British guitarist analyses Neil Young's PROFOUND writing at age 26 

Well said. Put ditto marks under this for me.

I feel it too my freind. Better days in so many ways.

August West I love my Pearlie Baker best more than my wine

@@hericbagley8286 more than my maker...

August West and a dime for a cup of coffee, the good old days

I think that Neil Young is an absolutely terrible singer. And yet he's one of my favourite singers to listen to. I can't reconcile the two. I don't even try any more. I just sit back and enjoy.

As a journeyman singer, I can hear him dial it back as he starts to belt to maintain the resonance. He never flinched, even though he is navigating what every singer experiences and what produces a lot of anxiety in most of us. This is a great performance of an original song. Another thing I love about Neil is that he never overstates himself instrumentally. He’s not trying to impress with his technical prowess, he has something to say and does it with great artistry.

He's an excellent singer and a great songwriter, much better (imo, of course) than the typical names that get tossed around. He does his own thing, within a wide emotional range. What's not to like?!

So well said... 👏👏👏

It's not bad more like unique

1 of the top 3 songwriters of all time honesty.

For me, "Harvest" was his best album.

@@bendagostino2217 Was his first album with songs like Southern Man , Don't let it bring you down , After the Gold rush and more . Few months after the album was released had made enough money to buy his ranch , where he met the Old man . Forgot his name , but was already the ranch care taker and never left until he passed away .

Im sorry but I hate the idea that people think youth is simplicity/ sunshine. Neil Youngs profundity at that age is only natural for that caliber.

@@markriobr "After the Gold Rush" was his third album, released in 1970. I think he bought the ranch (Broken Arrow) in 1969 after the success of especially his second album, "Everybody knows this is nowhere".

Yep... I'm one of those that took awhile to appreciate N. Young....I'm 59 now.

@@jerrymyers1798 You poor thing. I'm curious, just how many years *did* it take? I've always felt like I was late, I started really listening to rock music in the late '70s...which is when I started appreciating his music.

Brilliant way you describe it.

@@mariojorgecaeiro I wish I could remember who said it first. Some music magazine writer.

Could say he played it with a heart of gold 😂😂

so true, shovster

I love his voice.

'But every junkies like the setting sun' a great pay-off at the end of the tune. It was apparently for his great friend (and brilliant musician also) danny whitten who had just died from an overdose..imo all of the best music comes from some sort of tragedy..peace. : )

@@damotheman4196 Neil gives a little background before the song on the Massey Hall cd . no names but "some that everybody heard about" imo meaning Hendrix and Joplin. And "some that you didn't hear about" imo that's Danny Whitten and Bruce Berry. Massey Hall is a great CD for the music but also for the tidbits of background Neil gives for some if the songs.

My brother died from Heroin od. He was 54

This is the best thing I ever heard anybody say about Neil Young. Thank you, Wendy. Glad you made it!

Thank God! I saw a junkie untying. That was enough for me. ✌️♥️

Thanks!

I agree.

Fil any negative comments about you are preposterous you do a great job where is George lynch on your fav list I saw you play in my dreams and it was nice 1986 solo of the year

@znogypogy yep

Thanks Chris!

He's a natural teacher.

Art is art. You coax light waves. Musician coax sound waves.

Yes. Loved seeing him in concert where its just him an instrument, his voice & the words. emotional bliss

👍

Living for peace Thank You. Let’s all live for Peace! ☮️

Samantha Thomas Stated beautifully.

Tony Eckman Thank You, Tony! Peace ✌️

That's awesome. You got it right.

You dont have to be a great singer or guitar player. When your a gifted song writer who has the ability to touch people in a very personal way.

Seen Neil in concert solo, with Crazy Horse, with Crosby, Stills and Nash, with The International Harvesters ,with The Blue Notes and The Shocking Pinks 19 times total with 3 generations of family. Never disappointed. Plays and sings with such passion in so many different types of music. And his lyrics are incredible. Tears, goosebumps and adrenaline rushes when going to his shows. Hope he can keep on Rockin in the Free World for a long time to come!!!

