Neil Young

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• Genre: Classic Rock
• Hometown: Toronto
• Neil Young Website

About

Throughout his extraordinary career, Neil Young's Americana-rooted songwriting has dipped into a staggering variety of styles and tones. With the live Time Fades Away, the spatial On The Beach and the liquid Tonight's The Night, Neil inadvertently presented his so-called doom trilogy -- three records that beautifully capture throwing in the towel. 1975's Zuma signaled a return from the darkness to the sunny, rural rock he first explored on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. Comes A Time found him hip deep in a fermentation of 1970s canyon and country rock, while Rust Never Sleeps unfolded his career multi-dimensionally as he unleashed his acoustic/electric duality to a receptive commercial and critical audience. With Freedom and Ragged Glory, Young made a valiant return to form in the late '80s and early '90s before recapturing acoustic peace with Harvest Moon, his 1992 release that many view as the sequel to his heroically pastoral 1972 album Harvest. The Canadian transplant's high, watery tenor emotes with an elasticity that can effortlessly traverse into falsetto with natural warmth and heavenly tremolo. You'll find the real Young singing the hazy guitar epics "Like A Hurricane" and "Cortez the Killer," or when songs such as the gentle "Birds" and "Motion Pictures" seem to weep from your speakers. True to form, Neil Young is one of the only songwriters in the world who can approximate the sound of a heart breaking with his voice.

- Eric Shea