4. Neil YoungOn The Beach
The second side of this record has three songs that I think are some of the greatest sung by anyone. ‘On The Beach’, ‘Motion Pictures’ and ‘Ambulance Blues’. They are my favourite Neil Young songs, and they are very introspective and miserable, but they have something about them that makes me want to return to them again and again. I don’t find them self-indulgent or too bleak to listen to. It’s a deep record and I get a huge amount from listening to it. There’s something about Neil Young, he can just do so many different styles, but I guess he’s most well known for the After The Goldrush or Harvest records. This is darker, but there’s more to get lost in, for me. It sounds a bit all over the place. The first side of it, the tracks are produced by different people over different sessions. Neil Young was making an album like that around this time where he was cobbling them together; he’d make an album then decide not to put it out, and then he’d take tracks from one and then put them on another. Despite those different sounds, it works as a whole record. Neil Young was the first songwriter whose songs I learned to play on the guitar.
