Neil Young's lyrics have always been deceptively simple yet intricately complex. It is this simple complexity which make Young's lyrics so intriguing. Many argue that Neil is no Bob Dylan and this is quite true. Where Dylan's lyrics are often downright inscrutable yielding innumerable interpretations, Young's can sometimes border on trite and cliche or even downright silly.
Lyrics like "Welfare mothers make better lovers" or "Got mashed potatoes, got no T-Bone" are often cited as examples of Neil's lack of lyrical sophistication. But for every Welfare Mothers or T-Bone, there are lyrical triumphs like Powderfinger, Thrasher, Captain Kennedy, After The Goldrush, or Pocahontas.
In the song "I Am A Child", Neil puts forth one of his more famous lyrical puzzles. Young sings "What is the color when black is burned?" An interesting riddle, that only Neil knows the answer to, but last I checked, the answer appears to be "dark black". But could there be another color? Or is this really a question about colors? Some have interpreted the lyric to really be more of a statement about emotions and the heartbreak of love. Others think the answer is blowin' in the wind.
Young's lyrics are often brilliantly observant and clever. For example, take the lyrics to "On The Way Home":
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The imagery of the lyrics are wonderful and paint a visual picture of the pressures of a rock & roll star crossed with the metaphor of the impossibility of blowing smoke rings on a windy day. Such lyrical mixtures are typical throughout his long songwriting career spanning four decades and hundred of songs.
Yet lyrics as simple as "Keep on Rockin in the Free World" can take on multiple meanings in various concert settings. Once an anthem for the Berlin Wall falling, it has taken on different explanations with the Persian Gulf War, 9/11, and the war on terror.
The symbolism within Neil's song lyrics are often a prism when held up to the light of day refracting with different stories behind the music. For example, Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama" which was written in response to two Young songs, Southern Man, from the album After the Gold Rush, and Alabama, from the album Harvest. Certainly, Lynard Skynard's interpretation of Neil Young's songs probably wasn't what he intended.
Through the dozens of Neil Young albums and thousands of concerts we are able to only begin to speculate on the meaning of his songs. So we keep searching for that Heart of Gold. As Young sings in Ambulance Blues: "It's hard to say the meaning of this song." There's more to the story behind the music than meets the eye.
So here are a few essays on the lyrics of some of Neil Young's best songs.
So what do you think Neil Young's songs mean? Your opinion? To comment on lyrics meanings (except "Powderfinger"*), go to comment on the lyrics of Neil Young's Songs. (Note: Not required to leave name or email address.)
*To comment on the lyrics of "Powderfinger" only, go here.
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Rockin' In The Free World - Lyrics Analysis
Ohio - Lyrics Meaning
Heart of Gold - Analysis and Lyrics
Old Man
After the Goldrush - Lyrics Analysis
Thoughts on Powderfinger - Lyrics Analysis
"Down By The River" - Introduction to song at New Orleans, LA - Sep 27, 1984
Cinnamon Girl
A Man Need A Maid
The Needle and the Damage Done
Cowgirl in the Sand
On The Beach Analysis of lyrics
Zuma's "Cortez The Killer" lyrics analysis
Mr. Soul - Analysis and Lyrics
"When God Made Me" Lyrics from "Prairie Wind"
Greendale Lyrics Analysis
Thrasher - Lyrics Analysis
Sugar Mountain - Meaning as told by Joni Mitchell
"Southern Man" & "Alabama" - Interpretation in the context of Lynard Skynryd's "Sweet Home Alabama"
"Pocahontas" inspiration
Tonights The Night - Lyrics Interpretation
Like A Hurricane - explained by Neil himself
Expecting to Fly - Lyrics Analysis
Change Your Mind - Lyrics Analysis
The Extraordinary "Ordinary People" - Lyrics Analysis
"Mideast Vacation" - Stop Sniffin' That Smokin' Gun
"Old King" - Introduction to song at Greek Theatre, LA, 9/22/92
"Helpless" background from Neil interview
Broken Arrow's "Big Time" meaning
Mirror Ball's "Act of Love" lyrics analysis
Mirror Ball's "I'm The Ocean"
Will To Love
Long May You Run
Neil Young and Moons
Neil & Birds in Lyrics
Various Songs
, The Songwriters Idea Book: 40 Strategies to Excite Your Imagination, Help You Design Distinctive Songs, and Keep Your Creative Flow by Sheila Davis, Successful Lyric Writing: A Step-By-Step Course & Workbook by Sheila Davis, Tunesmith: Inside the Art of Songwriting , Neil Young - Greatest Hits: Fingerpicking Guitar Series
, and The Guitar Styles of Neil Young.
From the Decade album, Neil writes: "Wrote this for a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me thru Phil Ochs eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife."
