![]() ![]() He’d explain it, but his depression has rendered him incapable of speech. “Out On the Weekend” surveys the inner life of its lonely protagonist, who is getting ready to abandon his present circumstances, and just “pack it in.” He “can’t relate to joy.” It is foreign to him. It starts with what could be the bleakest, most depressive utterance of Neil Young’s career, which is saying something. The one slight problem here is that Harvest is every bit as ditchy as the records that followed, maybe ditchier. The three records that followed Harvest – Time Fades Away, Tonight’s The Night, and On the Beach – are now enshrined as “The Ditch Trilogy.” Neil Young acolytes, notably loyal and reliably obsessive, took the Decade blurb and constructed a parable that is now part of the gospel according to Neil freaks. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.” Neil Young Harvest, Reprise Records 1972 ![]() ![]() Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. I went looking for the DJ’s daughter.” Writing about “Heart of Gold” in the liner notes of his career spanning collection Decade around the same time, he said, “This song put me in the middle of the road. He put it this way in a song written a few years later called “Human Highway”: “I came down from the misty mountain. Young himself got the “fluff” ball rolling early on. Does it show a folk-pop tunesmith crafting radio-ready fluff, or reveal the tortured artist, already in full flower? Well, it’s somewhat unexpectedly complicated. Harvest Time, a new film from the Neil Young Archives documenting its making, is a golden opportunity to view the evidence and understand the record in a fuller context. Harvest is many things, but lightweight isn’t one. Harvest has long been viewed by his loyal fan base as a kind of tipping point in Young’s career, an intentional grab for mainstream popularity and radio airplay that would fairly quickly give way to a series of gnarly, dark records that were a truer reflection of the troubled artist.Īs is often the case, this kind of critical shorthand is not completely accurate. In 1972, Neil Young released an album that would land him somewhat unexpectedly at the top of the charts. ![]()
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