Neil Young

A prophet of the dream of changing the world, but also the chronicler of the depths of individual despair and an irreducible Loner, Neil Young has built a universal songbook. A lone cowboy riding rock's most treacherous trails. Because "Rock'n'roll can never die", as he sang in 1979. No one, after all, has embodied rock in all its souls quite like this lanky Canadian; he has lived it inside himself: in his nerves, his gut, his heart. And yet there has never been mere preservation: Young has always carried the seed of modernity within him. No other musician has managed to cross the decades while remaining a beacon for the generations that followed: from punk to grunge, from Sonic Youth to Nick Cave, from Dinosaur Jr. to Pearl Jam. Perhaps Young's greatness lies precisely in his restlessness, in that constant tug-of-war between the urge to reinvent himself and nostalgia for the past, between outbursts of rage and moments of purification. From the country of his early days to the garage-punk of "Rust Never Sleeps", from rock'n'roll to electric experimentation, from soul to blues, from hard rock to the heavy metal of "Re.ac.tor", there's no genre this singular rocker hasn't explored. So let's retrace his exhilarating career through this playlist of his "30 best songs": one of a thousand possible combinations, mind you, since countless other songs would have deserved a place here too. And maybe, sooner or later, we'll come back to the subject…

30. Sleeps With Angels
An angel burned out too soon. When Kurt Cobain took his own life in April 1994, his suicide note included a line from Neil Young: "It's better to burn out than to fade away", the most famous lyric from one of his songs ("My My, Hey Hey"). Young was deeply shaken by it, not least because he had tried in vain to reach out to him just a few weeks earlier. "Sleeps With Angels" was born out of this short circuit between two generations and was added at the very last moment to the album of the same name. But it isn't an explicit epitaph: it's an allusive, unsettling, almost whispered requiem, carried along by a stammering riff and a shroud of funereal distortion. A meditation on death and the void it leaves behind, sealed by Young's spectral falsetto: "Too late! Too soon!"

29. The Loner
The loner. It's hard to imagine a more fitting title for the Neil Young who, in 1968, left Buffalo Springfield behind and launched his solo career. "The Loner" is almost a pre-emptive self-portrait of the artist he would become: withdrawn, elusive, resistant to belonging to anything, and always ready to change course just when others thought they'd finally figured him out. "He's a perfect stranger", sings Young, sketching a mysterious figure who bears an uncanny resemblance to his creator. Musically, much of his future is already here: electrified folk, a guitar with an abrasive edge, and a melody suspended in that restless melancholy that would become one of his trademarks. The lone cowboy has just set off down his path.

28. Sugar Mountain
Paradise lost takes the shape of an amusement park. Young wrote "Sugar Mountain" at just nineteen, in a hotel in Thunder Bay, Ontario, turning the passage from adolescence to adulthood into one of his first great elegies on the loss of innocence. On Sugar Mountain there are carousels, balloons, the sounds of a party: a small childhood Eden that, sooner or later, you have to leave behind. "You can't be twenty on Sugar Mountain", the refrain warns. Behind the simplicity of the acoustic ballad already lurks one of the great Young themes: the impossible desire to stop time and return to a place that now exists only in memory. A nostalgia both sweet and painful, sung in that fragile voice which itself seems reluctant to grow up.

27. Guitar Solo 2
Neil Young without words, but certainly not without a voice. For "Dead Man", Jim Jarmusch's metaphysical western, the Canadian improvised the soundtrack watching the film's images in real time, surrounded by screens and armed chiefly with his inseparable Gibson Les Paul "Old Black". "Guitar Solo 2" is one of the purest expressions of that experiment: isolated chords, reverb, distortion and silences become part of the black-and-white landscape traversed by the William Blake played by Johnny Depp. Rather than simply accompanying the images, the guitar seems to breathe alongside them, conjuring desert spaces, menace, solitude and death. A kind of primitive ambient psychedelia, made with practically a single instrument, proving just how expressive Young's guitar playing can be even without a proper song form.

26. Walk On
After passing through grief and self-destruction, you have to keep walking. "Walk On" opens "On The Beach" with a surprisingly breezy energy compared to the darkness looming over the rest of the album. Young seems to be answering his critics – including Lynyrd Skynyrd, who had called him out in "Sweet Home Alabama" – asserting his right to move forward without being imprisoned by the past: someone loves you, someone hates you, but either way "sooner or later, it all gets real". Rough guitars, choruses and an almost carefree country-rock gait counterbalance the disillusionment of the lyrics. It's the ideal entry point to an album on which Young is still fighting his demons, but at least begins to glimpse a way out.

