Neil Young

• 1. Introduction

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  In April 2026, Neil Young announced a new studio album called Second Song, and three of its tracks were songs he had written in 1963. They had remained unreleased ever since. That detail suits a man who has spent his career refusing to move in a straight line. Neil Percival Young was born on the 12th of November 1945 in Toronto, and he is a Canadian and American singer-songwriter. His high tenor voice and deeply personal lyrics run through folk, rock, country and stranger territory. He plays piano and harmonica on many of his records, and he has directed films under the pseudonym Bernard Shakey. This documentary asks how a boy from small-town Ontario became an artist claimed by folk fans, stadium crowds and loud young bands alike. It asks why he so often turned away from success just as it arrived. It also asks why, decades into his career, he is still picking fights with record labels, streaming services and governments.

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• 2. Prairie Roots

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  Omemee, Ontario, was the rural home the Young family chose soon after Neil's birth, and he later described it fondly as a "sleepy little place". His father, Scott Alexander Young, was a journalist and sportswriter who also wrote fiction. His mother, Edna Blow Ragland Young, known as Rassy, belonged to the Daughters of the American Revolution. Although Canadian, she had American and French ancestry. Their first son, Robert, called Bob, had been born in 1942.

  In the late summer of 1951, Neil caught polio during the last major outbreak of the disease in Ontario. The illness left him partially paralyzed on his left side. After his hospital stay, the family wintered in Florida because they believed the mild weather would help his recovery. During that period he briefly attended Faulkner Elementary School in New Smyrna Beach.

  Through the 1950s the family kept moving. After returning to Canada in 1952, they went from Omemee to Pickering in 1956, then spent a year in Winnipeg, then lived in Toronto from 1957 to 1960. In 1959 he briefly attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute, where rumor said he was expelled for riding a motorcycle down the hall. His parents divorced in 1960. His mother went back to Winnipeg with Neil, while Bob stayed in Toronto with their father.

  On the radio, the young Neil heard rock 'n roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B and country, and he idolized Elvis Presley. He later referred to Presley in a number of his own songs. Link Wray, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison were among the many other early influences. His instruments arrived slowly. He started on a plastic ukulele, then moved to a better ukulele, a banjo ukulele and a baritone ukulele. By his own account, that was everything but a guitar.

  Fort Rouge, a working-class area of Winnipeg, was where Young enrolled at Earl Grey Junior High School. There he formed his first band, the Jades, and met Ken Koblun. At Kelvin High School he played in several instrumental rock bands before dropping out to chase a music career. His first stable group was the Squires, with Koblun, Jeff Wuckert and drummer Bill Edmondson. They had a local hit called "The Sultan" and, over three years, played hundreds of shows at community centers, dance halls, clubs and schools across Manitoba. In Fort William, now part of Thunder Bay, they recorded demos with a local producer named Ray Dee. Young called him "the original Briggs", a nod to his later producer David Briggs. At a venue called The Flamingo he also met Stephen Stills, whose band the Company was on the same bill, and the two became friends.

  Winnipeg's folk clubs came next, and it was there that Young first met Joni Mitchell. She recalled him as heavily influenced by Bob Dylan. Young himself credited Phil Ochs as a big influence, telling a radio station in 1969 that Ochs stood on the same level as Dylan in his eyes. In those clubs he wrote some of his earliest and most enduring folk songs, including "Sugar Mountain", about lost youth. Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" in response. Meanwhile the Winnipeg band the Guess Who, with Randy Bachman on lead guitar, had a Canadian Top 40 hit with Young's "Flying on the Ground is Wrong". It was his first major success as a songwriter.

  In 1965 Young toured Canada as a solo artist. In 1966, in Toronto, he joined the Mynah Birds, a band fronted by Rick James, and the group secured a record deal with Motown. While their first album was being recorded, James was arrested for being AWOL from the Navy Reserve, and the band fell apart. Young and bass player Bruce Palmer pawned the group's equipment, bought a Pontiac hearse and used it to relocate to Los Angeles. In a 1975 interview, Young admitted that he lived in the United States illegally until he received a green card in 1970.

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• 3. Bands and Quarrels

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  A chance encounter in traffic on Sunset Boulevard reunited Young and Palmer with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay. Together with drummer Dewey Martin, they formed Buffalo Springfield. The band blended folk, country, psychedelia and rock, and the twin lead guitars of Stills and Young gave it a hard edge. Their first record, Buffalo Springfield, sold well after Stills' topical song "For What It's Worth" became a hit, helped by Young's melodic harmonics on electric guitar. Rolling Stone and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame both credit the group with helping to create folk rock and country rock.

