Over the course of the decade, Young released three albums that were all stylistic exercises. In , he released the straight country Old Ways , which was followed by the new wave-tinged Landing on Water the following year. He returned to Crazy Horse for 's Life , but by that time, he and Geffen had grown sick of each other, and he returned to Reprise in His first album for Reprise was the bluesy, horn-driven This Note's for You , which was supported by an acclaimed video that satirized rock stars endorsing commercial products.
Around the time of its release, Young became a hip name to drop in indie rock circles, and he was the subject of a tribute record titled The Bridge in The following year, Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Ragged Glory , a loud, feedback-drenched album that received his strongest reviews since the '70s.
For the supporting tour, Young hired the avant-rock band Sonic Youth as his opening group, providing them with needed exposure while earning him hip credibility within alternative rock scenes. Weld and the Sonic Youth tour helped position Neil Young as an alternative and grunge rock forefather, but he decided to abandon loud music for its follow-up, Harvest Moon.
An explicit sequel to his breakthrough, Harvest Moon became Young 's biggest hit in years, and he supported the record with an appearance on MTV Unplugged , which was released the following year as an album. Also in , Geffen released the rarities collection Lucky Thirteen.
The following year, he released Sleeps with Angels , which was hailed as a masterpiece in some quarters. Following its release, Young began jamming with Pearl Jam , eventually recording an album with the Seattle band in early The resulting record, Mirror Ball , was released to positive reviews in the summer of , but it wasn't the commercial blockbuster it was expected to be; due to legal reasons, Pearl Jam 's name was not allowed to be featured on the cover. In the summer of , he reunited with Crazy Horse for Broken Arrow and supported it with a brief tour.
That tour was documented in Jim Jarmusch 's film Year of the Horse , which was accompanied by a double-disc live album. In recognition of his summer tour, Young released the live album Road Rock, Vol. His next studio project was his most ambitious yet, a concept album about small-town life titled Greendale that he also mounted as a live dramatic tour and indie film.
In early , Young was diagnosed with a potentially deadly brain aneurysm. Undergoing treatment didn't slow him down, however, as he continued to write and record his next project.
The acoustically based Prairie Wind appeared in the fall, with the concert film Heart of Gold , based around the album and directed by Jonathan Demme , released in That year also saw the release of the controversial Living with War , a collection of protest songs against the war in Iraq that featured titles such as "Let's Impeach the President," "Shock and Awe," and "Lookin' for a Leader.
Later in , he finally issued the first installment in his long-rumored Archives series, Archives, Vol. As he was prepping Archives, Vol. Archives, Vol. It wasn't a complete reunion, since bassist Bruce Palmer had died in and drummer Dewey Martin passed in , but the three singers used drummer Joe Vitale and bassist Rick Rosas to fill in.
The same configuration played six concerts in the spring of but reportedly did no studio work. Young continued going through his archives with the release of A Treasure in , a single-disc set of live tracks recorded during his tour with the International Harvesters that featured five previously unreleased Young songs mixed in with older songs like "Flying on the Ground Is Wrong" and "Are You Ready for the Country?
In , Young reunited with Crazy Horse for Americana , a set of classic folk tunes like "This Land Is Your Land" and "Wayfarin' Stranger," followed several months later by the double-disc album of originals Psychedelic Pill , which again saw Young turning to the guitar garage stomp of Crazy Horse. In the book, he wrote at length about his family and career and expressed his frustration with the low sound quality of digital music.
Timed with the release of the book, Young announced the founding of Pono Music, originally a new audio format but later simplified to a music player and downloading service designed for audiophiles and listeners who had similar issues with sound quality.
A Kickstarter campaign in raised six-million dollars, one of the largest digitally crowd-funded efforts in history, and the company started shipping the devices in the fall of Within a few months, he announced another full-length for , Storytone.
The album was heralded by the release of an environmentally conscious song, "Who's Going to Stand Up? Young 's passion for environmental causes also informed his next album, 's The Monsanto Years , in which he took on the issues of genetically modified crops and agribusiness; the album found him backed by Promise of the Real, a band led by Lukas Nelson , son of outlaw country icon and Young 's close friend Willie Nelson. Young and Promise of the Real supported The Monsanto Years with a tour, which became the basis for the live double-album Earth.
