Neil Young

Neil Percival Young was born in Toronto on November 12, 1945, the son of the journalist Scott Young, and grew up in rural Omemee, Ontario. He caught polio in 1951, in the last big outbreak in Ontario, and was left partly paralysed on his left side. When his parents divorced he moved with his mother to Winnipeg, where he dropped out of school for music. His band the Squires had a local hit called “The Sultan”, and in the folk clubs he met Joni Mitchell and wrote “Sugar Mountain”.

In 1966 he joined the Mynah Birds in Toronto, fronted by Rick James. They had a Motown deal until James was arrested for being AWOL from the Navy. Young and the bassist Bruce Palmer pawned the band’s gear, bought a 1953 Pontiac hearse and drove to Los Angeles to find Stephen Stills, whom Young had met on the road in Ontario. After a week of looking they gave up; stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard on April 6, they were spotted by Stills and Richie Furay heading the other way. With Dewey Martin on drums, Buffalo Springfield played its first show five days later. It made three albums, had a top-10 hit with Stills’s “For What It’s Worth”, and split up in May 1968.

Young’s first solo album came out in January 1969 and got mixed reviews; he said later it was “overdubbed rather than played”. For the next one he took three musicians from a band called the Rockets, Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass and Ralph Molina on drums, and called them Crazy Horse. They had been together six or seven days when they cut “Down by the River”, and they recorded the album live, with Young singing as he played. “I started just tryin’ to be real instead of fabricate something,” he said.

He wrote “Cinnamon Girl”, “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand” in bed on the same day, with a fever of 103 °F. The long jams on the last two were edited down from longer takes. The album was a sleeper: it peaked at No. 34 in August 1970, during a 98-week chart run, and went platinum.

Crosby, Stills & Nash needed another player to tour their first album, and Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic suggested Young. He was offered a place as a sideman and joined only as a full member, on terms that let him keep Crazy Horse going on the side. The quartet’s first show was in Chicago on August 16, 1969, and two days later, in the early morning, they played Woodstock. “This is the second time we’ve ever played in front of people, man,” Stills told the crowd. “We’re scared shitless.” Young sat out most of the acoustic set and refused to be filmed during the electric one.

Déjà Vu came out in March 1970, with Young’s “Helpless” and “Country Girl” on it. It topped the charts and has sold more than eight million copies, the best-selling record of each member’s career. Young and Stills fought for control throughout; Stills said Young “wanted to play folk music in a rock band”. By July 1970 the tour had fallen apart, and the four did not come back together in earnest until 1974.

Young made most of the album in the studio he built into his house in Topanga Canyon, with members of Crazy Horse and CSNY and the 18-year-old Nils Lofgren on piano, an instrument Lofgren had not played regularly. The title song and “Cripple Creek Ferry” were meant for a screenplay by his friend Dean Stockwell about an ecological disaster that washes away the Topanga hippie community. “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” was written for Graham Nash after his break-up with Joni Mitchell.

CSNY’s fame made it Young’s solo breakthrough: it reached No. 8. “Southern Man”, an attack on racism, so angered Lynyrd Skynyrd that they named him in “Sweet Home Alabama”. Young said he was a fan of theirs, and Ronnie Van Zant later wore a Tonight’s the Night T-shirt on an album cover.

Young hurt his back lifting a slab of walnut on his new ranch, and recorded most of Harvest in a brace. In Nashville to tape The Johnny Cash Show in February 1971, he met the producer Elliot Mazer, who put together a band of country session players; Young called them the Stray Gators. Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, there for the same show, sang on “Heart of Gold” and “Old Man”. Two songs were recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Barking Town Hall, and the electric ones in his barn after back surgery.

“Heart of Gold” was his only No. 1 hit, and Harvest was the best-selling album of 1972 in the US. It made him uneasy. In the notes to Decade he wrote that the song “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.”

