My relationship with music has always been a tricky thing to share. Much like spiritualism, the delicate threads that weave together personal meaning in art are incredibly challenging to describe for a wider audience. But I’m going to try.

I’ve returned to Neil Young’s Hitchhiker — released in 2017, but recorded in 1976 — more than any other album in the singer-songwriter’s daunting 55-year catalog. I am a dyed-in-the-wool Neil Young superfan, so I think this is saying something. Specifically, that something is a shockingly vulnerable view of an artist: a beautiful but deeply wounded self-portrait.

“The lonely man I made myself to be
Is not as bad as some things I have seen
The picture painted here is not a dream
But only reality the way it seems”

-Give Me Strength, Neil Young

The arrangements — just Neil and his acoustic guitar, with the occasional upright piano — are spare to the point of being uncomfortable. Recorded in the wee hours of the night at Indigo Ranch Studios in Malibu, it’s like Neil is channeling the ghost of some long-forgotten silver screen heartthrob, cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway while the living world sleeps. 

“When I was a hitchhiker on the road
I had to count on you
But you needed me to ease the load
And for conversation, too
Or did you just drive on through?”

-Hitchhiker, Neil Young

He chose not to release these recordings and instead filed them away. The reason Neil later gave is that he was too stoned, and that he could hear this on the record. Forty-seven years later, while it’s clear Neil isn’t entirely lucid during the chatter between tracks, it all melts away the moment the strumming starts. At this point in Neil’s career, he was so in tune with his art that performing had become as natural as breathing — if anything, the substances seem to strip away his practiced persona and reveal an unpolished emotional core. Contemporary on-stage recordings of some of these songs are earnest, but there’s a light veneer of musical discipline. On Hitchhiker, there is nothing between Neil and the microphone. It is a pure expression of lonely longing.

“Well, I loved, and I lost, and I cried
The day that the two of us died
Ain’t got no excuses, I just want to ride
While the band plays the old country waltz”

-The Old Country Waltz, Neil Young

But Hitchhiker is only a small slice of Neil’s songwriting output from 1974 to 1976, some of his most productive years — and his most brutal. His massive (and admittedly innavigable) 139-track Archives Volume II compendium reveals a deeper throughline. I’ve selected 10 tracks that ride the same wave of raw feeling that parts of Hitchhiker does, but take it to a far more personal place.

Those tunes are:

• Frozen Man
• Separate Ways
• Kansas
• No One Seems To Know
• Mexico
• LA Girls & Ocean Boys
• Try
• Love/Art Blues
• Vacancy
• Homefires

Here’s a link to a YouTube Music playlist of the above songs.

I want to step back momentarily and define the stylistic contrast I’m implicitly referring to here. Neil was a child of the 1960s songwriting movement, with its too-clever-by-half metaphor and sometimes-intentional inscrutability a la Bob Dylan. While beautiful in their own right, songs like The Last Trip To Tulsa, Mr. Soul, and After The Gold Rush are cases in point. 

“There were two men eating pennies
And three young girls who cried
The West Coast is falling
I see rocks in the sky”

-The Last Trip To Tulsa, Neil Young

Over time, Neil moved away from hippie songwriting for a more direct, semi-autobiographical style with hits like Heart of Gold, Old Man, and Helpless. This shift made his music far more accessible and, in my estimation, allowed him to pivot over and over again throughout his exceptionally long career. It also established him as an artist willing to engage head-on with his own evolving emotional contours, rather than obfuscate them behind increasingly obnoxious metaphors.

“When anger has closed the door
My eyes go blind
And I can only see behind
And I drown myself some more”

-Frozen Man, Neil Young

This is the Neil Young that has largely escaped the eye of popular music, though. Since many of his most intensely reflective songs became available only recently, the potential for impact on the collective consciousness has long since expired. During this period (1974-76), Neil released what are now widely considered his most artistic albums: On The Beach and Tonight’s The Night. I love these albums; they are aesthetic songwriting masterpieces. I have listened to each more times than I can count, and they will always retain their profound resonance. Tonight’s The Night is like a drive down a dark, lonely highway in the deep California desert, with a honky-tonk band coming in over the radio as the warm air rushes through the cabin. On The Beach is a stroll through the foggy Northern California coast, the waves crashing and the gulls squawking, the water appearing to reach into eternity beyond the misty veil. They’re unassailable, but they are also undeniably masks: Efforts to disguise intense traumas through stunning, powerful storytelling.