  Distrust of their management strained the group, and so did the arrest and deportation of Palmer. A second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, appeared in late 1967. Two of Young's three contributions were solo tracks recorded apart from the rest of the band. Only "Mr. Soul" was played by all five members together. The band split for good in May 1968, and a final studio album, Last Time Around, fulfilled a contractual obligation. Young supplied "On the Way Home" and "I Am a Child", singing lead on the second. During this period he also played session guitar on 1968 recordings by The Monkees that appeared on the albums Head and Instant Replay.

  When the Hall of Fame inducted Buffalo Springfield in 1997, Young skipped the ceremony. He wrote a letter saying the VH1 broadcast of the presentation "has nothing to do with the spirit of Rock and Roll. It has everything to do with making money."

  Reprise Records, the label of his friend Joni Mitchell, signed Young to a solo deal. He also shared a manager with her, Elliot Roberts, who stayed with Young until Roberts died in 2019. The first solo record, Neil Young, came out on the 22nd of January 1969 to mixed reviews. In a 1970 interview Young dismissed it as "overdubbed rather than played".

  For the next album he recruited three musicians from a band called the Rockets: guitarist Danny Whitten, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina. They took the name Crazy Horse, after the historical figure, and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere appeared in May 1969 under the credit "Neil Young with Crazy Horse". It was recorded in just two weeks. Young reportedly wrote three of its songs, "Cinnamon Girl", "Cowgirl in the Sand" and "Down by the River", in bed on a single day while nursing a fever of 39 degrees Celsius.

  Crosby, Stills & Nash had released their first album as a trio in May 1969 and had just won the Grammy for Best New Artist. Young joined them soon after. He was first offered a position as a sideman, but he agreed only if he received full membership, and the group became Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The quartet debuted in Chicago on the 16th of August 1969 and soon played the Woodstock Festival. There Young skipped most of the acoustic set and refused to be filmed during the electric set, threatening the cameramen with his guitar.

  During the making of their first album, Déjà Vu, released on the 11th of March 1970, the musicians argued constantly. Young and Stills in particular fought for control. Stills later complained, over a lifelong relationship, that Young "wanted to play folk music in a rock band". Then came the Kent State massacre on the 4th of May 1970. Young wrote "Ohio" in response, and the group recorded it and released it as a single while their song "Teach Your Children" was still climbing the charts.

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• 4. Harvest and the Ditch

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  After the Gold Rush, released on the 31st of August 1970, was Young's third solo album and his commercial breakthrough. His fame with CSNY helped, and guests included Nils Lofgren, Stephen Stills and bassist Greg Reeves. The sound was less amplified than on his Crazy Horse record, and the title track, played on piano, offered dreamlike lyrics that ranged from drugs and relationships to environmental concerns. His bitter condemnation of racism in "Southern Man" angered many southerners in an era of desegregation. Lynyrd Skynyrd answered by naming him in the lyrics of "Sweet Home Alabama". Young said he was a fan of the band anyway, and singer Ronnie Van Zant was later photographed wearing a Tonight's the Night T-shirt on an album cover.

  In the autumn of 1970 Young began a solo acoustic tour of North America. Many shows sold out, including Carnegie Hall and a pair of acclaimed hometown concerts at Toronto's Massey Hall that were taped for a planned live album. Near the end of the tour he played "The Needle and the Damage Done" on the Johnny Cash TV show. The song is a somber lament about heroin addiction, inspired in part by Crazy Horse member Danny Whitten.

  Nashville was the next stop. The owner of Quadrafonic Sound Studios, Elliot Mazer, invited Young to record with country session musicians who were pulled together at the last minute. Young named them the Stray Gators, and Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor came over from the Cash taping to sing backing vocals. Against the advice of producer David Briggs, Young shelved the live acoustic album. In its place he assembled a studio record from the Nashville sessions, electric sessions recorded later in his barn, and two tracks made with the London Symphony Orchestra at Barking in March 1971. The result, Harvest, came out on the 15th of February 1972 and was the best-selling album of 1972 in the United States.

  Broken Arrow Ranch, in the hills above Woodside and Redwood City in Northern California, was the property Young bought after his success with CSNY. He lived there until his divorce in 2014. He wrote "Old Man" in honor of the land's longtime caretaker, Louis Avila, and "A Man Needs a Maid" was inspired by his relationship with the actress Carrie Snodgress. "Heart of Gold" was the first single from Harvest and remains the only No. 1 hit of his career. "Old Man" reached No. 31 on the Billboard Hot 100, his third and final appearance in the Top 40 as a solo artist.

