(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 14 November 2025 20:00, UK
The definition of a hit never really resonated with what Neil Young wanted to hear.
The charts might be endlessly appealing for people who like the idea of millions of people singing along to their songs, but that was far from what Young expected. He wrote music in the same way that most people painted paintings, and if there wasn’t any inspiration behind it, it was much better for him to move on to whatever the next thing struck his fancy.
Did that put a damper on his success? Oh yeah. There were probably millions of opportunities for him to play the game and make another version of ‘Heart of Gold’, but he said on numerous occasions that he had no interest in doing that. Harvest was a time and place, and while there would be more rustic records to follow, his sense of Americana was a lot different from the heartland rock that would come later.
He was never afraid to take the right chance, and when looking at all of his records, he must have had guts of steel to make some of his bolder choices. Anyone in their right mind would have been turned away from making an album like Trans, but when you look at what Young’s personal life was like, it was impossible for him to ignore what was going on in the background whenever he played. It went into his brain and flew out of his guitar half the time, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt occasionally.
Because if you look at Tonight’s the Night, Young is barely keeping himself together throughout most of the tunes. The idea of losing a friend was always going to be a heavy experience, but since he saw Danny Whitten withering away to addiction whenever he walked in the room, Young figured that the best way to remember his friend was to write about the times they had together.
But the fact that the album did nothing on the charts was enough to prove Young’s point that the numbers didn’t matter, saying, “It took two years to make it sound like it was made in one night. Everyone thought we’d done this great work. And it still didn’t sell. For me, a perfect album.” If you look at what’s on the record, though, it’s not like he was going out to make great hit singles or anything.
In fact, a lot of the time when Young was in the charts, it had more to do with the drama behind whatever album he was making. Rust Never Sleeps got a lot of traction because of the dissolution of CSNY, Freedom put him back on top in the era where he was celebrated as one of the pioneers of grunge, and even for an album as wretched as American Dream, there were at least eyes on it for the fact that the supergroup were back together.
As far as Young was concerned, though, the beauty of Tonight’s the Night comes from how frail everything sounds. It’s not a pleasant record by any means, but you can hear a lot of raw beauty coming out of the speakers in the same way that you would listening to some of the later grunge bands like Alice in Chains or Nirvana.
In no way was that the plan in Young’s mind, but he learned the biggest lesson of songwriting a long time ago. Many people can spend their whole lives trying to be one of the most decorated songwriters of all time, but if there isn’t that much passion behind it, no one’s going to care about it after listening to the record once.
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