But the moment the unreleased Separate Ways comes through my headphones — a breakup epic that could launch a thousand ships — I don’t hear a songwriter; I hear a husband. Rationalizing his grief, and acknowledging the scars he’s left behind. There is a piercing directness that makes the pain behind the song unavoidable.

“I won’t apologize
The light shone from in your eyes
It isn’t gone
And it will soon come back again

Though we go our separate ways
Looking for better days
Sharing our little boy
Who grew from joy back then

And it’s all because of that love we knew, babe
It makes the world go round
Separate ways

Me for me, you for you
Happiness is never through
It’s only a change of ways
And that is nothing new

Well I’m feeling better now
A bit more alive somehow
My eyes are open
And my heart is pouring through”

-Separate Ways, Neil Young

Kansas is another that stops me in place, a song about the fleeting, dream-like nature of unplanned romantic encounters. It’s a prayer to a moment that cannot last, a plea to endure.

“I feel like I just woke up from a bad dream
And it’s so good to have you sleeping by my side
Although I’m not so sure
If I even know your name

Hold on, baby, hold on
We can go gliding
Through the air
Far from the jeers and lies”

-Kansas, Neil Young

Neil’s songwriting in this period became so direct that it made him deeply self-conscious. In later interviews, he admitted these songs felt too personal to put out, as though he’d be exposing gaping wounds to critical dissection. And it’s not just a handful of songs about love lost. It’s at least a double album’s worth — Neil has always been prodigious, but this period is unequaled in its thematic focus and depth of impact.

“Oh, the feeling’s gone
Why is it so hard
To hang on 
To your love?

Oh, the things we do
To live beyond the fears
And move on
Through the years”

-Mexico, Neil Young

A song that is autobiographical to the point of making you want to squirm in your seat, LA Girls & Ocean Boys, is an open discussion of mutual infidelity between Neil and his soon-to-be-former spouse Carrie Snodgress.

“We used to be so calm
Now I think of you all night long
‘Cause you’ve been with another man
There you are and here I am

And I know we should be free
But freedom’s a prison to me
Because I lied to keep it kind
When I left you far behind

And love became remote
As I wrote that guilty note
And it drove you far away

…It’s a special kind of love 
That it takes to rise above
Like this love I have for you
And I still believe it’s true
Yes, I still believe it’s true”

-LA Girls & Ocean Boys, Neil Young

And yet, glimmers of hope shine through, if briefly. Songs like Try and Love/Art Blues carry a self-effacing lilt, the latter openly mocking the emotional indulgence of the subject matter.

“Darling, the door is open 
To my heart, and I been hopin’
That you won’t be the one 
To struggle with the key
We got lots of time 
To get together if we try”

-Try, Neil Young

“My songs are all so long
And my words are all so sad
Why must I choose
Between the best things I ever had?”

-Love/Art Blues, Neil Young

But in the end, Neil has a message of deep pain — even anger — that he is openly grappling with. The borderline paranoia of Vacancy explores the crazy-making power of intimacy thrown into doubt.

“I look in your eyes
And I don’t know what’s there
You poison me
With that long, vacant stare

You talk like her
And she walks in your words
You frown at me
And then you smile at her”

-Vacancy, Neil Young

Neil was clearly in a state of intense self-questioning — not merely as an artist, but as a human being — during this period, and the resultant music was more inward-facing and emotionally ruthless than it would ever be again.

I shared this essay because I’ve long struggled to articulate what makes Neil Young an extraordinary artist to me. Many later musicians and groups cite him as a significant influence, with albums like Harvest Moon or Comes A Time frequently percolating in such discussions (they’re both great). His music has a base level of awareness in the larger rock zeitgeist, too, with top 40 singles like Heart of Gold and Old Man. Beyond that, you can find his more critically acclaimed work (e.g., Tonight’s The Night) on many music critic lists, such as Rolling Stone’s Greatest Albums of All Time. All that is to say: Neil Young is not a “hidden gem.” But the songs of this period reveal the unknown, the rare: A man deeply shaken in his confidence as he comes untethered from the bonds of intimacy, and openly grieving through his art.

“I’m not the same man
I was a while ago
I’ve learned some new things,
I hope that it shows.

I’m free to give my love,
But you’re not the one I’m thinking of,
So for me the wheels are turning
Got to keep the homefires burning.”

-Homefires, Neil Young