Neil Young - Harvest

Harvest may have been the first album I was listening to that my mom recognized. It was before I could drive, so she drove me everywhere. As we were riding, I inserted it into the car stereo. She said, “Oh, Neil Young!” and I said, “You mean, you know this?” I couldn’t believe my mom had listened to such a cool album. Only later did I realize that literally every person has heard Harvest. It has the sort of instant accesability paired with an aching gravitas that artists spend long hours trying to pull off. Which is the thing. The album was recorded so spontaneously in Nashville that, at least as far as I’m concerned, it was either going to bomb or it was going to kill. And boy did it kill! Some of Neil Young’s most ubiquitous songs are presented on Harvest.

The thing that gets me with Harvest is this: it does not try hard to be beautiful. Beauty, as I understand it, comes at a premium when one begins to struggle for it in their work. There is the constant battle to hide edges, to remove traces of effort, to downplay details that seem unconcerned with the final product. But all you get in the end is something that has fingerprints all over it. But you listen to Neil Young, and he puts down to tape what is going on for him at the moment, and the beauty is immediate. It is both raw and refined. At any rate, though Harvest is actually quite a hodge-podge of recordings, including a live track from a solo performance, it conveys itself in a way that makes you want to hear every song over and over and over. Which is what I did for quite a long time.

There is one song, though, that took longer to hit than the others. The title track. I find its beauty in the melody and the way the lyrics never quite articulate anything other than a sort of complicated frustration. It is the kind of waltz I expect to hear resonating in the floorboards of some old dancehall in Texas. Yet, the song maintains a loneliness that never really allows this image to be fulfilled. He sings with a stoicism that, rather than conceals, exposes an ocean of feeling underneath the otherwise static arrangement. I lifted the rhythm section out of my interpretation to give it a little more buoyancy, and I added some omnichord to taste.