(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 6 March 2026 4:00, UK
There is no such thing as a perfect Neil Young album from top to bottom.
There are many records of his that are absolutely beautiful and seem to be doing everything right, but Young was always the kind of musician who benefited from sharing a lot of his greatest imperfections with his audience whenever he played. He wanted the opportunity for people to see his fallacies, but there were more than a few times when he felt like he couldn’t play a wrong note whenever he got up onstage.
But the story of Young’s career can’t really be told without mentioning Crazy Horse. They were as integral to his band throughout his classic period as The E Street Band was to Bruce Springsteen or The Heartbreakers were to Tom Petty, and Young wasn’t about to take any of that for granted on record. The band was practically family to him, and you can hear a lot of his best emotions come out when he’s feeding off the rest of his fellow musicians in the mix.
Not every one of his records is exactly easy to listen to for that reason, but he would have rather reflected what he was feeling than trying to make a surefire hit. Tonight’s the Night doesn’t necessarily have the best production job in the world, but the reason why it sounds so open and frail is because that’s about as close to Young’s real feelings as possible. The loss of Danny Whitten was a lot more than he could have dealt with, and he wasn’t about to lie to his audience about what he was going through.
But it wasn’t all about the dour moments, either. Young had a lot of different facets to his personality, and that often involved going outside the norm of what a rock star of his stature was supposed to be. He could be one of the heaviest artists of all time when he wanted to, he could make an electronic experiment like he did on Trans, but when he got the call to join Crosby, Stills, and Nash, he had to adopt one of the hardest roles he had ever had: an actual team player.
You have to understand that Young was an extremely fickle man when it came to how his band sounded, and when you have that many egos in one place, it wasn’t going to be easy to balance everything out. So to have an album like Deja Vu manage to do so well, and ‘Ohio’ becoming an even bigger hit after the fact, made it look like Young had signed on to become one of the greatest shots in the arm that the band could have asked for.
He brought a lot more edge to all of their songs, and when seeing all of them onstage, Young felt that there was no way that they could have lost whenever they performed, saying, “Crazy Horse is liable to have a bad night, you know, and I think Crosby, Stills and Nash just isn’t liable to have a bad night because the personalities are there. If the music isn’t happening that night, just the fact that those three guys are there makes it cool. You know if you see Clapton having a bad night, you’re still seeing Clapton.”
While that theory did get tested a little bit during their various reunion shows throughout the years, there was still a wow factor in getting to see all of them up close. Young may have been the most uncomfortable with being a member of the band at times, but it’s hard to deny that he was still happy to be a part of history when they all descended upon Woodstock as one of their first gigs together.
But that’s both the beauty and the curse of having a supergroup like that. Crosby, Stills, and Nash were some of the greatest partners that Young could have asked for, but for someone who changes their musical mind at the same pace that most of us change our socks, it didn’t take long for him to want to move on to something different.