Furthermore, according to album Decade's liner notes, Neil wrote "Down by the River", "Cinnamon Girl", and "Cowgirl in the Sand" all in a single afternoon -- while sick with a 103 degree temperature. Also, recorded after being together with the band Crazy Horse for only 2 weeks. Amazing. And definitely one of the coolest song exits ever with the feedback meltdown.
On Radio Paradise, Ladyj posted:
Also see So Who Was The "Cinnamon Girl"? The Story Behind The Song.
At a London concert at the Royal Festival Hall on February 27, 1971, Neil said before playing the song "Cowgirl in the Sand":
From the Uncut Magazine interview (December 2004), Neil tells Nigel Williamson about blazing the electric guitar
interplay between Young and Crazy Horse's Danny Whitten (who died of a heroin overdose in 1972):
So when I played those long guitar solos, it seemed
like they weren't all that long, that I was making
all these changes, when in reality what was
changing was not one thing but the whole band.
Danny was the key. A really great second guitar
player, the perfect counterpoint to everything else
that was happening." No insight into the "purple words on a gray background" though. Purple is usually the color of passion and gray symbolizes bleakness. So many have interpreted the phrase to mean a love letter to someone during a relationship breakup.
The song is based on Neil's California ranch foreman Louis Avila, who passed away recently. From a New Musical Express review (2/12/1972) of the album Harvest by Rob Drysdale:
From the Uncut Magazine interview (December 2004), Neil discusses "Like A Hurricane". The song was written in July 1975 after Young had
just undergone an operation on his vocal chords after a cocaine-fueled night with friend and La Honda neighbor Taylor Phelps in the back of his car, a Desoto Suburban.
"We were all really high, fucked up. Been out partying. Wrote it sitting up at Vista Point on Skyline. Supposed to be the highest point in San Mateo County, which was appropriate. I wrote it when I couldn't sing. I was on voice rest. It was nuts - I was whistling it.
I wrote a lot of songs when I couldn't talk." From an interview with Neil Young:
NEIL: "Well, it's not literally a specific town so much as a feeling. Actually, it's a couple
of towns. Omemee, Ontario, is one of them. It's where I first went to school and spent my
'formative' years. Actually I was born in Toronto... *I was born in Toronto*... God, that
sounds like the first line of a Bruce Springsteen song (laughs). But Toronto is only seven
miles from Omemee." From Nigel Williamson's book 'Journey Through The Past', an analysis of the song "Will To Love":
Recorded solo and acoustic on a
two-track cassette, Young enthused about the song to the writer Bill
Flanagan in 1990, "I was all alone in my house and I was high on a
bunch of things. I was really out there and I wrote the whole thing
and put it together. None of the verses are exactly the same length.
They're all a little different. I never sung it except for that one
time." This isn't strictly true. Young had attempted to rehearse the
song for the Long May You Run album, but complained that he
kept "forgetting what I was doing, losing it totally and getting all
pissed off because it didn't sound right." Adapted from a post by Thrasher on An Aquarium Drunkard: Stop Sniffin' That Smokin' Gun.
Neil Young has always had the touch with a clever turn of a phrase. And there are lots of clever turns of a phrase in the lyrics "Mideast Vacation".
My favorite is the line about "Stop sniffin' that smokin' gun" in the context of fighting terrorism. Unbelievably, as we all know, as the U.S. ramped up it's saber rattling in the runup to invading Iraq in 2003, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice uttered the famous line regarding weapons of mass destruction that "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
In retrospect, it seems as if Condi should've stopped sniffin' that smokin' gun.
In the second verse, if you replace the name of Libyan dictator Muammar Khaddafi with Sadam Hussein or Osama Bin Laden, you have an eerily prescient prediction of events that took place almost 20 years later.
The song appears on the 1987 album Life. Here are the lyrics to "Mideast Vacation" from Human Highway:
I went lookin' for Khaddafi I was travellin' with my family So I ran downstairs From the Decade album, Neil writes: "I'm not a preacher, but drugs killed a lot of great men."
The song is about Danny Whitten, a guitarist in the band Crazy Horse who became addicted to heroin. So Young kicked him out of the band, gave him a plane ticket and $50 to go to LA, enter rehab and clean himself up. Instead, he spent the money on more heroin and ended up overdosing.
Purportedly, inspired by the song 'The Needle of Death' by the musical genius Bert Jansch.
There has been a lot of speculation as to what the line ""milk-blood to keep from running out" actually means. Here are some interpretations.
Milk is a verb and referring to donating blood to a blood bank to earn money for a fix.
Heroin addicts do "milk" their own blood, then re-inject it for a high. Since they've been doing heroin for so long, their blood has enough to give them a fix.
Injecting milk into the veins of someone who overdosed is thought to help bring them out of it. Hence "Milk blood to keep from running out" with "running out" meaning one is dying.
