Quick…think of a famous singer-songwriter album. A few just immediately come to mind like Tapestry, Blue, Sweet Baby James, Highway 61 Revisited, and For Everyman. I would put another in that top tier that inexplicably is never part of the discussion, one released on this date in 1970, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush.
Tell Me Why is classic folk with Neil and a very young Nils Lofgren sharing guitar harmonies. But it is just a warm-up for the next three songs which are some of the best to ever be put to vinyl in the 1970’s. The beautiful, haunting title track is one of the earliest pleas for our environment (and who else thought of writing a song with one verse reflecting a perspective on medieval times, one verse reflecting on modern war, and one verse from the viewpoint of futuristic space travel). Only Love Can Break Your Heart is so good that it was in CSN&Y’s very brief set at Live Aid. And Southern Man is a scorching rocker à la Cinnamon Girl.
Side two also has a stunning triple header starting with one of those great open D tuning acoustic ballads, Don’t Let It Bring You Down. Next, the ultimate end-of-relationship song, Birds, followed by another scorching rocker, When You Dance I Can Really Love.
Gold Rush’s successor, Harvest, took Neil to heights few singer-songwriters have reached (it not only hit number one, it was the best-selling album of the entire year of 1972), and I still prefer the rawness and brutal playing of Gold Rush’s predecessor, but pound-for-pound Gold Rush might be Neil’s overall best as a singer-songwriter. Or maybe it just set the mood for a soul-searching teenager like me with lines like: “I have a friend I’ve never seen. He hides his head inside a dream. Someone should call him and see If he can come out. Try to lose the down that he’s found” and “There was a band playin’ in my head and I felt like getting high. I was thinkin’ about what a friend had said. I was hoping it was a lie.”
Still feels good to listen to, regardless of the reasons. Keep on rockin’ in the free world, my friends.