25. Tired Eyes
"Open up the tired eyes." It's almost a prayer, repeated by Young at the end of "Tonight's The Night", by which point the journey through drugs, death and disillusionment seems to have drained every last bit of energy. A funereal talking blues, propped up by piano, guitar and a desolate harmonica, in which the vocal plods on exhausted, as if every word carried an unbearable weight. Behind the tale of a drug deal gone bloody hangs the personal tragedy Young lived through after the deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry: the idealism of the hippie era has collapsed into a spiral of violence and self-destruction. There isn't even the strength left to scream. Only those exhausted eyes that have seen too much and are desperately trying to stay open.

24. Expecting To Fly
Even before his solo career, Neil Young had already learned to fly. "Expecting To Fly", recorded in the Buffalo Springfield days with arranger Jack Nitzsche, is one of the earliest full demonstrations of how different he was from his bandmates: a suspended, almost baroque orchestral ballad, worlds away from the band's more classic folk-rock. Strings, reverb and an aching melody build a dreamlike setting for a romantic breakup experienced as a free fall. Young's voice rises fragile and distant, immersed in an orchestration that seems to dissolve bit by bit. Already present here is that particular blend of vulnerability and vision that would define his finest ballads: the desire to take flight, paired with the certainty that, sooner or later, you'll have to come crashing down.

23. Old Man
Neil Young was just 25 when he managed to look at himself in the mirror through the eyes of a much older man. The subject of "Old Man" is Louis Avila, the caretaker of the California ranch Young bought after his first taste of success. Two men worlds apart in age and circumstance end up mirroring each other: both need love, affection, someone to share their loneliness with. It's precisely this ability to look at another person and recognize himself in them that makes this one of "Harvest"'s most beloved ballads so universal. Acoustic guitar, banjo, pedal steel and a melody that feels like it has always existed do the rest. "Old man, look at my life/ I'm a lot like you were": just a few words to erase the distance between youth and old age, and to remind us that certain frailties have no age.

22. On The Beach
The beach as a place of solitude rather than vacation. It's the perfect image for the Neil Young of 1974: fresh off the worldwide success of "Harvest", yet devastated by the deaths of Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry and increasingly fed up with fame, the record industry, and even his own audience. The title track of "On The Beach" moves at a crawl, bluesy, narcotized. "I need a crowd of people, but I can't face them day to day", Young confesses, before finding himself alone in front of the microphone during a radio interview. It's the paradox of fame: needing others while at the same time wanting to flee from everyone. One of the most stripped-down and desolate confessions from the Canadian Loner.

21. I Am A Child
A child observing adults without really managing to understand them. Or perhaps an adult desperately trying to recover childhood's lost gaze. Written in the final days of Buffalo Springfield and later revisited many times onstage by Young, "I Am A Child" has a disarming simplicity: a handful of chords, a limpid melody, and that thin voice that makes the narrator's innocence believable. But beneath the surface, despair is already surfacing: "You can't conceive of the pleasure in my smile", sings Neil, almost laying claim to an emotional world that adults have forgotten. It's one of the first pieces of that great Young-ian novel about the loss of innocence that would keep resurfacing, from "Sugar Mountain" all the way to the works of his maturity.

20. Walk Like A Giant
At almost seventy, Neil Young returns to Crazy Horse and sets off walking like a giant once more. "Walk Like A Giant", a behemoth running over sixteen minutes included on "Psychedelic Pill", starts from the memory of the 1960s utopia: "Me and some of my friends, we were gonna save the world". But the dream failed, the world wasn't saved, and all that's left is the chance not to disown who you once were. Young and his band turn that regret into a torrential jam, with Old Black groaning, screeching and spiraling over a pachydermic rhythm section. Then the song seems to literally disintegrate into long minutes of feedback and noise. Not nostalgia, then, but proud survival: maybe we haven't become giants, but we can still try to walk like them.

19. Comes A Time
Then comes a moment when you feel the need to come back home. After the electric and psychological storms of the mid-'70s, "Comes A Time" brings Young back toward the pastoral dimension of "Harvest": acoustic guitars, country, vocal harmonies, and a serenity that in his music always seems on the verge of cracking. The title track is one of the clearest expressions of this newfound calm: a circular ballad about time passing, about love, and about the need to accept change. Nicolette Larson joins Young with a magnificent second voice that softens the landscape even further, while violins and guitars sketch a rural America that feels almost outside of time. But, as always with Young, behind the peace there remains a faint shadow of melancholy: every return presupposes something that has been lost.

