Neil Young

After the Gold Rush (1970)

After the Gold Rush moves between hushed piano ballads and ragged full-band rock without ever feeling like two different records, Young's cracked tenor holding both ends together. Its plainspoken melodic directness — the same vein "Heart of Gold" would draw from two years later on Harvest — runs straight through the title track and "Only Love Can Break Your Heart." The title track's apocalyptic imagery, delivered over almost nothing, is stranger than the record's reputation for gentleness suggests. It's the sound of a songwriter working in miniature and still sounding enormous.

Sleeve notes

After the Gold Rush · 1970

Neil Young left Canada for Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, co-founded Buffalo Springfield, and then spent the next half-century refusing to stay still — moving between the ragged electric guitar of Crazy Horse, the country-adjacent balladry of his acoustic records, and detours into rockabilly, electronic experimentation, and grunge-adjacent noise decades before it had a name. His voice, thin and unguarded, works as well over a delicate piano figure as it does buried in feedback.

After the Gold Rush (1970) and Harvest (1972) established the gentler, folk-rock side of his catalog that would prove enormously influential on generations of singer-songwriters, even as Young himself kept veering away from it into louder, stranger territory. That refusal to repeat a successful formula, more than any single record, is what later artists — from slowcore bands to noisy indie guitarists — most often cite when explaining what they took from him.