  The record's mainstream success caught Young off guard, and his first instinct was to back away. In the handwritten liner notes of the 1977 compilation Decade, he wrote that "Heart of Gold" "put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."

  On the 18th of November 1972, Danny Whitten was found dead of an apparent alcohol and diazepam overdose, shortly after Young had fired him from tour rehearsals because he could not function. Young described it to Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone in 1975. Whitten had told him he had nowhere else to go. "I loved Danny. I felt responsible," Young said, and then he had to launch a huge arena tour feeling nervous and insecure.

  On that tour Young struggled with his voice, and Nashville drummer Kenny Buttrey, unaccustomed to hard rock, was eventually replaced by Johnny Barbata. David Crosby and Graham Nash joined for the final dates. The album that followed, Time Fades Away, appeared on the 15th of October 1973. Young has often called it his least favorite, and it was not officially released on CD until 2017. It was recorded live even though the songs were new, an approach he would repeat with better results. Fans came to call it the first of three commercial failures, the "Ditch Trilogy".

  In the second half of 1973 Young formed the Santa Monica Flyers, adding Nils Lofgren and pedal steel player Ben Keith to the Crazy Horse rhythm section. Deeply affected by the drug-induced deaths of Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, he recorded Tonight's the Night. Its dark tone and rawness led Reprise to delay the release, and Young had to pressure the label for two years. Meanwhile he made On the Beach, released on the 16th of July 1974, which wrestled with the collapse of 1960s folk ideals and the underbelly of California life. One review of its 2003 CD re-release called the music "mesmerizing, harrowing, lucid, and bleary". Both albums sold poorly at first. Both are now treated as landmarks, and Young called Tonight's the Night the closest he ever came to art.

  Homegrown, a third album from the same stretch, was recorded with Harvest producer Elliot Mazer after Young's breakup with Carrie Snodgress. It was reportedly complete. Following a suggestion from Band bassist Rick Danko, Young dropped it and released Tonight's the Night instead. He explained: "It was a little too personal... it scared me". Homegrown did not appear in full until 2020.

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• 5. Experiments and Lawsuits

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  Between the end of his 1978 tour with Crazy Horse and the start of his tour with the Trans Band in mid-1982, Young played only two shows. One was at the 1980 Bread and Roses Festival in Berkeley and the other at the Mike Bloomfield Tribute at The Ritz. Two albums in that gap, Hawks & Doves in 1980 and Re·ac·tor in 1981, were pieced together partly from older sessions.

  Trans, released in 1982, was his first record for the new label Geffen Records. It used vocoders, synthesizers and electronic beats, a sharp break from everything before it. Young later said an inspiration was the theme of technology and communication with his son, who could not speak. Everybody's Rockin' followed seven months later in 1983, with several rockabilly covers and a running time of under 25 minutes. Label head David Geffen was already unhappy with Trans, and Geffen Records sued Young for making music "unrepresentative" of himself. For that album Young made his first commercial music videos, directed by Tim Pope for "Wonderin'" and "Cry, Cry, Cry".

  Human Highway, the film Young co-wrote and co-directed, finally premiered in 1983 and was little seen. Its cast included Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper and members of the art punk band Devo. Filming began in 1978, and over four years Young spent US$3,000,000 of his own money on it.

  He released no album in 1984, his first unproductive year since Buffalo Springfield began in 1966. The legal fight with Geffen was the main reason, and he was also frustrated that the label had rejected his 1983 country album Old Ways. He spent most of 1984 and all of 1985 touring with his country band, the International Harvesters. Old Ways finally came out in altered form in August 1985. That year he also appeared at Live Aid in Philadelphia, joining Crosby, Stills and Nash for the quartet's first paid performance in over ten years.

  Landing on Water in 1986 was recorded without Crazy Horse, who rejoined for the following year-long tour and the final Geffen album, Life, in 1987. Sales had dwindled steadily through the decade, and Life remains his least successful studio album, with an estimated four hundred thousand sales worldwide.

  Back on Reprise in mid-1987, Young assembled a blues band called the Bluenotes. A legal dispute with musician Harold Melvin forced a rename to Ten Men Working partway through the tour. A brass section gave the group a jazzier sound. During this decade Young also acted in the 1988 film '68, playing a cranky motorcycle shop owner named Westy. He supported President Ronald Reagan and said he was "tired of people constantly apologizing for being Americans", which drew criticism from liberals in the music industry. Rolling Stone wrote in 2013 that he had "quickly moved away from right-wing politics" and almost certainly regretted a harsh 1985 interview.

