’ve seen except A Simple Favor but I really don’t remember him specifically in that though I’m sure he’s great as ever and compelling and quite funny. He smiled warmly and said thank you and carried on with his tuna order. I got my chips and walked back into my office, took the elevator to the 26th floor and resumed editing an obituary for a slain hip-hop artist.

Hey now!

I’m going full stream-of-consciousness here because quite frankly writing about anything related to Neil at this particular juncture doesn’t seem appealing to me. I haven’t listened to the dude much as of late. I’ve sought out wilder, rawer sounds. I’ve been buried in the wild skronk of Pharoah Sanders and the quizzical improvisations of Chick Corea with Roy Haynes and Miroslav Vitouš. Have you listened to this shit, man? “Red, Black & Green” from Sanders’ 1971 album Thembi? I’ve never heard so much texture on a piece of recorded music in my entire life. Makes me think of Jackson Pollock and other abstract expressionist works where seeing the brush strokes offers as much insight into the meaning as does viewing the piece from multiple angles around the room. I’ve been wrestling with how to convey this particular relationship between different art forms because it makes sense in my head but I may have come up short here, which is perhaps why people tend just to say things like “song whips ass” because it gets the enthusiasm across without getting lost in the trees. Driving to pick up my daughter from school I listened to that song and followed it up with “Black Balloon” by the Goo Goo Dolls because everything is a vibe and realized 20 years too late that Johnny Rzeznik sings, “And I go on as you get colder,” and not, as I had long thought, “Dagger waters, you get colder” although it does make me want to use “dagger waters” in some kind of creative capacity. An experimental music act called “Dagger Waters” could sound like so many things, including but not limited to: a drum/guitar freakout that lasts way longer than it ought to; a brassy exploration of exotic scales; a chilly, synthesizer-led tribute to pirates. You get the idea.

Hey now!

My father-in-law is in his seventies, a few years younger than Neil. He’s originally from Michigan. A few years ago we were talking about the endless slate of gray skies that seems to materialize over this part of the country (Western New York, the Midwest, et al) from about October to April, if we’re lucky. He called it going into the tunnel. We’re in the tunnel now. I write this from inside the tunnel.

Neil Young turned 79 earlier this week, on November 12. For context, Neil’s Crazy Horse mates Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina are both 81. Everyone in The Stray Gators, who backed Neil up on Harvest, died between 2000 and 2015. Neil’s onetime bandmate Graham Nash is 82 (and quite lucid, even with the exact dates of formative events that happened to him in the 1960s). Stephen Stills is likewise 79 but turning 80 in less than two months. David Crosby died in 2023. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan are both 83 and Dylan is still very much touring, like Neil. Joni Mitchell, recently 81, just staged some incredible shows at the Hollywood Bowl. Phil Lesh died last month at 84. And earlier this month, Quincy Jones passed on at 91. I really didn’t mean to make this such a downer but I guess I’ve been thinking about death and really how could I not, how could we all not, as we’re always among it even as we are in life and all that. But I come back to the fact that Neil is nearly an octogenarian and yet still does whatever he wants as he is compelled to do it. Luckily for us most of those things seem to align with what is commonly understood to be Good (though not always).

One of these days I’m going to dedicate one of these entries entirely to Neil songs that I can’t stand and one of them is absolutely going to be “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” — and I suppose its twin, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” although at least that one has some cool crunching guitar dissonance in it. The whole “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” discourse is exhausting even now but I did like learning recently that John Lennon thought the whole sentiment was bullshit. (“Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison — it’s garbage to me,” he said in a 1980 interview, via Wikipedia. “I worship the people who survive.” He was murdered later that year.) Neil’s response to Lennon, given two years after the latter’s death, stuck with me:

Rock'n'roll doesn't look that far ahead. Rock'n'roll is right now. What's happening right this second. Is it bright? Or is it dim because it's waiting for tomorrow—that's what people want to know. And that's why I say that.

A foolish, likely selfish perspective that I nevertheless have to support. When you’re making art, there is only the moment. Any deviation is a threat to its very existence. “Is it bright? Or is it dim because it’s waiting for tomorrow?” Good thing to keep in mind as we make our way through the tunnel.

Hey now!

“Hey Now,” written by Neil Young, Jeff Blackburn, Bob Mosley, and Johnny Craviotto, from High Flyin’ (The Ducks, recorded 1977 and released 2023)

Neil Young: guitar, vocals
Jeff Blackburn: guitar, vocals
Bob Mosley: bass, vocals
Johnny Craviotto, drums, vocals

The waiting drove me mad
You’re finally here and I’m a mess

Robin Pecknold seems to age in reverse. Pull up a photo of the Fleet Foxes frontman from 2008, the year of his band’s debut album, and you’ll see long, unbrushed hair, a thick flannel shirt, and a fuzzy beard. He looks 30. He was 22. A few years later, during the Helplessness Blues era, Pecknold had explicitly introduced more of himself into his songwriting — “Pallid animals in the snow-tipped pines I find / Hatching from the seed of your thin mind all night” evolved into “If I had an orchard, I’d work ‘til I’m sore.” And he finally looked his 25 years, finding a bit more boyishness in a messy mop-top and a well-loved army-green shacket.

I don’t bring this up to linger on a musician’s appearance. I mention it to give the full context of seeing a 27-year-old Pecknold stop by Late Night With Jimmy Fallon one October evening in 2013. His hair was very short. His beard, close-cropped. And he wore a white t-shirt tucked into slacks like Paul fucking Newman in 1967. It fit, because the song he performed was not his own but Pearl Jam’s “Corduroy,” a meditation on how fame irrevocably changes every relationship you have, including to what you wear. When Eddie Vedder sang it, he was furious. In his rendition, Pecknold seems content, clear-eyed, and deliberate.

“They can buy but can’t put on my clothes,” he sings, and later, “Absolutely nothing’s changed. Take my hand, not my picture.”

Fleet Foxes had found success in the late 2000s and early 2010s with a pleasant, literate, and often catchy type of folk music steeped in the historical. Pecknold, who wrote the songs, seemed to be cosplaying at the very beginning, hiding himself behind signifiers that reflected the style (autumnal clothing and hippie hair) just as he decorated his lyrics with earthy images and borderline medieval sensibilities (an album cover by Pieter Bruegel the Elder). Both the Sun Giant EP and the Fleet Foxes album begin with songs about the sun immediately followed by songs centering naturalistic reminders of death (raindrops in a river, blood spilling in snow). “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” is followed by “Meadowlarks” and the “Blue Ridge Mountains.” You get the picture.