"Milk blood to keep from running out", refers to registering blood back into the works confirming venipuncture, so the shot doesn't "run out" into muscle.
There is a deeper meaning than just drug use in this song. The needle isn't just referring to drugs, it's talking about a record needle. The song is possibly about how Neil Young has seen the consequences of fame in his friends and himself. Maybe the line "I sing the song because I love the man/I know that some of you don't understand" is Neil saying that he plays music for himself and for his fans, but some other musicians only play for the money and fame so they can't understand that. It's more about being addicted to fame than drugs. Drugs are part of the equation, so that's the metaphor that is used.
From comment on Lyrics Analysis of Neil Young's Songs by radar:
I was a meth addict (35 years ago) and what we would do is shoot maybe 99% of the speed into the vein, then slowly draw the blood back into the chamber of the hypodermic needle to mix with the stuff that might theoretically be clinging to the insides of the chamber and then push the plunder all the way in again. It also gave you the sensation of shooting up twice, which was an adrenaline rush in itself.
I am thankful that I hit bottom and realized it and turned away from drugs (cold turkey is at least as bad as you think) and eventually towards God. But anytime I hear that song I think of people I shot up with back then and wonder how many of them are still living? Cowgirl in the Sand
"This is a song I wrote about the beaches in Spain. I've never been to the beaches in Spain. It's just my idea of what it's like over there."
"Nobody played guitar with me like that. That rhythm, when you listen to
"Cowgirl In the Sand" he [Danny] keeps changing. Billy and
Ralph will get into a groove and everything will be
going along and all of a sudden Danny'll start doing
something else. He just led those guys from one
groove to another, all within the same groove.
"Old Man"
"One of the best produced tracks, with brilliant banjo and steel guitar. The song was inspired by an old man who lives on Young's ranch: "Old man look at my life/I'm a lot like you were." Familiar themes of loneliness and lost love are also present: "Live alone in a paradise that makes me think of two" recalled with a certain pain "love lost/such a cost/give me things that don't get lost." Yet he is still searching for a heart of gold: "I need someone to love me the whole day through/Oh one look in my eyes and you can tell that's true." James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt again provide backing vocals."
Like A Hurricane
"All it is is four notes on the bass. Billy [Talbot] plays
a few extra notes now and then, and the drumbeat's
the same all the way through... Sometimes it does
sound as if we're really playing fast, but we're not. Its
just everything starts swimming around in circles.
Helpless
Q. On one of your most poignant and best-loved songs, Helpless, you sing about a town in
North Ontario which you keep returning to in your mind for comfort. I've always presumed
you're singing about the town in which you were born?
Will To Love
'Will To Love' , Young defiantly insisted many years later, "might
be one of the best records I ever made". Which only goes to prove
that artists are not always good judges of their own work. There is
something deeply unconvincing about the laborious lyric, which
equates a fish struggling to survive in the sea with Young's own
flounderings in the ocean of life.
"Mideast Vacation"
I used to watch "Highway Patrol"
Whittlin' with my knife
But the thought never struck me
I'd be black and white for life
I was raised on law and order
I a community of strife
Became a restless boarder
And I never took a wife.
Aboard Air Force One
But I never did find him
And the C.I.A. said Son,
You'll never be a hero
Your flyin' days are done
It's time for you to go home now
Stop sniffin' that smokin' gun.
In the Mideast late one night
In the hotel all was quiet
The kids were out like little lights
Then the street was filled with jeeps
There was an explosion to the right
They chanted "Death to America"
I was feelin' like a fight.
And out into the street
Someone kicked me in the belly
Someone else kissed my feet
I was Rambo in the disco
I was shootin' to the beat
When they burned me in effigy
My vacation was complete.
The Needle and the Damage Done
I can give you an alternate meaning for "milk blood to keep from running out."
From CSNY 4 Way Site on various song meanings:
"Stringman": about Stills.
"Hippie Dream": about "Wooden Ships".
"The Loner": according to Stills it is about Neil Young...
"Buffalo Springfield Again": obviously about SS and NY.
"The Old Homestead": song from Hawks and Doves about his relationship with CSN, Elliott Roberts, Ahmet Ertegun and others. Lots of references to riders, birds, horses, shadows.
"Get Back To The Country": about Buffalo Springfield (from Old Ways : "When I was a younger man/Got lucky with a rock n' roll band/Struck gold in Hollywood/All the time I knew I would/Get back to the country/Back where it all began")
So what do you think Neil Young's songs mean? To comment on lyrics meanings go here*.
*To comment on the lyrics of "Powderfinger" only, go here. (Note: Not required to leave name or email address.)
Neil One-liners - From An Ocean Full of Trees
Thrasher's Wheat - A Neil Young Archives
Neil Young Lyrics