Happy 55th Anniversary to Neil Young’s third studio album After The Gold Rush, originally released September 19, 1970.
In his 1972 experimental novel Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes: “You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.”
Nobody likes their favorite artist simply because that artist is good. They might think that the artist is talented, even the best at what they do—but quality is not the reason we repeatedly return to someone’s work. We do it because they do something for us that nobody else does.
Neil Young, with his rampant idealism and refusal to be categorized, easily fits this definition. While he invites descriptors such as “He writes the most tender songs you’ve ever heard and invented grunge,” I don’t love his music because he’s impressive. I love it because I understand and appreciate someone whose feelings can oscillate between the cosmic sadness of “After The Gold Rush,” the ecstatic uncertainty of making a romantic move on “When You Dance, I Can Really Love” and raw political anger on “Southern Man.”
Even though it contains some of the best songs of an incredible career, I take delight not in After The Gold Rush’s many wonders, but in the answer it has to a question of mine: how do I find love and joy in a world that’s falling apart environmentally and politically?
The title track asks this question by progressing from a whimsical tale of Medieval knights and queens in the first verse to a post-apocalyptic nightmare in the third. Combined with Young’s plaintive tenor, that first verse puts the song in a child’s perspective, casting environmental catastrophe as a crime against those who are born into it. “We Didn’t Start The Fire,” but good. But in its hazy imagery, “After The Gold Rush” is more about sadness than anger. We didn’t even get a chance, and now we just have to watch it all come undone. Somehow, a song that evokes a euphoric, dreamlike haze and apocalyptic terror at once.
Listen to the Album:
And then there’s “Southern Man,” a deeply controversial rock tune about bible thumping your way to segregation. Young’s vocal delivery oscillates between terrified (in the verses) to condemning (in the chorus); this combination, paired with the song’s changes in meter, let you embody multiple dimensions of racial violence. The fear and the anger chase themselves around in a circle, like how Greg Reeves’ bass lines chase the band to the conclusion of each of the verses. Young’s guitar playing builds on the abrasive approach he established on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), heightening the panic.
If “Southern Man” and “After The Gold Rush” narrate calamity on ecological and societal scales, “Birds” is focused on a smaller disaster: heartbreak. A simple, two-verse song comprised entirely of piano, Young’s voice, and harmony from Danny Whitten and Ralph Molina, “Birds” asks a former lover to use the reason a relationship ended as a way to chart a path forward. It’s one of the more poetic “you have to work on yourself” songs out there, written and performed with empathy while maintaining the finality of the breakup. And perhaps most importantly, its central concept can be extended back to “Southern Man” and “After The Gold Rush”: that while these issues feel huge, they have personal elements. Understanding where we have each gone wrong is the way to find out where to go next.
And if you get that far, you get the reward of “When You Dance, I Can Really Love.” The odd phrasing of the title evokes the discombobulating feelings of falling for someone: finding your sense of self suddenly thrown off-gravity into someone else’s orbit. On this tune, the heaviness of the band is in service of the ecstasy, rather than the violence of “Southern Man.” It makes no attempt at poetry or virtuosity; it simply is the sound of falling for someone with all of the bewilderment and joy that entails. Because sometimes, you just have to feel alive.
“When You Dance” isn’t “Birds.” It doesn’t offer some emotional or intellectual guidance out of any problem. It just is. After The Gold Rush is a masterpiece because it gives you both answers. It doesn’t know how you’re feeling today. It doesn’t know which of our multilayered disasters—fifty-five years in the future—is getting you down. But it’s got a couple of ways out for you, each with Young’s stamp firmly affixed to it, ready for you next time you’re in a burned-out basement. It’s a pretty good answer to my question.
Listen: