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(Credits: Far Out \/ Album Cover \/ Tidal)<\/p>\n
Sun 26 October 2025 18:00, UK <\/p>\n
We all know what it\u2019s 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\u2019t budge. Most people in this situation would doom-scroll endlessly, or nap fitfully.<\/p>\n
Not Neil Young<\/a>. Neil Young would write three songs. In fact, Young wrote his 1969 hit \u2018Cinnamon Girl\u2019 while suffering from the flu and a high fever at home in Topanga, California. During that period of illness, he\u2019d also write \u2018Cowgirl in the Sand\u2019 and \u2018Down by the River\u2019. They would all eventually appear on his 1969 album, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. <\/p>\n \u201cI want to live with a cinnamon girl, I could be happy the rest of my life with a cinnamon girl,\u201d 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, \u201cA dreamer of pictures, I run in the night \/ You see us together, chasing the moonlight.\u201d <\/p>\n The mysterious girl whom Young \u201cwaits between shows\u201d for is not a woman at all. Instead, she\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n Young\u2019s handwritten note on the\u00a0Decade\u00a0box album about the song shares that he wrote it \u201cfor a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through\u00a0Phil Ochs\u2019 eyes playing\u00a0finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife\u201d. Ochs, of course, was an\u00a0American protest singer and songwriter\u00a0known for his politically charged folk music throughout the 1960s and 1970s. <\/p>\n Those lines include another folk reference, as the \u201ccity girl playing finger cymbals\u201d 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\u2019s brother, Brian Ray, Paul McCartney\u2019s guitarist, believes that the whole song is about her.<\/p>\n Jean is not so convinced. Young admitted, eventually, that \u201cOnly part of the song\u201d was a bout her. He added, \u201cThere\u2019s images in there that have to do with Jean and there\u2019s images<\/a> that have to do with other people.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n