{"id":822204,"date":"2026-11-02T23:42:12","date_gmt":"2026-11-02T23:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/822204\/"},"modified":"2026-11-02T23:42:12","modified_gmt":"2026-11-02T23:42:12","slug":"the-one-song-neil-young-retired-from-touring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/822204\/","title":{"rendered":"The one song Neil Young retired from touring"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Neil<\/p>\n

Credit: Alamy<\/p>\n

November 2nd, 2026 \u00b7 8:59pm GMT <\/p>\n

When you\u2019ve built up a catalogue as broad as Neil Young<\/a> has, certain songs will always fall by the wayside. <\/p>\n

Since there are only so many chunks of time during a show, there\u2019s no telling whether or not that deep cut that you really want in the set is going to fly in favour of people who want to hear the big hits. Young didn\u2019t give two shits what his fans wanted, though, and when working on \u2018Tell Me Why\u2019, he thought that sheer stupidity forced in out of the setlist.<\/p>\n

But are we just going to sidestep some of the brilliance that Young put out during this era of his career? In just a few short years, Young created a body of work where he practically couldn\u2019t go wrong, giving away amazing songs like \u2018Helpless\u2019 when working with Crosby, Stills, and Nash and still having material left over to create albums like Harvest and After the Gold Rush.<\/p>\n

If anything, it was impressive when he sounded dishevelled during this period. Say what you want to about how much Tonight\u2019s the Night is out of tune and doesn\u2019t have the same sonic fidelity as the rest of his records, but the reason it works so well is how much of a wreck Young sounds like when playing on it. <\/p>\n

While After the Gold Rush is one of the crowned jewels of his discography, \u2018Tell Me Why\u2019 may be one of the simplest masterpieces he ever made. The rest of Crazy Horse might be behind him, but Young sitting with an acoustic guitar and singing about the questions that he has surrounding adolescence is a lot more profound than he probably realised.<\/p>\n

\"Neil<\/a>Credit: BBC iPlayer \u2013 Video Stilll<\/p>\n

Part of that intimacy came from someone who was barely out of adolescence himself. Nils Lofgren was only 18 when Young brought him into the sessions, handing him a Martin D-18 to play the second acoustic guitar part on \u2018Tell Me Why\u2019. Lofgren later recalled that it was his first real experience of acoustic guitar work, but Young clearly heard something worth keeping. He even gave the teenager the instrument afterwards. <\/p>\n

There is something fitting about that introduction to the record. For all the uncertainty running through the words, the performance has an ease that makes those questions feel like something shared between friends rather than a confession delivered from a pedestal.<\/p>\n

Looking at it objectively, though, Young didn\u2019t think he created something all that special. Later, he said that the lyrics forced him to retire the piece, telling SPIN<\/a>, \u201cI don\u2019t understand it. It sounds like gibberish to me. I stopped singing that song because when I get to that line, I go, what the fuck am I talking about? You know, I don\u2019t edit my songs. I knew something was happening at the time that I wrote it to make that right, but I can\u2019t remember what it is, and it doesn\u2019t apply to what I\u2019m doing now.\u201d<\/p>\n

It might mean something different over time, but Young made one of the most profound lines of his career when talking about being old enough to repay but young enough to sell. Outside of his confusion with the world, being at that crossroads in one\u2019s life when you\u2019re starting to get responsibilities for your elders and yet still trying to live like a teenager is something that no one will ever escape from in their lives.<\/p>\n

Young\u2019s confusion also reveals the price of trusting an instinct so completely. In the same interview, he questioned the meaning of \u2018I Am a Child\u2019, another song whose mysterious language had outlasted his ability to explain it. These weren\u2019t necessarily failed ideas. They were feelings preserved before their author had worked out how to translate them into ordinary conversation.<\/p>\n

Then again, it might have been because Young retired the song when going through one of the slumps in his career. After a run of lacklustre solo albums and the unholy reunion album with CSN on American Dream<\/a>, it would take Young a few more years before bringing back his rock and roll chops on Freedom.<\/p>\n

In that respect, \u2018Tell Me Why\u2019 could have been an anthem for the grunge rockers who respected Young years before the genre started. Many people knew what it was like to survive the 1960s in Young\u2019s generation, but artists like Eddie Vedder proved that just because they were young enough to sell didn\u2019t mean they forgot their principles.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

ADD AS A PREFERRED SOURCE ON GOOGLE \"\"\/ <\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Alamy November 2nd, 2026 \u00b7 8:59pm GMT When you\u2019ve built up a catalogue as broad as Neil…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":822205,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[186792,42201,96,19989,128,23564,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-822204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-186792","tag-1970s","tag-entertainment","tag-folk","tag-music","tag-neil-young","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=822204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/822204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/822205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=822204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=822204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=822204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}