The most famous of these early compositions, “White Winter Hymnal,” became a favorite of glee clubs for its impressive and fun harmony vocal arrangement and mysterious, violent lyrics. It’s the kind of tune that doesn’t sound out of place on a Christmas album. It also fits snugly alongside music from artists who sprung up in the post-Mumford & Sons boom of that era, when “indie folk” got flattened into a monolithic bran pancake. Fleet Foxes were always artier than those acts. But by 2011, Pecknold had taken a different tack. He got more introspective. “So now I am older than my mother and father when they had their daughter,” he sings to begin Helplessness Blues. “Now what does that say about me?” A Best Folk Album Grammy nod followed.

By the time he appeared on Late Night, Pecknold had moved to New York City to study at Columbia. He was a college student now, and Fleet Foxes were seemingly taking some time off. This meant a lot to me, someone who effectively made indie folk his entire musical persona from 2010-2012. To have Pecknold pop up announced on NBC and play a banger of a PJ song was big, and to preserve its alt-rock blueprint but make it a little artier and squarer (with help from Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen) was exhilarating. And to see Pecknold look the way I looked at that time in my life, give or take some patchy stubble, was utterly life-affirming. “Corduroy,” I knew from my nominal Pearl Jam fandom, was a loaded choice, too, conveying plenty because the song says so much in its lyrics already.

The story goes like this. Eddie Vedder wore a corduroy jacket during a performance in the early ‘90s, and like most things he did around that time — in the band’s commercial behemoth period, when their only real commercial peers were Nirvana — it became fashionable. The piece of fabric Vedder had bought for $12 became a commodity, as tends to happen. He saw it in a shop going for $650 because it was the Eddie Vedder corduroy jacket. (It might have been a vest.) This disgusted him, so he fired up the band for some bloodletting. “Corduroy” is about fame, with the jacket a kind of synecdoche. Vedder sings the song to his own success: “I don’t wanna take what you can give. I would rather starve than eat your bread.”

For my money, it’s probably the best Pearl Jam song. “Corduroy” was released in 1994 on the band’s third album, Vitalogy. That same year, the band played the song at Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefit in California, along with a Daniel Johnston cover. In January 1995, Pearl Jam members entered the studio with Neil to make Mirror Ball, which includes one of his best-ever songs, “I’m The Ocean.” When I talked to Dylan England from Del Paxton about that one last year, he summed it perfectly: “It’s like a big epic. I almost was like, oh shit, this is just kind of — everything, which is why it was cool. It’s kinda uncool. A big rock song that ends with him chanting, ‘I’m the ocean.’ I guess I could go either way on that.”

Me too. Another big rock song that ends with a literal message that feels readymade for big arena chanting? “Can’t buy what I want because it’s free,” go some of the final lyrics in “Corduroy.”

The way Pecknold punctuates his take on the tune really grabbed me then, in 2013, and it grabs me now sitting here watching it again as a lo-res YouTube rip. After the Big Rock declaration against consumerism and commodification, drummer Neal Morgan and guitarist Daniel Rossen both drop off, leaving him gentle and alone to strum and sing the final verse:

Why ain’t it supposed to be just fun?
Oh, to live and die, let it be done
I figure I'll be damned
All alone like I began

And then, on the final word, the cacophony begins. Octopus percussion. Atonal, vaguely minor-key strumming from Pecknold. Rossen’s pinching Telecaster. It lasts for 18 seconds before resuming the song’s scripted outro. Most importantly, it rules — and it satisfies my recent inclination toward the noisy. But it also acts as an announcement. This is not Pearl Jam’s version. This is not Fleet Foxes, though the band had dabbled in free jazz-indebted experimentation on the great song “The Shrine / An Argument” and gotten freaky with it in live performances in 2011 and 2012. This is Robin Pecknold, intrepid frontiersman of new sounds. It proved true. The Fleet Foxes album that followed, 2017’s Crack-Up, remains a bit of a puzzle to me, impossibly ornate and still somewhat impenetrable despite sounding pretty and very much its own complete musical world. It was as much a repudiation of what had come before in the Fleet Foxes realm as the mini noise jam he broke out on Late Night. (2020’s Shore was, fittingly, a return to form with all the mature wisdom he’d gleaned.)

But you know what I come back to? It’s not Pecknold covering Neil’s “Comes A Time” with My Morning Jacket, though that’s good, too. (Or “Expecting To Fly,” which Jim James did with Fleet Foxes and is also good.) It’s also not even Pecknold reportedly saying that Neil “doesn’t seem to have any enemies” in 2009, though that strikes me as both completely probable and quite implausible, given how he follows his own impulses with abandon. (The full quote is below:)

Pitchfork: Is there any music you've been listening to that you think could be shaping the music you're writing?

Robin Pecknold: The biggest thing to me — and I mean this in a totally approach-based way — is Neil Young.

There's less of a Neil Young feeling than on the first album. But we were asked to do his [Bridge School] benefit down at Mountain View [California], and the experience of being around his crew and being an observer into his world for a few days was this crazy and inspiring experience. He seems like such a wonderful person, and it seems like he just did it the right way. He doesn't seem to have any enemies, and he just does what he wants and looks after the people in his circle.

You would meet person after person who did such and such job on the tours, and everyone had stories. There were dudes that that had stories from 1971, and everyone had nothing but good things to say.

The thing I come back to is Pecknold’s white shirt on Late Night. He’d left his ripped flannel — something Neil knows a thing or two about — behind. But professional photos reveal the tiny imperfections of Pecknold’s shirt. Some wear around the collar and the sleeves. The kind of simple thing that could go for a lot in a store window because a rock star wears it. It likely didn’t happen in Pecknold’s case. These days, he’s likely to be found wearing a small beanie, too. He sported one back in the pastoral Fleet Foxes days but ditched it for a while during his growth years. It seems like he’s rediscovered it.

After all this time, he’s grown into it. “All the things that others want for me,” he sang, way back then. “Can't buy what I want because it's free.”

As a bonus, listen to this recording of Robin Pecknold apparently covering Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio” in 2007 that someone has preserved nearly 20 years later. Thank you kind soul.

“Expecting To Fly,” written by Neil Young and originally released as a Buffalo Springfield song, from Buffalo Springfield Again (1967)

First off: This is not an interview with Jeff Tweedy. (Maybe someday.)

But man, how about Jeff Tweedy? A few weeks ago I traveled west to see him in a theater at SUNY Buffalo State University and was struck by how assured, how confident, how completely in command he is even when it’s just him and four guitars up on a stage in front of hundreds of people. It’s a far cry from the slightly detached lone rock star captured before, during and after a solo show in the early 2000s in Sam Jones’ definitive Wilco documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart.