Few tell Foster to f-off and survive! lol

Peter Foster has produced people in the industry who have gone onto some astounding success. I’d listen to him

When the Geffen label threatened to sue him because his album (Old Ways) was "uncharacteristic" of his style, "too Country," Neil said I'm gonna do three more like it, it'll become quite "characteristic."

Legacy Maiden Neil Young always did things his way. No BS from anyone.

I remember that documentary. Best moment out of the whole thing. 😂

Haha cool!

I wish my parents had gotten it. Country & Western and religious music, though my father had a thing for Mario Lanza and a guy who was called The Mad Gypsy. My father died years ago, and my mother doesn't seem to listen to music at all anymore. Damned shame. All of their records are parked outside in a shed, waiting for me to get in good enough shape to haul them home. Hopefully, the good ones won't have been chewed up by rodents.

quite the opposite was true for me. my younger years were like a soundtrack to the late 60's early 70's, little did i realize how lucky i was at the time. I guess you could call it a benefit of dad being a hippie. I knew the words to neil young and bob Dylan songs before I even knew who neil and bob were.

No. You just need good perception.

Yes, I was so much older the, I’m younger tan that now

Indeed!!

Just like Paul Williams back in the day. How could he be so young yet so wise?

Paraphrasing the Beatles I believe.@@catebannan7343

👍

Agreed. There were even a couple of good tunes on "Trans". I forgive him for that.

Neil was, is and always will be a beast. He is great at any age.

idiot, moron, he has turned into a hollywood liberal scumbag that stabs his country in the back

☺

@Dr. Hannibal Lester it's kind of like jimmy page & his guitar work. there r guitarists that r technically superior & will play circles around him, especially when he plays sloppily. but his creativity & ingenuity r what make me such a fan of his music, as w/neil young.

Today's performance coaches tell the artist to open their eyes for the audience...to me, a performance is more powerful with their eyes closed or whatever is natural to the artist...Neil always touched me with that haunting voice and inward performance.

👍

ms3bani hey, ....haven't you heard Taylor Swift emote on her acoustic guitar ?? Lol 😪

Amen

Agreed. This stuff was coming out brand new on commercial radio. Nothing like this anymore. Sure great music is still being produced, but no one really gets to hear it.

When the mind is preoccupied, the brain remains dormant...as Phil is saying about kids once being innovators of music, today they are prisoners to electronics.

@503 Workshop lol, I see you failed basic English. Learn to comprehend. Point made.

I agree

Thanks Ray ☺

Yes.

Pity BBC has gone the way it has-back then they would show lots of concerts-Mike Oldfield doing Tubular Bells in their studios is another one to watch & you had OId Grey Whistle Test, now the only thing approaching a half decent music show like that on television is Jools Holland-but it has zero atmosphere.

Awe'Some'Ness Neil Young..🎶💞 Legend In His Time

I miss audiences that knew how to behave. Stay in your fucking seat and STFU and listen. Today, everyone on their feet, phones head above their heads to record what's going on and idiots babbling away thinking the song just needs their input.

Thee best is an outdoor concert, on a full moon, when the moon rises, and Neil starts Harvest Moon. Nothing better. ✌️

@@Rock_Girl_Daze Did you have the experience you described?

@@miyojewoltsnasonth2159 yes 🙂 desert trip, second show, 2016. Neil rocked. Im sure there are vids ✌️ . As the moon popped up behind the stage, the band took it away...was pretty cool. Caught a shooting star too.

@@Rock_Girl_Daze I _thought_ it sounded like a real experience ... thanks for the details, I'm gonna try and find it ... :) :) :)

@@miyojewoltsnasonth2159 not the best music vid but shows the moon, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uCRYCr1osik.html

Cool!

