Musicians - Neil Young

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	Musicians - Neil Young

Neil Percival Kenneth Robert Ragland Young, better known as Neil Young (born November 12, 1945) is a Canadian singer-songwriter whose best work is characterized by deeply personal lyrics, distinctive guitar work, and an almost instantly recognizable nasal tenor voice. Although he accompanies himself on several different instruments, including piano and harmonica, his hammer-on style of acoustic guitar and often idiosyncratic soloing on electric guitar are the lynchpins of a sometimes ragged, sometimes polished, yet consistently evocative sonic ambience.

Although Young has experimented widely with soul, swing, jazz, rockabilly, and electronica throughout a varied career, his most accessible and best known work generally falls into either of two distinct styles: an acoustic, country-tinged folk rock, such songs like "Heart of Gold" or "Old Man," or grinding, lumbering form of hard rock, heard on songs like "Cinnamon Girl" or "Southern Man."

Young first came to prominence as a member of the folk-rock band Buffalo Springfield in the mid-1960s and then as a solo performer backed by the band Crazy Horse. He reached his commercial peak during the singer-songwriter boom of the early 1970s with the albums After the Gold Rush and Harvest as well as with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. He has long been distrustful of commercial management in the music business, and has at times created highly accessible and durable popular music while at other times has indulged in outlandish and uncompromising experiments that have left audiences, critics, and—in one notable case—his record label baffled.

Young has been inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2000, the cable music channel VH1 ranked Young 30th on a list of the Top 100 Artists of Rock and Roll. He was also 30th on VH1's list of Top 100 Hard Rock Artists.

Young has directed or co-directed a number of films using the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, including Journey Through the Past (1973), Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Human Highway (1982), and Greendale (2003).

He is also an outspoken advocate for environmental issues and small farmers, having co-founded the benefit concert Farm Aid, and in 1986, helped found The Bridge School together with his wife Pegi.

Early years

Young was born in Toronto to sportswriter and novelist Scott Young and mother Rassy Ragland Young. After his parents' divorce, Young moved with his mother back to the family home of Winnipeg, Manitoba, and it was there that his music career began. During high school in Winnipeg, he played in instrumental rock bands, one of which, the Squires, had a local hit called "The Sultan." He later worked the folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he befriended guitarist Stephen Stills and Joni Mitchell, and also spent a summer in Thunder Bay, Ontario, playing at local clubs.

In 1966, after an aborted record deal on the Motown label with the Rick James-fronted Mynah Birds, Young and bass player Bruce Palmer relocated to Los Angeles, where they joined Stills, Richie Furay, and Dewey Martin to form Buffalo Springfield. A mixture of folk, country, psychedelia, and rock lent a hard edge by the twin lead guitars of Stills and Young made the Buffalo Springfield a critical success, and the first record Buffalo Springfield (1967) sold well after Stills' topical song "For What It's Worth" became a hit.

Things did not go smoothly for long, however, and distrust of their management as well as the arrest and deportation of Palmer exacerbated relations between group members. A second album, Buffalo Springfield Again, was released in late 1967 but two of Young’s three contributions were actually solo tracks recorded apart from the rest of the group.

In many ways, these three songs on Buffalo Springfield Again are harbingers of Young's work in that, although they all share deeply personal, almost idiosyncratic lyrics, they also present three very different musical approaches to the arrangement of what is essentially an original folk song. "Mr Soul," the only Young song of the three that all five members of the group perform together, is driven by a fat guitar riff that owed more than a little to the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." In contrast, "Broken Arrow" was confessional folk rock of a kind that would characterize much of the music that emerged from the singer-songwriter movement. Young’s experimental production intersperses each verse with snippets of sound from other sources, including opening the song with a sound bite of Dewey Martin singing "Mr. Soul" and closing it with the thumping of a heartbeat. "Expecting to Fly" was a lushly produced ballad featuring a string arrangement that Young's co-producer for the track, Jack Nitzsche, would dub "symphonic pop."

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Musicians - Neil Young

Early years

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