Week 3: After The Gold Rush

9. NEIL YOUNG - After The Gold Rush
Reprise, 1970

Here we have perhaps the most unabashedly beautiful record Neil Young ever recorded, but more importantly, it features some of his best-evs songwriting. The key Crazy Horse players are in attendance - Whitten, Talbot, Molina - but this is certainly no rock-fest; rather, the songs are gentle, slow-burning, almost MOR at points but that's not to say they're at all boring - Neil's always had a knack for phrase-turning, and his lyricism here is focused and direct while maintaining a sense of pure poetry. That's also not to say there's no rock and roll on this record - one need look no further than the Lynyrd Skynyrd-despised anthem "Southern Man," with its hints of Crazy Horse to come and its incendiary lyrics about burning crosses, cotton-picking and the like. It's a powerful song in more ways than one, and boy howdy if only Neil were this relevant today (his upcoming project is a concept album about electric cars, I mean, really?), maybe we'd have a similarly significant canticle (or three) for these strange modern times. No use complaining, though, 'cause Neil gave us a few decades of unapproachably solid work, and really, that's way more than we have any right to expect from anyone.

STREAM: Neil Young - "Southern Man"