My Year Of Neil Young, Part 1: His Self-Titled Debut Album

A look at the ‘Neil Young’ album from 1968

This review is the first in a new series for 2022 in which I review each of the studio albums by Neil Young.

You may think that I must be a big fan of him if I’m doing something very time-consuming like this, since he has over 40 albums.

Well, yes and no.

While I’ve been familiar with Neil Young’s music for most of my life and I’ve liked the majority of the music I’ve heard by him, I actually know just a small amount of it.

Like most people, I’ve always known his hit songs that get played frequently on the radio, but these are the only albums I’ve ever owned by him: Comes A Time, the Decade compilation, the live album Live Rust, Harvest Moon, and Sleeps With Angels.

I’ve told myself for many years that I should explore more of his music, but I never got around to it — until now.

I’m doing this partly as an answer to my own recent writing prompt in which I challenged fellow music lovers to listen to more music they’re unfamiliar with in 2022.

I’m also going to be doing the same thing with the albums of Bruce Springsteen this year.

My self-imposed rule for writing album reviews is that I must listen to an album a minimum of three times before reviewing it. I think that most music listeners, myself very much included, often don’t fully “take in” an album until we’ve listened to it multiple times.

I know that I’ve sometimes unfairly dismissed many albums as “bad” upon my first listens to them, but then I grew to love them later on.

So, that’s why I now feel it’s unfair for me to review albums until I’ve heard them at least three times.

One last thing about these reviews I’ll be doing: Other than this somewhat lengthy start to this series, I’m going to make most of my reviews pretty short.

I’m not going to be delving into the histories of the albums or how well (or how badly) they sold upon release. I’m mostly just going to write about my favorite and least favorite songs from each album. Sometimes I’ll write about every single song on an album and sometimes it will be less. Then I’ll rate the album somewhere between 1–5 stars.

And away we go!

Neil Young’s self-titled debut solo album was released on November 12, 1968, which was Neil’s 23rd birthday. Prior to this, he had been a member of the popular band Buffalo Springfield for a couple of years.

I just listened to the Neil Young album in its entirety for my first time during the first week or so of January 2022.

While listening to it, my first thought was that it’s amazing that this was his very first album as a solo artist!

What’s even more amazing to me is that he was only 23 years old at the time. On the album, he sounds like someone who had been writing and recording music for many, many years already.

Neil Young starts with the fantastic instrumental “The Emperor of Wyoming.” The next track is the exceptional song “The Loner,” which is one of only two songs from the album that I was previously familiar with.

This song rocks!

I’ve loved it ever since first discovering it on Neil’s live album Live Rust. If you’re curious to check out that live version, well, I’m going to help you out. Here it is:

The next song on the Neil Young album is a great ballad called “If I Could Have Her Tonight.” I’d probably rank this one as one of my Top 3 (or so) favorite songs on the album.

Another one that makes my Top 3 (or so) is “I’ve Been Waiting For You.” While it’s partly a ballad, it also still rocks and has a fantastic guitar solo in it.

“The Old Laughing Lady” is the other song besides “The Loner” which I already knew before listening to this album. I first discovered it in the early 1990s on the awesome Decade compilation. While I completely love most of the song, I have mixed feelings about the parts with the female backing vocalists. Sometimes I think they sound sort of out of place with the rest of the song and they somewhat annoy me.

However, there are other times in which I thoroughly enjoy that those parts are so different from the rest of the song — and then I sort of love them.

Ah, I’m a fickle lad sometimes!

That’s half of the album right there. When I sat down here to write this, I didn’t intend to review every song on the album, but it looks like I’m doing that.

However, I’m going to do the second half of the album differently and just say that I love all but one of the remaining songs, which are:

“String Quartet from Whiskey Boot Hill” “Here We Are In The Years” “What Did You Do To My Life?” “I’ve Loved Her So Long” “The Last Trip To Tulsa”

The one I don’t love is “The Last Trip To Tulsa.” It’s perfectly fine, though. The music and lyrics are both great…but the song just doesn’t knock me out.

I’m not sure why. Maybe because it’s almost 10 minutes long and most of the others on the album are very short? Who knows?

Not loving just one out of ten songs on an album is still a pretty darned good thing, isn’t it?

All in all, I think the Neil Young album is exceptional and I give it 4 out of 5 stars.