The setlist was terrific, blending Wilco favorites like (the song) “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” with deep cuts like “In A Future Age” and plenty of solo-show staples like “Radio King,” his wonderfully spry tune from Golden Smog in 1995. I entered the show expecting something sleepy and sedate, as a lot of Jeff’s recent solo output has been, and was elated to discover the show had the opposite effect. I walked out of the theater energized, my brain buzzing with new appreciation for recent Wilco stunners like “Ambulance” and “A Lifetime To Find” and, most surprising of all, a strong urge to probe back into the trio of late-2010s/early 2020s solo releases I’d initially written off.

Warm, Warmer, and Love Is The King do have their drowsy moments, but so do plenty of modern Wilco albums. They also have highlights like “Gwendolyn,” which might actually be the best song Jeff’s written in the last half-decade. To me, it’s perfect — a pop song dressed in folky clothes and accessorized with glam guitar lines. As good as anything on Star Wars, which makes it impressive he played nearly every instrument on it himself (apart from drums, handled by his son Spencer).

“Gwendolyn” also boasts two lines I find to be very much taken from the Book of Neil in spirit if not precise language. About halfway through the tale of its title character (who could charitably be called a mess and who ultimately ends up locked up), Jeff sets a scene: “The sun beating down like a big trombone / That's right when I start missing home.”

I’ve talked before about how Neil lacks the outright poetry of his peers like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but it really doesn’t matter. Neil’s vernacular is much wobblier, beer-warm at times and powered by a desire to express what he’s feeling right now. Revisions, though not altogether absent, are uncommon. Neil would liken a hot sun to some low, blowing brass because it feels good and also unexpected.

Jeff’s next trick is even more Neil in its payoff. After Gwen’s taken away, the narrator expresses relief and says essentially that he does believe he’s had enough: “Sun coming up like a piece of toast / That's right when I started heading home.” Bellissimo.

In 2010, Wilco were a decade out from the album that made them iconoclasts, and their reputation was sound. They had rebuilt the band itself, too, shedding members of that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot era and replacing them with the dizzying talents of Nels Cline and sound mechanics Mikael Jorgensen and Pat Sansone. In other words, they were solid. The Whole Love, an underrated album, opens with a long showcase of their dual identities: tender soft-rockers with experimental and noisy tendencies.

It made sense, then, for them to cover “Broken Arrow.” Neil penned that song during his Buffalo Springfield days as a project going in several directions. (In short, Wikipedia lists its genres as psychedelic rock, art rock, proto-prog, and jazz fusion.) On record, the song begins with a live recording of “Mr. Soul” before devolving into a swirling hiss. Then, a beautiful and orchestral introduction before the tender folk ballad begins.

Wilco performed it at the nonprofit MusiCares’ tribute to Neil, the same evening Elvis Costello turned “The Losing End (When You’re On)” into a high and lonesome wail and the Red Hot Chili Peppers oddly covered “A Man Needs A Maid” (or perhaps not so oddly). But it made complete, perhaps almost too much, sense. Wilco, auteur experimentalists, helming early Neil at his most experimental. They both knew hot to subvert expectation and offer subtle transformation within the folk tradition.

In other words, Jeff knows Neil. He’s frequently covered “The Old Country Waltz” in solo shows. Wilco has covered “Cinnamon Girl” and “Helpless” and “Out On The Weekend” and even dug into the deepest cuts on his quarantine-era livestreams in 2020, giving the dozy number “Try” a go from home. Wilco opened for Neil on tour in 2008, around the same time he told GQ which Neil album was his most-listened to, at that time anyway. “Tonight’s the Night. Easily,” he said. And he continued:

If I made a list of my favorite songs from Neil Young’s career, it wouldn’t be all of those songs. It might not even be any of them. It’s more the idea of it as a record. It’s an insight into what a record can be. It’s like an anti-record or something, and something I think that Wilco kind of aspired to at some point. Maybe even to our detriment.

I don’t think you can manufacture that kind of mood or vibe. It was just a document of a place and time. I guess that’s what I mean more than anything. That record informed what it means to take a more documentary approach to record-making. Tonight’s the Night doesn’t feel finished. It also feels like a window into a particularly dark period of his life, and that’s pretty fascinating.

Near the end of Jeff’s set in Buffalo, he broke out a fan favorite from Wilco’s first album: “Passenger Side.” It’s a funny and juvenile song about drunk driving that also seems wise beyond its years, making it a pitch-perfect slice of mid-’90s alt-country. “Roll another number for the road,” Jeff sings to begin the second verse. “You’re the only sober person I know.”

The explicit reference to one of Neil’s booziest tunes from Tonight’s The Night sets an immediate tone and provide the template for a sonic sequel. Jeff, sober for decades now, sings it as a wizened 57-year-old who has lost none of his sense of playfulness. (Neil, at 78, hasn’t lost his either, even as he’s slowed down a bit by the natural forces of time.)

But what’s the most Neil Young song Jeff has ever written? And what does that even mean, anyway?

You might think it means most guitar or even the most guitar solo. But we can agree that “Impossible Germany” — perhaps the signature song of this modern version of Wilco — has both and yet is not even remotely Neil in composition, sound, or texture.

So, what’s the most Neil song in the catalog? For me, the answer is clear.

It begins with Jeff barely singing, mostly whispering a melancholic domestic scene in the aftermath of a fight. He alternates between two chords (A minor and G major), a very Neil move, before something quite dramatic happens. The song breaks the hell open, yielding a lightning-cry coda that extends until Jeff, channeling the debilitating panic attacks he grappled with due to crippling depression and addiction in the early 2000s, goes fucking nuts on the guitar. It’s Neil-coded for sure, grimy and thick, but it also transcends his influence into the realm of the sublime. Looking at the devil in the eyes and holding the fear close.

Before I realized Nels Cline wasn’t yet in the band when they made A Ghost Is Born, I assumed the expert fret virtuoso handled those duties. Upon learning it was actually Jeff, a skilled guitarist of his own merit, I felt unbound by possibility. If this guy could write a song as visceral as “At Least That’s What You Said” and leave most of the emotional impact to jarring, ugly bursts of sound he made on his fretboard, I could maybe try my hand at doing the same.

During lockdown, around the time he covered “Try,” Jeff sat down with his son Spencer on drums and they banged out a very contemplative version of “At Least That’s What You Said” that I can say quite profoundly changed the way I think about creativity. On record and onstage with a full band, the song begins quietly and explodes with a rich backdrop of instruments. With only Spencer’s primitive kit and Jeff playing a small guitar through what sounds like only natural amplifier textures, they’re forced to keep things together even as Jeff skates away for some improvisational runs. He has to handle both rhythm and melody and he can’t rely on the scuzz of his axe to fill the space. It’s all very intimate and raw in a way that I find endlessly inspiring.

