Classic Albums - Harvest.
In February of 1972, Neil Young released his fourth solo album, ‘Harvest’. It was to be one of his greatest achievements and it has proved to be phenomenally popular even to this day.
‘Harvest’ was close to never coming about at all. Leading up to it, Young had spent months in bed with a serious back problem. He wrote many of the tracks whilst being immobilised. Even during the actual recording of the album he had to be ‘propped up’ a lot of the time whist singing and playing guitar.
Neil Young has never wanted to be a ‘star’ in the normal sense of the word and when ‘Heart of Gold’ proved to be an incredibly popular single he quickly had a rethink. He is famously quoted as saying that it; ‘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.’
In 2007, ‘Harvest’ was named as being the ‘number one Canadian album of all time’ in Bob Mersereau’s, The Top 100 Canadian Albums. There is no denying that when Young made this record he captured something incredibly special. Most of his fans still rate it as being his greatest work and anyone who likes Folk-Rock will have it in their collection.
The tracks run through in a totally fluid way right from the lazy beat of, ‘Out on The Weekend’ to the melancholy, ‘Words’. Stand-out tracks (in a ‘I’d love to be able to play like that’ way) include; ‘Old Man’, ‘Harvest’ and ‘A Man Needs a Maid’. The other track well worth a mention is, ‘The Needle and The Damage Done’. Young wrote this about the musicians who have been lost to heroin.
Out of the forty-odd years of Neil Young’s career, ‘Harvest’ has always stood out. It is extremely atmospheric and when you listen to it you can almost smell the dust in his barn, where it was recorded.
I have just updated the design on the email marketing software page, I am kind of starting to think I should have left it. And before you say anything Lesley, yes we all know that you could have done it better…