Rehearsals for the Harvest tour showed that Danny Whitten could not function for drugs. Young sent him home, and on November 18, 1972, Whitten was found dead of an overdose. “I loved Danny,” Young said. “I felt responsible.” The live album from that tour, Time Fades Away, began what fans call the Ditch Trilogy: three records after Harvest that sold poorly. The last two became critical favourites.

On the Beach was recorded after Tonight’s the Night but came out first, while Reprise sat on the darker record. The sessions ran on “honey slides”, sautéed marijuana and honey that “felt like heroin”, at the urging of the session player Rusty Kershaw. Rolling Stone called it “one of the most despairing albums of the decade”. Young’s own verdict: “Good album. One side of it particularly.”

In June 1973 the roadie Bruce Berry died of a heroin overdose too. That summer, on the way to a CSNY session, Young knocked on David Briggs’s door instead: “Let’s go make some rock and roll.” With the Crazy Horse rhythm section, Nils Lofgren and Ben Keith, known as the Santa Monica Flyers, he recorded a wake for Whitten and Berry, mostly on one day, August 26, at a rehearsal room run by Berry’s brother. Young’s voice cracks; the room echoes; “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown” is Whitten himself, live at the Fillmore East in 1970.

Reprise held it back for two years. In 1975 Young played it, by chance, on the same reel as the album he was about to release, Homegrown, and Rick Danko of the Band told him, “You ought to put THAT out!” He did. It sold poorly and got mixed reviews; it is now regarded as a landmark, and Young said it was the closest he ever came to art.

After the 1974 CSNY reunion, one of the first stadium tours, Young re-formed Crazy Horse with Frank “Poncho” Sampedro on rhythm guitar in Whitten’s place; the line-up lasted, with one short break, until 2014. Newly single after his break-up with Carrie Snodgress, he and the band moved into Briggs’s house near Point Dume and Zuma Beach in Malibu and recorded in the garage. “Those were some of the finest, most alive days of my life,” Young wrote.

The songs swing between lost love and dreams of the Aztecs and Incas. “Cortez the Killer” retells the Spanish conquest of Mexico from the side of the conquered. The album reached No. 25.

On the 1978 tour each show was split in two: Young alone with an acoustic guitar, then Crazy Horse, loud and abrasive, with giant mock amplifiers, roadies dressed as the Jawas from Star Wars and “Rust-O-Vision” glasses for the audience. The album keeps the split, with new songs recorded on stage and overdubbed: an acoustic side that opens with “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and an electric side that ends with “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)”.

Young was suddenly relevant to a new generation. Rolling Stone’s critics made it Album of the Year, the Village Voice named him Artist of the Decade, and Nirvana and Pearl Jam later cited the electric side’s distortion as an inspiration. The line “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” was widely quoted.

In 1982 Young left Reprise for David Geffen’s new label, with $1 million an album and total creative control. His first record for it, Trans, buried his voice in a vocoder and synthesizers. Few knew that he was spending much of his time on a therapy programme for his son Ben, born with cerebral palsy and unable to speak. “You know I’m saying something but you can’t understand what it is,” Young said. “That’s exactly the same feeling I was getting from my son.”

Then came Everybody’s Rockin’, rockabilly in under 25 minutes, and Geffen Records sued him for making music “unrepresentative” of himself. He countersued; both suits were dropped, and Geffen apologised. Country with the International Harvesters, synthesizers again, a horn band called the Bluenotes: his sales fell all decade, and Life (1987) remains his least successful studio album. Back on Reprise, the video for “This Note’s for You” mocked corporate rock, and MTV at first refused to play it.

After a CSNY album full of “pretty songs that he fuckin’ hated”, in the words of his co-producer Niko Bolas, Young booked a studio in Times Square and chased the loudest sound he could get out of his old Les Paul, Old Black. He added songs going back to the Zuma days, a duet with Linda Ronstadt, and a new one built on a phrase of Poncho Sampedro’s.

“Rockin’ in the Free World” opens the album acoustic and closes it electric, as on Rust Never Sleeps. It went to No. 2 on the mainstream rock chart and made Freedom his comeback after a decade of genre experiments. The same year, Sonic Youth, the Pixies and Dinosaur Jr were on a tribute album, The Bridge.