Patrick Lee...Yep...Heart of Gold is one of my favorites of Neil's and I was having a hard time remembering the title I could only remember the word gold!... thanks for mentioning it...😁

@@loripond1839 You're welcome. Spent many hours in my car listening to the great music of that golden era.

Cortez the killer and my my hey hey have always been favourites of mine.

@@loripond1839 , Heart of Gold is actually not one of Neil's favorite songs. Perhaps not the song itself, but the fact that it put him in the middle of the road commercially, and he ultimately wasn't too happy about that.

Exactly, we may need to revise the word 'needle' in Neil's lyrics "I've seen the needle and the damage done" to "cell phones" or "gaming", too much unproductive time.

😂👍

I am always posting him on my Facebook. I just don't want to put him out there as only analytical, or a cover artist, so I am constantly saying he has a CD of original songs.

I 2nd that opinion

cool people from L.F.

👍

definately

I bet that vinyl sounds great!

@@wingsofpegasus It does! Late 70s DJ demos of 60s 70s hit the "cutout bins" $1.99. Replaced a lot of worn ones, put them on cassette to preserve records. Glad!

Yes. Much like Donald Fagen, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.

Some may say the same thing about his guitar playing but for me, it's so honest and raw it's incomparable to anyone else.

Bob in the West I love his voice.

But in fact, beyond the rawness (intentional) is pretty much flawless intonation. He lives in the songs, not in the outmoded concept of trying to be a perfect vocalist. Another kind of perfection. But...perfectly musical nonetheless. Same with his guitar playing. He just doesn’t play bad notes nor write parts that do not work.

@@christopherecatalano And his long guitar solos are interesting and coherent.

Thanks!

ME Too, i ENJOY Hearing Phil ANALYZE these Artists, i Learn quite a few good things when he speaks. There are Other people who do Reaction videos who are BORING 'cause they really DON'T know much about Music so they just end up saying the SAME BORING stuff over and over Again, "i Really liked the Song, she/he has a good voice, blah, blah, blah, blah." 😬 👎 LOL. 😝 😂 Plus i ENJOY Phil's cute English Pronounciation 'cause i know people from England speak the Language more correct, whereas here in America, we Pronounce our English words a wee bit "Lazy". Right?? 😢 😢 LOL. 😝 😂 PEACE OUT And G'Night to You Phil and You Too, Andrew. 😴 😴 😴 😴

I agree, Andrew. I learn o much from Fil.

Haha thanks!

I could just look at him all day.

Cool!

Lol, why does this not surprise me?? Love Neil and his music. Love his enterprising spirit as he has aged!

Mr. Roach The concert movie 🎥 he made with Crazy 😜 Horse 🐴 is my favorite.

@@kittysawunude I can't stand those damn symbols either but there's no need to insult someone

Just like Bobby Baccala!

Haha thanks!

No problem ☺

So-called singers nowadays have no honesty, as exhibited by the need for three songwriters and five producers just to come up with a hit single. They also have no pitch control, as proven by the fact that everything and everyone gets auto-tuned.

@@goodun6081 Don't you think that's a bit of an overstatement? I really enjoy many new singers. Adele is the real deal, just watch her Tiny Desk Concert or her Unplugged Concert. It doesn't get more honest and fearless than that. As for someone very new, I am very intrigued by Billie Eilish. I have seen some unplugged live performances from her and she is amazing. I could go on and on as there are many many great contemporary singers. I was an opera singer when I was young, and so I valued the things I thought I was good at. Now I think there is so much more, and there is so much music to explore. Remember, these are young people's future good old days. :)

