about

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I saw “Rockin’ in the Free World” on MTV. I think it was early 1990. Intrigued, I asked my dad about Neil Young. At the time, I was a metalhead and knew my dad had a lot of LPs from asking him about Black Sabbath. He pulled out LPs of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Zuma, and a dubbed cassette tape of Live Rust. We would sit on the living room floor listening to these and to this day, I look back fondly on that time as the most musically formative time in my childhood. Every time I listen to Neil, I picture that living room stereo setup. That same copy of Everybody Knows This is Nowhere is on my office wall as I type this.

He also had CSNY and Buffalo Springfield albums, but I was hooked more by Neil’s solo and Crazy Horse work. I borrowed that cassette of Live Rust for a long time and listened to it incessantly, along with dubbed copies of the other albums. Happily, that same year brought a brand new Neil album, the brilliant Ragged Glory. My first ever concert was for that album in 1991 at the Richfield Coliseum (Sonic Youth and Social Distortion opened). I was just blown away. Crazy Horse live was loud and raucous, and they had the giant (fake) Fender stacks from Rust Never Sleeps on stage. The very next year, we saw him again solo in the lead up to Harvest Moon (it would be 30 years until I saw him live again).

Despite being a fan for 30+ years, I didn’t listen to every single album he released. As I progressed through high school and college, my musical interests broadened more and more and somewhere along the way, my Neil fandom lapsed. Once in awhile it would come back, specifically around the time that he started releasing archival albums like Massey Hall, which just stopped me dead in my tracks. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I started listening to his albums from the beginning and chronicling my journey on Twitter. My comments were getting longer and longer and I made the leap to Substack (and now to Ghost). I've slowly started talking about music influenced by Neil or that just feels akin to his ethos. This newsletter is a way for me to talk about all the music I love in one way or another, but its bones are that Neil Young influence.

I took the title of this newsletter from one of the songs that has stuck with me the most over the years, “Don’t Let it Bring You Down”

Don’t let it bring you down

It’s only castles burning

The meaning I get from this is don’t worry about material bullshit like castles, because there are people hurting out there, show them some empathy and it helps all of us. Or maybe that happiness comes from making others happy. 

Or:

Here is a new song, it's guaranteed to bring you right down, it's called 'Don't Let It Bring You Down'. It sorta starts off real slow and then fizzles out altogether. (Neil Young, 4 Way Street)

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