In April 1990 Young and Crazy Horse set up in a barn on his ranch and played a set of songs twice a day for a couple of weeks, never repeating a set, then picked the best takes. Young said it “took ‘analysis’ out of the game”. Two songs run past ten minutes, as on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.

Kurt Loder called it “a monument to the spirit of the garage”, and the Village Voice’s critics voted it album of the year. Young toured it with Sonic Youth and Social Distortion as support, to the dismay of many old fans, and came home with tinnitus.

Still recovering from the tinnitus, Young picked up the acoustic guitar, piano and banjo again and called back the Stray Gators, with Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and Nicolette Larson on harmonies. Where Harvest was about new love, these songs look at a long marriage: the title song is for his wife, Pegi, and “Unknown Legend” is about meeting her when she was a waitress, in 1974.

“People had been asking me to do it for twenty years,” he said of a sequel to Harvest, “and I never could figure out what it was in the first place.” It outsold Freedom and Ragged Glory and won the Juno Award for album of the year.

By the early ’90s a critic had dubbed Young the Godfather of Grunge, and in 1993 he played “Rockin’ in the Free World” with Pearl Jam at the MTV Video Music Awards. That winter he went back into the studio with Crazy Horse. Then Kurt Cobain killed himself, and quoted “It’s better to burn out than fade away” in his note. “It struck a deep chord inside of me,” Young wrote. “I wrote some music for that feeling.” The title song is about Cobain without naming him; the rest had been recorded before he died.

It is a quiet, mournful record, with bass marimbas, vibes and tack piano. Young has refused to talk about it: “Too sensitive of a subject.” Rolling Stone gave it five stars. It was the last album David Briggs produced for him; Briggs died the next year.

In 1995 Eddie Vedder inducted Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Within weeks Young was in a Seattle studio with Pearl Jam, bringing in songs he had written the day before each session; Mirror Ball took four days. When Briggs died at the end of the year, Young went back to Crazy Horse for Broken Arrow and a long tour. In 2003 came Greendale, a concept album about the murder of a policeman in a small California town, which he toured with a full cast and trucks running on biodiesel.

In March 2005 he was treated for a brain aneurysm, and was back on stage at Live 8 by July. Living with War (2006) was recorded and released inside a month, against the Bush administration’s war policy. The archive he had been working on since the late 1980s began to come out: The Archives Vol. 1 1963–1972 in 2009, which won a Grammy for its packaging, and later a website streaming nearly everything he has recorded in high resolution.

With the pandemic stopping all touring, Young asked Crazy Horse, now with Nils Lofgren in Sampedro’s place, to meet safely in the Rockies and record four songs. He kept writing, and in six days in June 2021 they had ten. They played in an 1870s log barn that had been falling down until Young had it rebuilt from old drawings and photographs. “There’s no squares,” he said. “Squares are the enemy of sound.”

The songs were recorded live, often on the first take. “Heading West” remembers the drive to Winnipeg with his mother after his parents split. Robert Christgau named it the best album of 2021.

In January 2022 Young pulled his music from Spotify in protest at COVID-19 misinformation on The Joe Rogan Experience; Joni Mitchell and the rest of CSN followed. He came back in 2024, saying he could not keep up the boycott on every platform. In 2023 he and Daryl Hannah went by train to Victoria to play for the Fairy Creek protesters, and in 2024 he toured with Crazy Horse for the first time in ten years, until illness in the band stopped the tour.

Late in 2024 he formed a new band, the Chrome Hearts, out of Promise of the Real, his backing band of the 2010s, with the organist Spooner Oldham. Their album Talkin to the Trees came out on June 13, 2025, with songs aimed at Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and two weeks later they headlined Glastonbury. In March 2026 they recorded another, Second Song, under a full moon at Rick Rubin’s studio in Malibu, with three songs Young wrote in 1963.