I hadn’t seen this video until after I had made and released some music of my own. But I’ve not yet played that music for anyone live. If I do, I’d like to tap into that exact energy and see what happens.

That’s Jeff’s gift to me, via Neil’s gift to him. Sometimes you’ve just gotta plug in and start up a tune. Hey, look at that. They’re playing the old country waltz.

Jeff Tweedy’s on tour through Wednesday, October 30.

“The Old Country Waltz,” written by Neil Young, from American Stars ‘N Bars (1977)

This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m honored to publish a conversation with John Ross, the creative force at the center of Wild Pink. It’s been exciting to hear Wild Pink’s evolution since 2017, introducing dreamy elements and a heartland influence into their music. But the narrative around their new album Dulling The Horns goes like this: John wanted a sound closer to Wild Pink’s live show, so they chose rawer takes. None of this would matter if John’s songwriting was bunk. But he’s one of a kind, preternaturally gifted at communicating odd, occasionally sad feelings punctuated by references to the 1995 crime film Heat, the War on Terror, and Catholicism. He is, of course, a fan of Neil, and he specifically singled out Ben Keith’s pedal steel work on Harvest Moon: “I feel like that sounds like what a lot of bands are after.”

A highly unusual Wild Pink song is “Abducted At The Grief Retreat,” which, in addition to boasting an incredible title, also flaunts a hard groove that belongs on a dance record. It was previously unexplored terrain for a band often likened to The War On Drugs and Tom Petty — but then again, John Ross’ creative expanse knows few boundaries. Wild Pink’s 2022 album ILYSM is a trip, and when it arrives at “Grief Retreat,” the story shifts to an eerie but transcendent experience. “You are 10 feet tall hovering above my car,” he sings to a mysterious shape. “You are Jesus and Dracula. You are around my neck like a scapular.”

Catholic signifiers immediately make my antennae perk up, which is why I loved “Grief Retreat” as more than just a musical outlier. John, who was also raised in that religious tradition, is particularly interested in how the historical Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, shared the same upbringing. “I’ve been pretty fixated on Dracula my entire life,” he said. “It’s pretty fascinating that he’s both a fictional and non-fictional character, and that he was an actual Catholic Crusader in the 15th century, and that he was a ghoul.”

It’s not surprising to learn that he returns on Wild Pink’s great new album Dulling The Horns (out Friday), on a song appropriately called “Catholic Dracula.” (It also fits that Wild Pink are set to tour in early 2025 with MJ Lenderman, whose work is likewise littered with residual Catholicism.) Now, to my knowledge, Neil has never delved far into the lore of Dracula, though he evokes bloodsuckers to bemoan the oil industry’s death-grip on our planet on “Vampire Blues.” And John is the kind of music maker whose catalog feels at least partially indebted to Neil, sonically speaking. (Hear: “See You Better Now,” which prominently features Neil disciple J. Mascis on lead guitar.)

But a certain Dulling The Horns lyric struck me as channeling that mid-’70s, downtrodden, here-we-go-again grinning fatalism that props up my favorite Neil records. “Don’t know how many switches I’ve flipped. Flipped a switch and then the thing just don’t exist,” he sings on “Eating The Egg Whole.” “But my stupid ass is always searching. Hoping for a pearl when I open up my fist.” Pair that with some wild guitar and it you’ve got a Crazy Horse prototype. Yet John was eager to talk about his love for a much quieter, well-traveled Neil album.

Weekly Neil: A big difference with Dulling The Horns versus the last couple albums was this idea of you trying to capture more of a live Wild Pink sound and experience, right?

John: Definitely. The last two records, there's been a disconnect between the studio album and the live experience. I pretty much just wanted to make a record that sounded like the band live. Because of where I'm at now and where we're at as a band, it’s just a heavier sound, and I think that's where the the Crazy Horse comparison came from.

WN: You released the Strawberry Eraser EP ahead of this album, and “Q. Degraw” ahead of ILYSM. With that approach, are you thinking, “This is a representation of what I'm working on now, so let’s put it out, even if it’s not a full album”?

John: I think they're little release valves. They're very easy. It's so easy to just put out one or two songs at a time, and it can be really cathartic to try out some some production ideas that I'm fooling around with at home not have wait two years to invest in a whole record. I love doing these little one-offs.

WN: Some musicians have told me that they love Neil Young's approach to releasing music. He's an artist who thinks, “Well, I'm doing this now, and and the shorter the runway between doing it and being able to share it with somebody, the better.”

John: Yeah, totally. I wish that the time it took to release a record was shorter. I don't see it getting any shorter. But I mean, Neil can do what he wants.

WN: I feel like people initially gravitate to Neil Young because he obviously has a really innate ear for songwriting, but also just it's fun to make a lot of noise on the guitar. Has that been influential for you?

John: Probably more so recently. I just saw him live at Forest Hills, and he was awesome. I loved how kind of sloppy it was. Like, he was tuning without a tuner, just very off the cuff. It was very, very cool. Very fun. He’s definitely been a more recent influence. Springsteen, Tom Petty and then Jackson Brown are more evergreen ones, and more early on for me. But I love Harvest Moon. That’s my favorite record of his. I'm looking at his discography now. [takes a moment to browse] Man, Harvest Moon has so many hits on it. It's insane. “Unknown Legend!” I think that's probably my favorite song on that.

WN: That's obviously a more subdued, mellower, folky record. Is that what appeals to you over the noisier stuff at the moment?

John: I think so, yeah. I love the pedal steel on that record.

WN: It’s a beautiful-sounding album, but as always with Neil, there’s this idea of not getting too bogged down in trying to make something perfect. Is that something that appeals to you too?

John: Totally. Not being too precious about stuff. That's a pretty good philosophy, especially if you're going to put out a lot of records — just not wringing your hands. A Billion Little Lights kind of went down some rabbit holes. This, the most recent record, was very much in in that vein of, just capture a good take. [pauses again] Ragged Glory was another favorite. “Fuckin’ Up.”

WN: I first heard that song because Pearl Jam covered it.

John: Yeah, same!

WN: “Unknown Legend” really is a beautiful song. It’s a love song, and a lot gets revealed in it. For you, what is it about that song? The sound or the vibe, or kind of the whole package?

John: I guess the whole package. I really do love the production on that record, and really the pedal steel. I feel like that sound sounds like what a lot of bands are after. I certainly am inspired by that, or The War On Drugs, or I feel like many bands sound like they have been inspired by that record.

