Neil Young

Neil Young released the first volume of his Archives project in June 2009. The Archives Vol. 1 box set covers 1963 through 1972 and includes early Buffalo Springfield recordings, live performances, and studio outtakes from the period that produced some of his most important work.

The Archives project is significant for several reasons, but for the purposes of this site the most important is what it reveals about the country and folk thread running through Young's early work. The acoustic recordings from the early period — the ones that preceded the electric work with Crazy Horse — show an artist whose fundamental relationship to music was as a folk singer.

What the Archives reveals

The 1963 recordings, made when Young was seventeen in Winnipeg, are folk recordings in the direct sense: acoustic guitar, voice, the folk revival repertoire and original compositions in a similar mode. The influences are Hank Marvin and the Shadows, early Everly Brothers, and the folk revival that was running through North American youth culture at the time.

The progression from these recordings to the early Buffalo Springfield work to Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere to Harvest is a progression in which the folk foundation is always present even as the electric guitar becomes more prominent.

The 2009 moment

In November 2009, Neil Young was a figure with fifty years of recorded work behind him and an active present. The Archives project was being received as a significant historical document. Young was also touring and making new music — the Greendale project, the Chrome Dreams work — that showed no signs of the career tapering that affects most artists at his stage.

The question of how Young fits into the Americana conversation is perennial. The Neil Young Goes Twang mixtape on this site — from earlier in 2008 — makes the case for the country-folk thread in his catalog. This field note picks up that thread with the additional evidence the Archives provides.

What the Archives adds to the argument

The early recordings show an artist who began as a folk musician, absorbed rock and electric music as he went, and never stopped carrying the folk sensibility in his work. The country influences that surface explicitly in Harvest (1972) were present in the structures of the music from the beginning.

This is the argument the Archives makes: that the career is coherent, that the folk foundation is not incidental, and that the electric work is better understood in the context of where it came from.

More at Field Notes. See also the Neil Young Goes Twang mixtape.