18. Cowgirl In The Sand
One of three flashes of inspiration born during the famous Topanga Canyon fever, alongside "Cinnamon Girl" and "Down By The River". "Cowgirl In The Sand" is early electric Neil Young already pointed toward the future: ten minutes of stretched-out, nervy rock in which the song form becomes mainly a launchpad for the dialogue between his guitar and Crazy Horse. The lyrics stay deliberately enigmatic – “Old enough now to change your name/ When so many love you, is it the same?” – offering only glimpses of a female figure impossible to pin down. But it's precisely that vagueness that multiplies its appeal. Young plays as if he were searching for the answer directly in the strings, through distortion, repetition and sudden melodic openings.

17. Lotta Love
Neil Young at his tenderest and most luminous. "Lotta Love", written for "Comes A Time" and then handed over to sweet Nicolette Larson, boils love down to an elementary necessity: “It’s gonna take a lotta love to change the way things are”. No grand philosophical construction, just the almost childlike conviction that it takes "a lot of love" to save the world. Young's version keeps the album's rustic warmth, suspended between country and soft folk-rock, while Larson's recording would soon turn it into a big pop hit. But it's in the original reading that the disarming simplicity of Young's songwriting comes through best: few words, an immediate melody, and that particular melancholy that manages to seep in even to his seemingly sunniest songs.

16. Ohio
Four dead in Ohio. Not much more needed to be said. On May 4, 1970, the National Guard opened fire on students protesting the expansion of the war into Cambodia at Kent State University: four young people were killed and nine wounded. Young saw the photographs of the massacre, picked up his guitar and wrote "Ohio" in one sitting. Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young recorded it immediately and the record hit stores within a few weeks, turning outrage into an instant classic destined to become one of the most powerful protest anthems in rock history. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming”, Young accuses, as the guitars seem to advance like a menacing procession. Then that dry cry: “Four dead in Ohio”. And there's not much else to add…

15. Cinnamon Girl
Even two chords can be enough to invent a classic. "Cinnamon Girl" is one of the songs that forever defines the relationship between Neil Young and Crazy Horse: a massive, circular riff, the vocal doubled by Danny Whitten, a pulse that's both heavy and ramshackle, miles away from the precision of hard rock but irresistible precisely for that reason. Young wrote it alongside "Down By The River" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" while bedridden with a high fever at his home in Topanga Canyon. The result is a small concentrate of desire and mystery, dedicated to a woman more dreamed of than real. And when the solo arrives, Young pulls off one of his most celebrated tricks: practically a single note repeated over and over, proof that his expressiveness needs no virtuosity. The Crazy Horse sound, in just under three minutes.

14. Revolution Blues
Neil Young's journey into darkness reaches its peak on “On The Beach” (1974), an album that wouldn't be remastered on CD until thirty years later - further proof of how pain could fuel Young's bleakest creative streak. Everything here feels desolate, starting with the cover art: a murky sea, an abandoned beach umbrella, a Cadillac half-buried in sand, and Neil Young himself shown from behind, as if embodying solitude itself. There are plenty of striking tracks, but it's the eight minutes of "Ambulance Blues" that sum up the whole record: an indictment of America's moral decay, driven by Molina's bare-handed drumming and cradled by the sighs of Rusty Kershaw's fiddle and the wail of Young's harmonica. The Loner looks back on his folk days in Toronto's Yorkville scene and at the Riverboat, as well as vanished places like Isabella Street, turning the past into something that can never be reclaimed. The present, on the other hand, belongs to Watergate and Richard Nixon, the target of the closing lines: “I never knew a man could tell so many lies”, sings Young about the president, who would resign just two weeks after the album's release. Equally scathing is “You’re all just pissing in the wind”, a line attributed to manager Elliot Roberts regarding the stalemate within Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Built on an acoustic frame modeled after Bert Jansch's “Needle Of Death”, "Ambulance Blues" becomes Young's requiem for the ideals of the 60s: the past is buried, politics lies, and even rock's collective dream seems to have dissolved.

13. Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Only love can break your heart. A truth so elementary it would risk banality, were it not spoken by Neil Young. On "After The Gold Rush" it becomes instead a limping, achingly sweet waltz, a meditation on relationships that end and on the impossibility of truly protecting yourself from pain. The melody seems to console while the words deny any consolation: it's precisely this contrast that makes the song so heartrending. Young is said to have written it thinking of the end of the relationship between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell, but the private story quickly dissolves into something universal. Everyone can recognize themselves in that paradox: we seek love to save ourselves from loneliness, knowing full well that it's love itself that has the power to wound us most deeply.