WN: And what about “Harvest Moon?” I mean, “Harvest Moon,” the song, is interesting because it's one of his best-known ones, and so everyone has their own relationship with it.

John: I remember the music video growing up. It has kind of a cool music video, people dancing in a roadhouse. Everyone’s dancing. Neil’s dancing. [Editor’s note: Dale Crover from Melvins is also in the video, portraying a young version of Neil. He recently spoke to Stereogum about it.]

Did Daniel Lanois produce this record? No, he didn’t produce this one. [Editor’s note: Lanois produced 2010’s Le Noise.] I've been rewatching old Daniel Lanois videos. He's so awesome. Another Canadian.

WN: I love Lanois’ album with “Still Water” and “The Maker” on it.

John: Acadie? Yeah, man. That one’s got the hits. “Sonho Dourado.” “Jolie [Louise].” Yeah, there’s some good stuff in there.

WN: I can just see how that goes with a lot of what Wild Pink has done.

John: Totally. “Sonho Dourado,” before the pandemic, we used to actually cover that song.

WN: Around the time of A Billion Little Lights, you put out a playlist of some songs that had inspired the record, or maybe just were in your orbit around the time. I believe Neil’s “Long May You Run” was on that.

John: Oh, that’s very possible.

WN: You just posted one for Strawberry Eraser not long ago. I didn't see any Neil on there, though.

John: Yeah, we had some Sundays, some Crocodiles, The 6ths, The Pains [Of Being Pure At Heart], John Cale, Silver Jews, Martin Rev, Joe Strummer, Talk Talk… dude, have you heard this Fust record?

WN: Yes! I actually think it was [our mutual friend] Tom who told me about it.

John: Oh my god. It's so good.

WN: I've been listening to Wild Pink for about six or seven years now, and I’ve started to clock lyrical recurrences. You’ve got “Catholic Dracula” on the new album, and “Abducted At The Grief Retreat,” talking about Jesus and Dracula. I also love “The Seance On St. Augustine St.” in 2018, and now “St. Catherine St.” I'm always wondering how intentional stuff like that is, or if it just happens by virtue of you being the guy writing it, and this is just how your brain works.

John: I think it's the latter. I'm a pretty obsessive person, and I've been pretty fixated on Dracula my entire life. It’s pretty fascinating, that he's both a fictional and non-fictional character, and that he was an actual Catholic Crusader in the 15th century, and that he was a ghoul. I don't know of any other characters — Frankenstein's not also a real person. The “St. [blank] Street” is, I think that just looks really cool. I was born and raised Catholic. Catholicism is a theme, and I’m not a Catholic now or anything, but it's just stuck with me. I think that if you grow up in the church, I don't think you ever really get away from it. You are indoctrinated into it. It's hardcore.

WN: I grew up Catholic. I made many sacraments. I was an altar server.

John: Yeah? They get their hooks in! They do. It stuck with me. Not maintaining being religious, but just the imagery. It just has stuck around in some way or another.

[We talk a bit about Catholic schools here and wind our way back to the new record.]

WN: Well, I'm looking forward to kind of sharing in the moment with folks when it comes out.

John: Dude, I have not been as excited for one of these records to come out since, like, Yolk In The Fur, probably. It feels very much like where I am right now. It's not where I had hoped I would be, or where I want to be, if that makes any sense. It’s not aspirational. I just wrote songs about where I'm at, and it feels very authentic to me, so I'm excited for people to hear it.

Wild Pink’s new album, Dulling The Horns, is out Friday, October 4. It’s $11 on Bandcamp.

“Harvest Moon,” written by Neil Young, from Harvest Moon (1992)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Tim Drummond: bass, broom
Ben Keith: pedal steel guitar
Spooner Oldham: Hammond organ
Linda Ronstadt: vocals
James Taylor: vocals

“I heard there were three old ladies in the audience tonight, and we thought we’d do this one slow Ducks song for you who are here tonight. You know who you are.”

Ah man, The fuckin’ Ducks.

It’s well established that Neil hates to be tied down, right? Right. He famously bailed on a tour with Stephen Stills and his band just 19 dates in by sending a telegram: “Dear Stephen, funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach.” He makes loud music and quiet music depending on whatever he’s feeling. He told Jim Jarmusch “I don’t make plans” but then recorded a soundtrack for his 1995 film Dead Man anyway. He yields his best work with Crazy Horse (and indeed most of the entries on this very platform are songs he did with them) but any records with them when he feels like it. He’s mercurial but also he follows the muse. Six of one, half-dozen of the other.

So, The Ducks. Santa Cruz, California, 1977. Neil’s got it in his contract that Crazy Horse is his touring band, but he’s got these other musician he’s been grooving with. Bob Mosley, Jeff Blackburn, and Johnny Craviotto. They link up and call themselves The Ducks and only play gigs in Santa Cruz so as not to technically “tour.” Twenty gigs in July, August, and September. And crucially, it’s not Neil Young & The Ducks. It’s just The Ducks.

They play rock and roll. It’s beer-drinkin’ music. It’s lawn-mowin’ music. (A fellow dad friend and I had a good text exchange about this last summer.) Neil sings sometimes but largely just plays guitar. Things get a bit choogly. They give “Are You Ready For The Country?” a fresh coat of paint and throw a spoiler on the tail. You can hear this all on their sole release, High Flyin’, a collection of live versions from that summer.

In the second half, they slow it down. Neil introduces a tune with the words above. And then the band strums into “Little Wing,” a song that would, three years later, open Neil’s Hawks & Doves album as a minimal acoustic number. In the Ducks arrangement — spacious, borderline dreamy — it becomes a stunning ballad that you can imagine hearing in a quieter moment on Tonight’s The Night or On The Beach. Like when you walk outside and get some air during a loud party. His guitar solo is bleary-eyed and mildly sludgy, unmistakable, quite lyrical. It’s a magnetic moment.

I don’t know who Neil wrote “Little Wing” about. But whoever it is, she sounds like a wonderful person in his own estimation. A person who will listen to children sing and protect them. Someone he wants to stay but is afraid will leave.

I feel that way when I hear the fragile acoustic version of the song. It’s skeletally quiet and over too soon. But listening to both I go back to something Dominic Angelella told me when I spoke to him in late 2022 about his own songwriting. “I’ve always wanted to make skronky noise-pop punk stuff, and then have also enjoyed playing the acoustic guitar,” he told me on a FaceTime audio call from Ireland. “This is why so many people become obsessed with Neil Young, because he is very good at both of these things.”

