Neil Young Goes Twang: A When You Awake Mixtape

Neil Young is primarily known as a rock musician, and this is accurate as far as it goes. The electric guitar work on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Rust Never Sleeps and Ragged Glory is some of the most important rock guitar on record. The band work with Crazy Horse is in its own category.

But Neil Young Goes Twang is not about any of that. It is about the other Neil Young: the acoustic Young, the country Young, the folk Young, the Young who made Harvest and Harvest Moon and the recordings with the International Harvesters in the early 1980s.

This Young is just as important and is often underappreciated because the electric Young is so loud.

The country thread

Young's Canadian roots — he grew up in Ontario and spent time in Winnipeg before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s — give his relationship to American country and folk music a particular texture. He is not from the South, not from Appalachia, not from the Texas singer-songwriter tradition. He arrived at the American musical forms from the outside, which may explain why he heard them with a particular clarity.

Harvest (1972) is the album where the country synthesis is most direct. The record was made partly at Young's ranch in Northern California and partly in Nashville, with the London Symphony Orchestra on some tracks and Nashville session musicians on others. The result is one of the best-selling albums of the 1970s and one of the defining records of what would eventually be called Americana.

"Heart of Gold," "Old Man," "The Needle and the Damage Done" — these are folk songs in all but name. The structures are simple. The emotional directness is unprotected.

The International Harvesters period

In the early 1980s, Young assembled the International Harvesters, a country backing band, and toured and recorded with them. The records from this period — Old Ways (1985) most prominently — were received at the time as a surprise and a detour. In retrospect, they look like a direct expression of something that had been in Young's music all along.

The Willie Nelson collaboration from the Harvesters period is evidence of what Young heard when he listened to country music: a tradition of directness and narrative craft that his own songwriting had always drawn on.

The mixtape sequence

• "Heart of Gold" — the Harvest recording, the acoustic template
• "Old Man" — the song that demonstrates what country chord structures can carry
• "Comes a Time" — the Comes a Time album, the most consistently country Young record
• "Four Strong Winds" — the Ian Tyson cover, Young going back to the Canadian folk source
• "Are You Ready for the Country?" — the song that asks the question the mixtape answers
• "Old Ways" — the International Harvesters period, direct and deliberate
• "Harvest Moon" — the twenty-years-later sequel, which holds up
• "Unknown Legend" — the story song, one of Young's best narrative constructions
• "Natural Beauty" — the acoustic closing track from Harvest Moon, a statement of position

What Young means in the Americana conversation

The Americana tradition's canonical figure in any discussion of the 1970s rock/country synthesis tends to be Gram Parsons or the Flying Burrito Brothers or the country-rock wing of the Byrds. Young sits alongside this tradition rather than inside it, but the conversation between his music and the American country and folk forms is continuous and productive throughout his career.

He is the musician who most consistently demonstrates that the distinction between "rock" and "country" is administrative rather than musical.

Full Mixtapes archive.