12. Tonight’s The Night
“Bruce Berry was a working man”. Just the name of the friend and roadie who died of an overdose is enough to open one of the most harrowing requiems in rock history. "Tonight’s The Night" springs from grief over Berry and over Danny Whitten, the Crazy Horse guitarist who had died just months earlier, and lends its title to the album where Young turns personal tragedy into the funeral of an entire generation. Recorded during late-night sessions clouded by tequila and exhaustion, the song lurches along, dirty and drained. And above all there's that voice: off-key, cracked, close to tears, and precisely for that reason terribly true. Young records the pain live and turns it into the de profundis of an entire era.

11. Heart Of Gold
"Heart Of Gold" is Neil Young's only single to reach number one in the United States, and the symbol of the worldwide success of "Harvest". Yet it couldn't be simpler: acoustic guitar, harmonica, Ben Keith's pedal steel, and a melody that seems to flow naturally, as Young confesses to being a miner searching for a heart of gold and adds, almost as an aside, “and I’m getting old”. Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor join on backing vocals. Even Bob Dylan was thrown by its resemblance to his own style: "But that's me!", he reportedly remarked. Young, however, having conquered massive success, would choose to swerve elsewhere. But first he had written his perfect folk song.

10. Rockin’ In The Free World
After a decade of experiments, missteps and albums met with growing indifference, Neil Young returned in 1989 with one of those incendiary, everlasting riffs. "Rockin’ In The Free World" is both an anthem and its own negation: behind a seemingly euphoric chorus lie stories of homelessness, drugs, abandoned children, political promises and the contradictions of America at the tail end of the Reagan era. It's his "Born In The USA", a song often mistaken for a celebration when it's actually a scathing indictment. On "Freedom" it appears in two versions, acoustic and electric; it's the latter, fierce and hammering, that would become an unmissable ritual of his live shows. The song through which a new generation of rock fans would discover who the master was and who his disciples were: the godfather of grunge reclaims the spotlight.

9. Down By The River
A man takes his woman down by the river and shoots her. Or maybe not. Over the years Young has given different accounts of what "Down By The River" means, fueling the mystery of a murder ballad that might just be a violent metaphor for the end of a relationship. But the story, in the end, is almost secondary to the music. Recorded with Crazy Horse for "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", it's one of the earliest great demonstrations of Young's guitar method: long instrumental spaces, a handful of dry, distorted notes, pauses, repetitions, tension stretched to the breaking point. No virtuosic showing-off, yet every strike of Old Black seems to carry enormous specific weight. Composed during the famous Topanga Canyon fever, it's one of the Loner's tensest, most electric soundscapes.

8. My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)
“Rock and roll can never die”. But how can it survive? By burning out quickly or fading away bit by bit? That's the dilemma running through "Rust Never Sleeps", the album with which, at the end of the 1970s, Young took up punk's challenge and returned to questioning the very meaning of rock. "My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue)" is its acoustic prologue: a bare-bones ballad that evokes Elvis Presley – “The King is gone but he’s not forgotten” – and Johnny Rotten, putting the old revolution and the new one in dialogue. Then comes the fateful line: “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”. Fifteen years later, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain would quote it in his tragic farewell letter, giving it a meaning that would shake Young himself. Since then, that reflection on rock's survival can never sound quite the same.

7. Alabama
Neil Young points the finger at racism in the American South. "Alabama" is a bitter, dark invective: “You’ve got the weight on your shoulders that’s breaking your back”, he sings, as guitars and piano drag "Harvest" away from its pastoral calm for a few minutes. The reply would come from Lynyrd Skynyrd with "Sweet Home Alabama": “I hope Neil Young will remember/ A Southern man don’t need him around anyhow”. But what has often been portrayed as a feud was actually something quite different: Young admired Ronnie Van Zant and stated that he liked "Sweet Home Alabama". Years later he would even admit that his own lyrics had been too accusatory, self-righteous and easy to misread. A rare bit of self-criticism, which makes one of his most controversial political songs all the more interesting.

6. After The Gold Rush
Past, present and future compressed into just over three minutes. A medieval landscape, a narrator lying in a basement, spaceships carrying the last chosen ones away from Earth: "After The Gold Rush" is one of the most enigmatic visions Young ever conceived. He himself has called it an environmentalist song, with Mother Nature "on the run in the 1970s", but every interpretation seems insufficient in the face of the sheer power of its imagery. The title came from a screenplay by actor Dean Stockwell for a film that was never made, and something cinematic has stayed in the almost dreamlike sequence of scenes that defines it. Musically, Young opts for the barest of trimmings: piano, a thread of voice and, in the finale, a lone flugelhorn. A whispered apocalypse.

