Credit: Far Out / Per Ole Hagen
Thu 3 September 2026 20:00, UK
Neil Young wasn’t shy about any of his mistakes whenever he made one of his albums.
Half of the greatest albums of his career are used to being a little bit rough around the edges, and even if not all of them relate to the broader listening public, all that he could hope to do was capture what he was feeling in the moment when he was writing those songs. But there were also more than a few times when he remembered that things didn’t turn out the way he wanted them to.
Make no mistake, Young was always going to release his music the way he wanted to make it, but there were more than a few times where he intentionally pivoted the other way to give himself something fresh to work with. There was no point in him repeating himself, so why not make something that’s absolutely bonkers and hope that it finds the same kind of audience that you had been looking for?
That’s half of the fun of working in rock and roll, and Young was trying his best to get the kinds of sounds that would work perfectly with whatever song he was working on. But by the time that he reached the age of MTV, you couldn’t find anyone less equipped for being a music video starlet than Young. He was bound to be terrible in some respects, but that didn’t stop him in the slightest when making those records.
And out of morbid curiosity, records like Landing on Water aren’t exactly the worst things in the world of anything. Young was clearly out of his depth in many respects, but it is novel to hear him making tunes like ‘Weight of the World’ knowing that it’s nothing but him trying to make the most of what he was working with. Regardless of what he’s working on, Young could at least be counted on to be funny.
Some of his humour comes off like a grumpy old man at times, like on ‘This Note’s For You’, but there are more than a few times where he can go so far outside the box that you don’t realise what he’s doing. The entire journey towards Trans would have sounded like he was doing the exact opposite of what a Neil Young song was supposed to be doing, but the whole thing is actually far more wholesome than people realise.
He was making music as a way to communicate with his son, and given the issues he was facing in the studio, he had more of a problem with the production of the record than anything else, saying, “Underrated! Well, let’s say I don’t underrate Trans. I really like it, and think if anything is wrong, then it’s down to the mixing. We had a lot of technical problems on that record, but the content of the record is great.”
Further reading: From The Vault
Granted, tightening up a couple of the performances wouldn’t automatically make the project an undiscovered classic or anything, but it does have a lot more interesting moments than people realise. And if this was the first time that he tried venturing this far outside the box, Reactor was the next major switch-up of his career, to the point where he sounded like a completely different person from the guy who made After the Gold Rush all those years ago.
That’s because he wasn’t that guy anymore. He was willing to go out on a limb and make music that didn’t have the same sound as what he was used to, and if the whole thing turned him on musically, that was all he could ask for. No one was going to tell him how to be a musician, and some of the biggest pieces of his discography are the ones that he feels emotionally connected to more than anyone else.