  The title track of 1988's This Note's For You became his first hit single of the decade. Its video parodied corporate rock, the pretensions of advertising and Michael Jackson, and MTV initially banned it unofficially for naming sponsors' brands. Young wrote an open letter asking, "What does the M in MTV stand for: music or money?" The network still named the video best of the year in 1989.

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• 6. Godfather of Grunge

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  Winnipeg and Los Angeles were far behind him when Young began the Rust Never Sleeps tour in 1978. Each concert was split in two, with a solo acoustic set followed by an electric set with Crazy Horse. The electric half was abrasive and influenced by the punk spirit of the late 1970s. Two songs anchored the new material, the acoustic "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and the electric "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)". Young had worked out a cacophonous version with Devo at the Different Fur studio in San Francisco before bringing it to Crazy Horse. Its lyric "It's better to burn out than to fade away" was widely quoted by his peers and critics.

  Johnny Rotten became part of the story when Young compared the Sex Pistols singer's rise to that of the recently deceased Elvis Presley, who had once been disparaged as a dangerous influence before becoming an icon. Rotten returned the favor by playing Young's "Revolution Blues" from On the Beach on a London radio show. The albums Rust Never Sleeps, released on the 2nd of July 1979, and Live Rust, released on the 19th of November 1979, captured the two halves of the show. Artist Jim Evans made the film poster with the Star Wars Jawas as a theme. Readers and critics of Rolling Stone voted Young Artist of the Year for 1979, and the Village Voice honored him as Artist of the Decade.

  The heavily distorted guitar on the second side of Rust Never Sleeps was later cited by Nirvana and Pearl Jam as an inspiration, which is how the label grunge came to attach itself to him. In 1989 the single "Rockin' in the Free World" reached No. 2 on the US mainstream-rock charts alongside the album Freedom. Its lyrics deal with homelessness, terrorism and environmental degradation, and implicitly criticize the policies of President George H. W. Bush. Heavy feedback on several tracks foreshadowed the coming rise of grunge. Kurt Cobain of Nirvana and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam frequently named Young as a major influence.

  A tribute album, The Bridge: A Tribute to Neil Young, appeared in 1989 with covers by Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Soul Asylum, Dinosaur Jr and the Pixies. Young stayed loud on Ragged Glory in 1990, recorded with Crazy Horse in a barn on his ranch. For that tour he took Social Distortion and Sonic Youth as openers, much to the consternation of many old fans. Arc, a 35-minute collage of feedback and distortion, was spliced together at the suggestion of Thurston Moore and packaged with some versions of the live album Weld.

  The next record went in the opposite direction. Harvest Moon in 1992 returned to country and folk-rock after Young developed hyperacusis in the aftermath of the Weld tour. It reunited him with core members of the Stray Gators and with Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor, and it won the Juno Award for Album of the Year in 1994. His song "Philadelphia" earned an Academy Award nomination in 1993 for the Jonathan Demme film of the same name.

  The year 1994 brought Sleeps with Angels, a dark record shaped by Kurt Cobain's death earlier that year. Its title track dealt with Cobain's life and death without naming him. Cobain had quoted Young's "burn out" lyric in his suicide note, and Young had reportedly tried repeatedly to reach him beforehand. Young and Pearl Jam had already played together at an abortion rights benefit, and in 1995 they made the live-in-the-studio album Mirror Ball, produced with Brendan O'Brien. That same year Vedder inducted Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

  In 1995 Young also wrote the soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's black-and-white western Dead Man. He improvised the instrumental score while watching the film alone in a studio.

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• 7. Causes and Campaigns

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  Farm Aid began in 1985, when Young co-founded the benefit concert with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp, and he remains on its board. According to its website it is the longest-running concert benefit series in the US and has raised $43 million. Each year Young co-hosts and performs, and the money funds grants for family farms, a crisis hotline and efforts to prevent foreclosures.

  In 1986 Young and his then-wife Pegi Young helped found the Bridge School, an educational organization for children with severe verbal and physical disabilities. It is supported by the annual Bridge School Benefit concerts.

  The records themselves carried the message. Environmental themes grew more prominent through the 1990s and 2000s, especially on Greendale in 2003 and Living with War in 2006. Like "Ohio" decades earlier, Living with War was recorded and released in less than a month in direct response to events. It rebuked the Bush administration's war policy by looking at its human costs, and it included an outright protest song, "Let's Impeach the President".

