![]() ![]() Poolside’s first LP “ Pacific Standard Time” came out last summer and instantly became the perfect soundtrack for sunbathing and making pitchers of margaritas.(As noted in my first Essentials entry, this is an occasional series in which I spotlight albums that, in my estimation, everyone should experience at least once.) The crowned kings of daytime disco had put together a super vibe-y and lounged out record that seemed to make time go slower. One track that drove this point home more than others, was a cover of Neil Young’s “ Harvest Moon ”. When they played Morning Becomes Eclectic last fall, we were expecting this song to take us back to longer days and warmer nights.1992’s Harvest Moon album became Neil Young’s most successful release in 20 years. Typically, though, it represented a musical U-turn for the Canadian singer-songwriter. The early 90s had found Young embracing the grunge movement and enjoying his status as a noise-loving father figure to Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth. While touring to promote 1990’s Ragged Glory, Young and his long-serving rock trio, Crazy Horse, were at their most fierce and wild, as evidenced by the following year’s live album, Weld, and its companion release, Arc. “‘Harvest Moon’ is about making things last, how to keep the fire burning”Īn introspective work of subtle beauty, with a sound that harked back to Young’s best-selling 1972 album, Harvest, Harvest Moon couldn’t have been more different from his recent outings with Crazy Horse. However, it provided a contrast that made total sense to Young, as he explained to Musician magazine in 1991: “That’s the way my life is – very extreme. ![]() I think I pushed the envelope on that one.” I don’t see how much further than Arc I could go into a metal-crazed kind of expression. There were factors at play other than Young’s instinct for the contrary. His mother, Edna, had died in 1990 and, after regular exposure to the brutal sounds he unleashed on the Ragged Glory tour, Young had started to suffer from hyperacusis – an intolerance to noise. “This is the same band I used on ‘Harvest’” It’s unsurprising that the next music he’d make would veer towards a mood of quiet reflection. In a 1992 interview with Q magazine, Young explained how Harvest Moon became a sequel of sorts to Harvest. “Now that it’s created, it seems to be related to Harvest, but when I started work on it, I had no idea that it was gonna be like that,” he admitted. “The first thing I did was to finish a song called You And Me, which I’d started writing in 1975. Then I wrote a few more songs until I had enough to start thinking about doing a session. ![]() I began to figure out which musicians to use and once I’d written down the various names and started calling them, I realised, This is the same band I used on Harvest. ![]() So it was the songs which dictated who I played with. Intriguingly, Young had been performing a snippet of You And Me as early as 1971, along with working versions of Harvest songs – as heard on the Neil Young Archives Official Bootleg Series release Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 1971, where a few lines from You And Me act a prelude to I Am A Child.Įverybody was available it all happened real easy.” Luckily, there was no problem getting the guys together again. Twenty years later, however, in its Harvest Moon incarnation, You And Me finds Young sounding haunted, singing ambiguous lyrics that seem to flit between an imagined past with the old flame who originally inspired the song and memories of his years with his then wife, Pegi.īack then, the nascent song shared the bittersweet feeling of one of the best Neil Young songs, After The Goldrush, in the way that it seemed to look back on a past relationship. ![]()
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