(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover / Tidal)
Sun 26 October 2025 18:00, UK
We all know what it’s like to run a high fever. To thrash around in your bed from the sheer exhaustion of having been lying horizontally for too long at the behest of a head-cold, a fever, a cough, some shmucky headache that just won’t budge. Most people in this situation would doom-scroll endlessly, or nap fitfully.
Not Neil Young. Neil Young would write three songs. In fact, Young wrote his 1969 hit ‘Cinnamon Girl’ while suffering from the flu and a high fever at home in Topanga, California. During that period of illness, he’d also write ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ and ‘Down by the River’. They would all eventually appear on his 1969 album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.
“I want to live with a cinnamon girl, I could be happy the rest of my life with a cinnamon girl,” Young begins in the opening verse of the tune, the first introduction we get to this enigmatic, free-spirited cinnamon girl. Over a descending bass guitar line, he continues, “A dreamer of pictures, I run in the night / You see us together, chasing the moonlight.”
The mysterious girl whom Young “waits between shows” for is not a woman at all. Instead, she’s a symbol for Young, something undefinable. A feeling, fleeting and impossible to stay, like poking your head out of the side of a moving car and capturing a burst of fresh wind.
Young’s handwritten note on the Decade box album about the song shares that he wrote it “for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Ochs’ eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife”. Ochs, of course, was an American protest singer and songwriter known for his politically charged folk music throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Those lines include another folk reference, as the “city girl playing finger cymbals” describes Jean Ray. This might give us more of a clue who the song is really about, despite the cryptic, illusory nature of the subjective lines. Jean’s brother, Brian Ray, Paul McCartney’s guitarist, believes that the whole song is about her.
Jean is not so convinced. Young admitted, eventually, that “Only part of the song” was a bout her. He added, “There’s images in there that have to do with Jean and there’s images that have to do with other people.” Perhaps he is trying to save his back. Perhaps it was the fever talking, stacking the fragments of heated memory into the form of a new woman who is both real and fake.
It’s easy to overlook just how much weight this song carries. It’s been covered by everyone from The Smashing Pumpkins and Phish to Foo Fighters and Radiohead – each one taking a crack at that gritty, lumbering guitar riff that kicks things off. Even Lana Del Rey got in on the act, penning her own ‘Cinnamon Girl’ in 2019, though it explores a toxic relationship, not a flourishing one.
Wherever Cinnamon Girl is now, I hope she’s happy.
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