  During the 2004 Greendale tour, Young began running his trucks and tour buses on biodiesel. "Our Greendale tour is now ozone friendly", he said, promising to prove that goods could be delivered across North America without foreign oil. In 2008 he revealed LincVolt, a hybrid-engine 1959 Lincoln. The album Fork in the Road, released on the 7th of April 2009, was loosely based on the project.

  The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, running from Alberta to Texas, drew some of his sharpest words. Describing the oilsands near Fort McMurray, Alberta, he said the area now resembled Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Representatives of the Canadian petroleum industry called his statements irresponsible. He worked directly with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and in 2014 he played four Canadian shows for the Honor the Treaties movement to raise money for their legal defense fund. In 2015 he and Willie Nelson held a festival called Harvest the Hope in Neligh, Nebraska. Leaders of the Rosebud Sioux, Oglala Lakota, Ponca and Omaha nations honored both men and invested them with sacred buffalo robes. He also toured all 10 Canadian provinces on the Blue Dot Tour, fronted by David Suzuki.

  The 2015 concept album The Monsanto Years protested the biotechnology company Monsanto and supported sustainable farming. Young made it with Lukas and Micah Nelson and Lukas's band Promise of the Real. In August 2019 The Guardian reported that Monsanto had been spying on Young and other environmental activists. In 2023 he and Daryl Hannah took a train to Victoria to support 1,200 Old Growth activists arrested at the Fairy Creek logging protests, and he played a short set to hearten them.

  His targets have also included presidents and platforms. In February 2020 he wrote an open letter calling President Trump a "disgrace to my country", and on the 4th of August 2020 he sued Trump's reelection campaign for using his music at rallies. In January 2022 he threatened to pull his catalog from Spotify unless it removed the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, which he accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation. His music was removed on the 26th of January, and Joni Mitchell and the members of Crosby, Stills and Nash followed in solidarity. The World Health Organization's Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised Young. In March 2024 Young returned to Spotify, saying he could not sustain his opposition on every platform.

  On the 8th of October 2025, Young announced he was pulling his catalog from Amazon Music in protest of Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos. He urged fans to boycott Amazon and support local businesses instead.

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• 8. Archives and Late Work

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  In March 2005, while working on the album Prairie Wind in Nashville, Young was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. A minimally invasive procedure treated it successfully, but two days later he passed out on a New York street from bleeding at the femoral artery, which doctors had used to reach the aneurysm. He missed the Juno Awards telecast in Winnipeg. By the 2nd of July he was closing the Live 8 concert in Barrie, Ontario, where he debuted a soft hymn called "When God Made Me". The brush with death shaped the themes of memory and mortality on Prairie Wind.

  Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, his autobiography, was released on the 25th of September 2012. New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin reported that Young wrote it for two reasons. He needed a break from performing for health reasons but still wanted income, and he feared dementia, given his father's medical history. She called the book frank but quirky and without pathos.

  Since 2006 Young has kept the Neil Young Archives, which began with live albums such as Live at the Fillmore East and box sets starting with The Archives Vol. 1 1963-1972 in 2009. It has since grown into a subscription website and application where all of his music streams in high-resolution audio. It also holds his newspaper, The Times-Contrarian, The Hearse Theater, and photographs and memorabilia from across his career.

  Honors had gathered along the way. He received the Order of Manitoba in 2006 and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010. In 2023 Rolling Stone ranked him No. 30 on its list of the 250 greatest guitarists of all time. Twenty-one of his albums and singles have been certified gold or platinum in the US.

  The Chrome Hearts, his newest band, formed in late 2024. It includes Promise of the Real members Micah Nelson on guitar, Corey McCormick on bass and Anthony Logerfo on drums, plus organist Spooner Oldham. Their debut single, "Big Change", came out in January 2025, and producer John Hanlon compared it to a Jackson Pollock paint splatter. The album Talkin to the Trees followed on the 13th of June 2025. Its second single, "Let's Roll Again", released on the 2nd of May 2025, takes a direct shot at Elon Musk and Tesla.

  On the 28th of June 2025, Young headlined the Glastonbury Festival, with the BBC broadcasting the set live after an initial embargo placed by Young. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote that the band "may well be the best backing band Young has assembled since Crazy Horse". On the 27th of August 2025, at the Huntington Bank Pavilion in Chicago, the band premiered "Big Crime", aimed at the deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents in Washington, D.C.

  Shangri-La Studios in Malibu, owned by Rick Rubin, hosted the sessions for Second Song, which began under a full moon in early March 2026. Five new songs were recorded in the first two days. Young said he tried something he had never done before, recording digital and analog masters at the same time to show the difference. The final mixing and mastering finished in April 2026 under another full moon, and both versions are due to be released.

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