Just after the June release of Earth , Young wrote and recorded the protest album Peace Trail , which appeared in December Young continued his burst of activity in with the release of "Children of Destiny. Also in , Young released two volumes in his Archives series: April saw the release of Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live , which was recorded in , and November brought the release of Songs for Judy , a collection of highlights from his acoustic tour.
Young unveiled another archival release in June , Tuscaloosa , a live set recorded at an Alabama date on the same tour that produced Time Fades Away. Neil Young continued mining his archives in , unearthing the scrapped album Homegrown for an official release that summer, with the long-awaited box set Archives, Vol.
Though the second of his two sets at Carnegie Hall had been widely bootlegged over the years, this release offered previously unreleased recordings of the first set, which found Young playing many songs off his just-released After the Gold Rush LP, as well as performing songs that at that point weren't commercially available yet.
AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Aggressive Bittersweet Druggy. Suffering from epilepsy, Type 1 diabetes and polio, by his health had deteriorated so far that he was unable to walk. Following the split, Robert stayed with his father in Toronto and Rassy relocated to Winnipeg with the teenage Young, who by this time was far more interested in his musical pursuits than he was in academics.
Over the next few years, he would play with several bands before forming the folk-rock group the Squires in Intent on a career as a musician, he dropped out of high school and started performing at clubs and coffeehouses in the area, first with the Squires and later as a solo act. While making his rounds on the Canadian folk circuit, Young began to rub elbows with other up-and-coming Canadian musicians, including fellow folk singer Joni Mitchell and rock band the Guess Who. He also met Stephen Stills during this time and briefly joined a band called the Mynah Birds, which included future funk star Rick James on bass.
The group managed to win a contract with the legendary Motown label in but disbanded before they could finish their album. They released their debut, self-titled album in December , and it managed to crack the charts. The band soon attracted a large following and was acclaimed for its experimental and skilled instrumental pieces, inventive songwriting and harmony-focused vocal composition. Young signed with Reprise Records in and released his self-titled debut to mixed reviews, though it hinted at the originality and willingness to experiment that would define his body of work.
But just as he reached this early peak, Young was faced with one of the more difficult periods in his life. At the end of , Young and his girlfriend, Academy Award-winning actress Carrie Snodgress, had a son, Zeke, who was born with cerebral palsy, and Snodgress had to set aside her acting career to care for him. A few months later, shortly after being fired by Young before their upcoming tour, Crazy Horse guitarist Dan Whitten died of an drug overdose.
The second half of the decade would prove to be a more positive one for Young, who teamed up once more with Stephen Stills to record Long May You Run , which reached No. Released in , Rust Never Sleeps echoed the structure of the concerts, alternating between quiet, acoustic tracks and aggressive electric numbers.
Young began the s by indulging his experimental urges, not always to the best results. He followed with an abrupt about-face in , releasing the hard-edged Re-ac-tor , before mixing it up even more with Trans , incorporating synthesizers and vocoders into his songs and further confusing fans and critics and underwhelming his new label, Geffen.
Unwilling to sacrifice his independence and artistic integrity to please his label, he eventually reached a deal with them in which he would take a pay cut for his next few albums. This led to the heavily country Old Ways , featuring guest appearances by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings ; the New Wave—tinged Landing on Water ; and the album Life , all of which were only mildly successful but fulfilled his final obligations to Geffen. An avid model-train collector, Young created a foot model train track within a barn on his property as a way to interact with his son Ben and developed special controllers for the train set, allowing him to control switching and power using a paddle system.
The controls later formed the basis for a company called Liontech, formed in In , when the Lionel company was facing bankruptcy, Young put together an investment group to purchase the train company so he could continue his research and development. The school has since been supported in part by annual benefit concerts that attract hundreds of thousands of music fans and feature a vast array of major artists, including Bruce Springsteen , Beck, Pearl Jam, No Doubt, Paul McCartney and countless others.
No stranger to benefit shows, Young participated in the Live Aid concert and has worked with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp to organize the Farm Aid concerts since Perhaps more important, it further endeared him to up-and-coming acts such as Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. As the premier elder statesman in this new era, Young continued to record and explore, reuniting once more with Crazy Horse to record Ragged Glory and releasing the noise-laden live album Weld The following year, he returned to his folk roots with Harvest Moon.
He would be inducted again two years later with the other members of Buffalo Springfield.
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