5. Powderfinger
The white boat moves along the river. A twenty-two-year-old boy grabs his father's rifle and tries to defend his home and his family. He won't have the time. "Powderfinger" is one of Young's narrative high points, a tragic western condensed into a few minutes, told in the first person by someone who already seems to know he's doomed. “Remember me to my love, I know I’ll miss her”: in the moment of death, heroism gives way to fear and regret. Musically, Crazy Horse turn the tale into an electric epic: the riff marches on relentlessly while Young's guitar fires off sharp solos, like shots taken from a distance. On "Rust Never Sleeps", America's mythic past and rock's present end up burning in the same flame.

4. Southern Man
Here Neil Young pulls no punches. "Southern Man" is another scathing indictment of the racism rooted in the American South, conjured through images of cotton plantations, grand white mansions, shacks and crosses set ablaze by the Ku Klux Klan. “Southern man, when will you pay them back?”, he asks, calling out directly the historical debt built on slavery and segregation. But the violence of the lyrics would be far less effective without the violence of the music: driving piano, feverish vocals and above all Young's guitar, which proceeds in abrasive, convulsive bursts. One of the moments where "After The Gold Rush" abandons its pastoral melancholy and catches fire. One of his most political songs, destined to turn, live, into endless electric apotheoses.

3. Words (Between The Lines Of Age)
Words, too many words. “Words” closes “Harvest” by blowing up, over almost seven minutes, the reassuring country perfection of the album. Young recalled that the song came together during his relationship with Carrie Snodgress, when domestic serenity was starting to be smothered by too many people constantly around the house: “Words – too many words, that's how it felt to me.” And the music seems to translate exactly that instability. Young's searing guitar keeps tearing open the fabric of the Stray Gators' playing, in an extended instrumental call and response. The lyrics, too, remain deliberately enigmatic, suspended between love, memory and the passing of time. After so many polished melodies, “Harvest” ends with a scorching, heart-wrenching coda that leaves you... without words.

2. Like A Hurricane
“I am just a dreamer, but you are just a dream.” She appears, in the middle of a crowded, smoky club, and everything is swept away. “Like A Hurricane” turns infatuation into an electric storm. The song is said to have been sketched out in 1975 in the back of a car, while Young still couldn't use his voice after an operation on his vocal cords. When it finally takes shape with Crazy Horse, it becomes one of the definitive electric rides of his catalogue. Frank Sampedro's Stringman synthesizer lays down a carpet of sound like a distant orchestra, but it's Old Black that dominates: the riff sets off a sequence of torrential solos, lyrical and ferocious, in which Young really does seem to be playing inside a storm. And at the eye of the cyclone sits that achingly romantic melody, impossible to escape.

1. Cortez The Killer
First come the guitars. For over three minutes there's still no story, just Neil Young and Crazy Horse seemingly floating in a timeless space, among long notes, hesitations, reverb and sudden flares of guitar. Then the ghost of Hernán Cortés appears: “He came dancing across the water/ With his galleons and guns.” The landing on the shores of Mexico is introduced by that livid, writhing electric solo: three minutes and twenty seconds of catharsis and agony. Young turns the conquest of the Aztec empire into a feverish vision, idealizing Montezuma's world as an Eden doomed to be wiped out by the violence of the Conquistadors. The historical reconstruction is anything but rigorous, but that's exactly the point: “Cortez The Killer” isn't a history lesson. It's a dream about conquest, loss and guilt. And when the narrative suddenly shifts from third to first person – “I still can't remember when or how I lost my way” – the conquistador vanishes and what's left is Neil Young, with his own defeats and his own lost paradises. The myth takes on flesh, history crumbles onto the rubble of everyday life, the downfall of the Aztec epic plays out again in a microcosm. As the guitar resumes its soliloquy, at once scathing and heartfelt like a declaration of surrender with swords drawn, Eden reveals itself as a deception, a hollow illusion. Montezuma has died again, dragging his dreams underground with him. Love, too, lies down there, in an Atlantis that will never resurface again, in a promised land disowned by everyone and left at the mercy of invaders. Everyone is their own Cortez.
Recorded for “Zuma” with the new Crazy Horse lineup featuring Frank Sampedro, it's the perfect synthesis of his electric language: primitive and visionary, fragile and devastating. A song that seems on the verge of falling apart with every beat, and precisely for that reason, half a century on, it never truly ends.

Contributions by Salvatore Setola (“Cortez The Killer”)

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04/10/2026