Even if The Ducks’ take on “Little Wing” isn’t quite skronky or punky, the point stands. It’s plugged-in, and Neil’s guitar Old Black carries a heavy bite. He’s my favorite guitarist of all time but it’s actually because his rhythmic acoustic playing is actually quite profound (to my heathen ears anyway). The picking on “Old Man” is simply spellbinding to me. “Little Wing,” via The Ducks, feels more like the path of a bumblebee than a bird. Not a duck. Not a hawk. Not even a dove. But a wing’s a wing.

“Little Wing,” written by Neil Young, from Hawks & Doves (1980), Homegrown (2020), and The Ducks’ High Flyin’ (2023)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar, harmonica (Hawks & Doves version)
Jeff Blackburn: guitar, vocals
Bob Mosley: bass, vocals
Johnny Craviotto: drums, vocals

Look at the calendar. Feel the chill in the air. It’s Harvest season.

Years ago I met an old friend at a bar called The Magician on New York’s Lower East Side. It might be the best bar in the world because you can bring in pizza and Genny Cream Ale pours are cheap and I’ve made a lot of nice memories there with people I care about. I am mostly a homebody and always have been but I associate The Magician with the kind of communal friend experiences you typically only see on sitcoms. One dude is always late, one is always talking about the latest imported Blu-rays he picked up, we can start there and end up at a karaoke place singing “Mr. Jones” until 2 a.m., etc.

These are all real but atypical occurrences that I nevertheless cherish because of how rare they seem to me in retrospect. The Magician facilitates this with its impeccably glowing neon interior sign and vintage CD jukebox that was replaced by a digital one in the past few years. It’s the kind of place where an old friend comes in wearing a white t-shirt after having taken off his sweaty Oxford and pulls up a chair across from you and, when you ask him how he’s doing, he says, “Well, I’m thinking about packing it in, buying a pickup, and taking it down to L.A.”

You know this friend but not well because he’s really the older brother of a friend you know better who is your age. But you’ve hung out with this friend. He’d come to visit in college and you’d mostly talk about music, which makes sense because he’s a musician but not professionally, so he’s able to be candid but also freewheeling. The last time he was at your place you put on In Rainbows and both tried your hand at hitting Thom Yorke’s falsetto vocal run that ends “Nude.” Then you all had a nice spaghetti dinner.

The friend has just moved to New York from years in Atlanta, which I guess is his version of finding a place to call his own and starting a brand new day. And when he quotes Neil Young he smiles wide and waits for you to comment on it because he’s excited to say that specific line to you because he knows you know it and maybe guys at work don’t and so they wouldn’t get it. So you say, “Nice! Neil!” because it is nice and because you love Neil. Then you look for the song on the jukebox but they don’t have it I actually didn’t do this part though I should’ve. I’m going to switch to first person now.

The same friend recently texted me, no bullshit, the following photo. We hadn’t talked since May, and then, boom.

Harvest is in the air. (Thanks, Jon.)

I told him about this entry and he sent back the following message, which I may have to print on a hypothetical Weekly Neil t-shirt somewhere down the road: “At one point in my life I used to say, ‘I don’t listen to music, I listen to Neil Young.’”

Who among us hasn’t thought about packing it the hell in and starting over somewhere new? What can even be said about “Out On The Weekend” that hasn’t already been dissected at length in the 50+ years since its release? All I know is it’s a great song with so much air in it. I want to live in that air. I’ll never forget Mark Richardson’s words about the Harvest album:

It's probably his best sounding album, and the ear tends to gravitate to the rhythm section in particular, as bassist Tim Drummond and drummer Kenny Buttrey are almost absurdly in the pocket throughout.

Listening to it once with another friend when we were way younger, we blasted the chorus (a funny thing to do because it’s a gentle twangy folk song) and he remarked on “that bell or whatever the hell it is” that radiates a steady calm as Neil delivers his lyrics. It’s a pedal steel but we didn’t know what that was back then. It does arrive like a ringing bell, a note of a single pitch that one might refer to as an announcement siren. The notification that Neil has, in fact, heard the call of woman he’s thinking of who has made him so down today.

“Out On The Weekend” is a quiet song but I’d argue it’s full of swagger. It evokes the image of the paradoxical cowboy, the truck-driving man ready for a new adventure who is also a lonely boy with a broken heart. “He can’t relate to joy,” Neil sings about himself. “He tries to speak and he can’t begin to say.”

As I’ve written before, I don’t like calling Neil a genius — even as he’s restless, boundlessly creative, and steadfast in his principles, he’s still just a guy, and in fact his everyman appeal is his among his best qualities but not for the dumb reasons people tend to use that descriptor, which are usually political. But I think that line is genius. The musical openness of the song echoes its lonesome sentiments. Guy’s got a broken heart, so he’s looking to start over. He was also laid up in a back brace during this time recovering from surgery. That’s undoubtedly a lonely experience. And he knows about being lonely. About the “Bad Fog” it brings and about channeling that wallowing feeling.

You have to create space in order to really sell the loneliness. Tell your rhythm section to slow it down. Let that pedal steel ring out. Unplug your guitar. Pack it in.

It’s funny to write about living out sitcom scenes with friends in a bar in relation to a song about loneliness. But I’d be lying if I said “Out On The Weekend” doesn’t also fill me with possibility — the wide-open expanse of two days off. What are you gonna do with ‘em? You could do nothing and be lonely or try to have some fun and be lonely doing that, too. Your call. I’ve done both. The latter typically works out better.

I get the same feeling hearing Kacey Musgraves’ “Slow Burn,” a song explicitly indebted to Neil’s influence. Her own lonely weekend has shades of it, too.

I recently hosted two hours of a talk show our local NPR station broadcasts daily called Connections. The topic was Brat Summer, but as the conversation wound down, the focus turned to autumn. Arielle Gordon, a writer I admire, came on to talk about Charli XCX and the great piece she wrote about the Brat phenomenon (“kamala IS brat” and the like), and I had to ask her how she was musically preparing for fall. She mentioned Nilüfer Yanya, whose terrific new album My Method Actor is out today. And then she asked a question so perfect I have to reproduce it here.

“Is MJ Lenderman Brat?”

That query — along with the fact that “Rip Torn” sounds remarkably like “Ambulance Blues” — is a topic for another newsletter. But to end this one, it’s worth noting that a September release date for MJ Lenderman’s new album Manning Fireworks feels predestined. A generational talent who references Bob Dylan a lot and who is stylistically and musically much closer to Uncle Neil dropping his breakthrough record into the amber haze of harvest season?

Brat Summer is dead. Welcome to Harvest Fall.

“Out On The Weekend,” written by Neil Young, from Harvest (1972)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar, harmonica
Kenny Buttrey: drums
Tim Drummond: bass
Ben Keith: pedal steel guitar

This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m digging into my own archives to feature a brief conversation with Mac DeMarco from early 2023. In fact, it’s the very conversation that inspired me to begin this newsletter in earnest a few months later.

Mac DeMarco loves Neil Young. It’s not shocking. Many musicians love Neil, especially the musicians existing in the tradition of guitar-based songs who like to get a little loud and/or jammy with it. Mac doesn’t get so loud but he can certainly jam. His biggest songs on streaming are chewy numbers about love that prominently feature him playing a guitar that sounds like it’s melting. Over the past decade or so, his music has mellowed out, to the point where his most recent LP is 35 minutes of instrumentals he mostly recorded in hotels. He called it Five Easy Hot Dogs. (A few months after putting it out, he dropped One Wayne G, a six-hour collection of 200 more. He’s in his data-drop era.)

Ahead of Five Easy Hot Dogs, I got the chance to interview Mac for the first time ever. I’d been a fan and I was eager to connect with the guy at this stage in his career. MTV News, where I worked, wasn’t necessarily covering Mac’s every move but it felt like the right time. He’d largely left the pepperoni playboy persona behind and weathered some big life changes. Because Five Easy Hot Dogs had no lyrics, I couldn’t delve into the usual “what this album means” questions. But I’d remembered seeing a video of Mac covering Neil’s “Unknown Legend” a few years prior and thought it was as good a topic as any.

In fact, “Unknown Legend” had been a Mac setlist staple for brief stretch, played with a prototypical lack of reverence and an abundance of emotion cloaked in irony and slacker energy. A 2014 performance in Atlanta is full of passion, while a 10-minute version in Paris from the same tour treads the line between piss take and fun party trick; naturally it culminates in Mac stage-diving. 2017 was more contemplative: A pretty, stripped-down piano-led rendition threatens to collapse into pure mawkishness before Mac deflates the balloon. “I don’t know the second verse, so let’s just talk about Neil Young,” he offers. “Ontario boy.”

Perhaps Mac’s definitive “Unknown Legend” cover came via a SiriusXMU session that found him thanking Uncle Neil directly midway through. “Thank you for blessing us with your music for so many years,” he rasps while strumming a sunburst acoustic. “Although many people may not consider you Canadian or even know, we know the truth, Neil, and we love for you it. Just a nice boy from a small town in northern Ontario. Us boys, we’re from out west. Edmonton, Alberta. I’m sure you graced our prairies once or twice, three times.” Then a quick laugh. “This one’s for Neil, baby!”

Five Easy Hot Dogs doesn’t sound like Neil Young. But I figured I’d ask Mac about him anyway. And I’m glad I did. We spent almost an hour on the phone, Mac’s engagement level high but his voice calm and steady from a house in Los Angeles. “I kind of feel like this record sounds like it was made in an Ewok village in Star Wars,” he told me. (It does.) We chatted about actual hot dogs, how he loves the soundtrack to Final Fantasy X, and then, I asked him what seemed like an important question.

“You once said Harvest was one of the records you had played most in your life. Is Harvest still the one for you?”

And then Mac opened up the Neil floodgates.

I go back to Harvest more often than his other records just because I'm intrigued by the way it sounds. He recorded this in his barn. Like, why can't I make a record that sounds like this at my house? That record and maybe Paul McCartney RAM, or McCartney II — those ones where I was like, “If they did this at their crib, like, what the fuck,” you know?

Harvest Moon is another one. We used to cover “Unknown Legend” like every night. I mean, we kind of butcher it, but we try and pay our respects to Neil. After The Gold Rush I love a lot. Zuma, we actually used to listen to on tour all the time. We’d play it in the early days of Mac DeMarco band touring. We’d just play it nonstop, and back in those days, we had CDs in the car. Nobody even had fucking an iPhone to get the directions. We had the CDs that we had, and those were what we listened to.

I even paid attention to Neil's new album that he did at Shangri-La with Rick Rubin [World Record]. I think it's amazing. It’s awesome. And the content that he has along with it, where he's got these weird, almost like flip phone quality-looking videos that accompany it. This is so great. I almost feel like what I tried to do with Five Easy Hot Dogs is what he's what he did with that record, too. He's just like, “Well, let's go. We'll just record, make sure it's captured good and just see what the fuck happens.” And Rick Rubin's like, “Yeah, okay.” And it's sick!

He's sick. He's amazing. He's Neil Young! What can you say?

The last part of Mac’s answer — the excitement, the passion, the humor — got me hyped, too. Sometimes I’d stick too close to the usual talking points in artist interviews and make the conversations feel transactional. I genuinely cared what they had to say, but when you’re the fifth or even fifteenth journalist to ask someone about music they’ve spent weeks talking about already, the answers you get begin to feel less special. This is even true for indie artists like Mac, not just the media-trained heavy hitters. It can be a bummer, and ultimately it comes back to me and the questions I’m asking. Why didn’t I ask people about Neil more often?

I started thinking how cool it would be to just talk to other musicians about Neil and hear their voices light up on the other end of the line like Mac’s did. The first person who let me have that conversation with them was Dominic Angelella — whose new album, God Loves A Scammer, is out now, by the way. (It’s good, and it definitely sounds a little like Neil Young.) I’m really grateful to Dom for chatting and proving my hypothesis.

Around the time of my interview with Mac, David Crosby died. That got me thinking about legacy and helped me face the fact that yes Neil will also die. But he’s not dead yet and so let’s just have some fun and play guitar music really loud and talk about it.

I took in Mac’s long and unexpected answer and hit him back with one of my Neil favorites: 2010’s Le Noise.

“Oh yeah, with Daniel Lanois. That’s really sick,” he said. “I think they did that in the neighborhood I’m in right now.”

We couldn’t see each other (this was a phone call). But I bet we both got the far-away look in our eyes. He’s sick. He’s amazing. He’s Neil Young.

Read my conversation with Mac DeMarco for MTV News via the Wayback Machine right here.

“Unknown Legend,” written by Neil Young, from Neil Young Unplugged (1993)

Neil Young: vocals, acoustic guitar, harmonica
Ben Keith: dobro
Nils Lofgren: guitar
Tim Drummond: bass
Oscar Butterworth: vocals
Astrid Young: vocals
Nicolette Larson: vocals
Spooner Oldham: piano

We begin with a correspondence dated July 26, 2020:

Neil, did you really take “Borrowed Tune” from the Rolling Stones, and were you really too wasted to write your own?
[Peace],
David

D
yes. in madison wisconsin / the edgewater HOTEL. time fades away tour.
love neil
be well

During the worst of the COVID times, David wrote into the Archives to ask Neil if “Borrowed Tune,” the wounded piano song that arrived fourth on Tonight’s The Night, really was a Rolling Stones lift. He asked this presumably because Neil sings, “I’m singing this borrowed tune / I took from The Rolling Stones,” in the final verse. He then gives context as to why he might have done something like steal a melody from one of the most famous bands on the planet: “Alone in this empty room / Too wasted to write my own.”

In another song, this might be funny. In the hands of a Neil acolyte like Josh Tillman (better known as Father John Misty), these words might be both wounded and funny and would likely reveal a greater truth about the nature of art as it relates to capitalism and maybe even addiction. And Neil’s delivery, while far from funny, does paint a scene where laughter perhaps feels appropriate to offset the darkness. He’s fucked up and alone, writing a song in a hotel in frozen-ass Madison, Wisconsin during a big arena tour and feeling bummed. His former trusted collaborator is dead. His album Harvest is huge and he’s kinda freaked out about it.

He sits down at the piano and starts to play a song he knows, “Lady Day” by The Stones. It’s a baroque little folk tune, pastel and British as hell. But he forgets the chords so he makes up his own. Soon he’s got his own song. But it’s at least 30% someone else’s song, so he nods to that in the lyrics. He wraps the tour, gets boozed out of his mind making Tonight’s The Night in August, then records “Borrowed Tune” in December.

A few years after Tonight’s The Night, he reflected on “Borrowed Tune,” calling it “a song I had written at the beginning of the Time Fades Away tour reflecting on whether a big stadium tour was right for me.”

On the Archives, accompanying the song is a stark monochrome photograph of a frozen Lake Mendota, near where Neil wrote the song at the Edgewater Hotel. It was taken over a decade before by Paul Vanderbilt, and it’s quite simple in composition. A structure with a dusting of white on the roof’s margins, a few skinny piers, two lone gasoline pumps and textured snow. The desolate photo looks exactly the way “Borrowed Tune” sounds.

Funnily enough, Neil had lifted from The Stones before. You ever throw on “Mr. Soul” from Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 second album and marvel at that bouncy riff? You’ve definitely heard it before. Neil had, too. It’s nearly note-for-note the iconic guitar part Keith Richards’ penned for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The Stones put that song out two years earlier.

“Satisfaction” is decidedly not a psychedelic song, though it does get at something elemental to the emerging boomer-rock culture of the time: being fed up. (Paul Westerberg later made a generation-defining indie-rock anthem out of the same sentiment.) “Mr. Soul,” meanwhile, is trippy as hell. There’s that rubbery riff repeating as a bedrock, but Neil’s lead guitar sounds like a minor acid trip. (The mono mix available on the Archives sounds revelatory.)

One of my favorite rock myths is that the “Satisfaction” riff came to Keith Richards in a dream and he woke up and immediately started writing the song because he knew it was good. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. It creates a legend. Subconscious may have played a role in Neil writing “Mr. Soul, ” too. It probably went something like this: He was playing guitar, started jamming on the riff and wrote a whole other song around it. (Sound familiar?)

A few years after Tonight’s The Night came out, Neil released Comes A Time, a collection of simpler folk and country tunes that harkened back to his big Harvest breakout. (The best song on that album is “Human Highway,” which is a top-10 Neil all-timer.) Track 4 opens with yet another familiar piano melody and Neil singing some “la la la” sounds. You’ve heard that before, too. It’s “Let’s Spend The Night Together,” The Stones’ ‘67 b-side to “Ruby Tuesday.” But here, Neil winds the melody so it ends up at a melting repeated “ooh” and a genteel take: “It’s gonna take a lotta love / To change the way things are.” Nicolette Larson, a prodigious singer whose voice perfectly suited her moment, transformed “Lotta Love” into a breezy, slightly disco-fied country tune the same year. “I got that song off a tape I found lying on the floor of Neil's car,” she reportedly said. “I popped it in the tape player and commented on what a great song it was. Neil said: 'You want it? It's yours.'”

None of this means that Neil was not also a massive talent. Inspiration can strike anywhere. Creativity is fluid, music especially. Rock ripped off the blues and country, etc. Our current climate of lawsuit-heavy song crediting has certainly helped some folks get their proper due, but it’s also led to a culture of fear. Never the ideal conditions for creativity to flourish.

Back in 2021, Nick Thorburn, the vocalist and songwriter for the band Islands, heard a tune he liked by airy folk artist Julie Byrne called “Prism Song.” He learned how to play it and recorded a voice memo of himself strumming it out. Some time later, he found the recording with no memory that he was playing someone else’s song. He brought it to his band, and they recorded and released a slick song called “Carpenter,” which is, word-for-word, the same as “Prism Song,” and shares much of the same musicality (though with a much different arrangement).

When he got called out for stealing the song, Thorburn shared his side of the story to Stereogum, along with the right amount of penitence and humor that the situation deserves:

In those years between, I had completely forgotten the provenance of the song, and attributed it to one of the many “works in progress” I had been maintaining in the growing folder of song ideas. When I started putting this album together, I took my “Carpenter” demo into the studio, thinking it was an original song. It was brought to my attention only this morning on Twitter that it was a Julie Byrne song, which I was extremely dismayed to discover! Holy fuck!

It was never my intention or desire to copy another artist, and certainly not to profit off of their work in any way. Thankfully, it is all being sorted out! I’ll be going to songwriter jail for a bit and when I get out, I will make sure to learn from the failings of my Swiss-cheese brain.

I love this story because this is exactly how creativity works. Thorburn should be sorry, and he is, but he also realizes that this is the way things happen sometimes. We can’t rely on the structurally solid framework of our brains when it comes to the more elusive aspects of pulling music out of thin air. In fact, as this anecdote shows, ideas rarely come from thin air at all. Everything exists in a continuum.

I was poking around on a forum dedicated to Neil ripping off other artists and came across one I’d never heard before: The “Pocahontas” (1976) melody originating in the early Carole King tune “He’s a Bad Boy” (1963). That’s a fascinating bit of musical hopscotch. It’s very easy to think Neil knew the song and the melody and it just came out one day when he was putting some chords together — admittedly while high as hell pulling an all-nighter recording session.

Lest we forget, Neil’s been ripped off plenty. The worst (or most blatant) offender is still a tune I actually like. That feels like a topic for another entry, all the detritus of what makes a song someone’s own versus a carbon copy. The subconscious is a powerful thing. Not everyone’s is capable of pure poetry. Sometime you end up with plants and birds and rocks and things.

“Borrowed Tune,” written by Neil Young, from Tonight’s The Night (1975)

Neil Young: vocals, piano, harmonica