@@matthewjamestaylor , while I'll allow that a few more modern singers can indeed actually sing (Beyonce, Lady Gaga, and Norah Jones, to name a few, have certainly got the "pipes") but the songs they add their vocal parts to are so mechanized and formulaic that they're more like sledgehammers than anything resembling a conversation or even poetry. A really good artist makes you feel like they are singing and playing directly to you yourself and you are participating in the conversation. It's hard to have that kind of intimacy when the recording has electronic drums and programmed synthetic handclaps and layers and layers of overdubbing....and, in the majority of instances, autotuning. (This it kind of makes me long for the days of monophonic recording, or before overdubbing, when you had one overhead microphone for the drums and another overhead microphone for two or three singers ---- and when the group came into the studio, they were already rehearsed, they knew the tunes they were going to do, they cut them live to tape in just a couple of takes, and nobody obsessed about any small warts or mistakes). Nowadays, when you see modern pop music performed in a stadium with 20 or 30 thousand people, there's like an army of choreographed dancers, the musicians are usually behind the dancers and dozens of feet apart from each other, and the primary singer never even looks at the rest of the band or perhaps even at the other dancers. There's pyrotechnics, lasers, explosions......That's not a band playing a concert, that's like an invading army! chances are good that some of the music is on tape or being played off of hard drive anyway. And ultimately, most of the music is just made for dance clubs anyway. For what it's worth, my interests in and knowledge of American music goes back a hundred years or so, with a huge interest in early blues musicians and how blues, folk and country (and jazz) merged into R&B, soul, rockabilly and rock. And then there's the side of me that has learned to appreciate English / Irish / Scottish folk music that might go back two or three hundred years, stuff that I heard from and learned about from versions done by old British folkies (and some of the rockers too). The common thread here is, learning some history of what came before you and building upon it and adding your own stamp to see where it would take you, or where you could make it go. I was talking about this with a friend at work who's also a guitar player, although much better than me. Our theory, thesis or consensus is that the struggle to learn to play an instrument that was so common in the days before the internet, even in the days before all those specialized music magazines, and before the easy availability of mail order guitar tablature and song books from specialty music suppliers that could provide sheet music and learning aids for both older folk/ traditionals and the pop tunes of the day.... if you went back before all of that, you kind of had to figure stuff out on your own, on whatever instrument was available, even if it was a piece of crap guitar with bad strings and a warped neck; and you tried to play what you heard on the radio or what was sung around you. You almost certainly didn't have a tape recorder, and you might not even have had a record player, but if you did, you sat in your room with your instrument, you played a piece of a record and tried to play it back yourself, then you lifted up the needle and put it back where you had started from, and did it all over again. Over and over and over!. You didn't have any kind of electronic device to help you tune you the instrument or tell you if the player was playing in certain keys or if he tuned his guitar differently from standard, you probably didn't have any tablature for it, you didn't have an instructional video.... instead you tried to drive yourself crazy figuring out how the heck somebody could make those chord stretches! There might have been an easier way, a different tuning perhaps, or a capo, or a trick that the artist used, but you didn't know about that. Hell, you might have been a left-handed person trying to learn guitar on a right-handed instrument that belonged to someone else in the family, and you couldn't mess with it or change it, and perhaps you weren't even supposed to be playing on it at all, so you just grabbed it when no one was around to tell you to put that damn thing back, you flipped it upside down, and didn't reverse the strings I probably didn't even know such a thing was possible) and had to teach yourself the fingerings your own way (eg: Albert King, Elizabeth Cotten). Only the most obsessed and dedicated person would persevere under situations like this, and only such a person who also had some innate talent or ear for music would have been likely to succeed to any degree. And after all that, all of you might have been able to sound pretty much like the musician since you had started out trying to emulate, the chances are good that you are also able to sound like yourself and nobody else. PS, I thought Beyonce was absolutely terrific portraying Etta James in the movie about Chess Records.

J-Me yes. Listening to it, it made me realize I should learn it. It’s great.

Yup

One of my favorite guitar bits is from "Ohio".

👍

I'd like to add Gordon Lightfoot to your list.

Our great neighbors to the North..Neil, Joni, Gordon.....this American loves them all, fabulous artists.....thank you Canada!!! 🇺🇸❤🍁

Maybe Canada. I like Neil Young even back in early 70,s. I don't think his singing was great. Compare to the massive amount of singing at that time in history. A real great song writer

@@maddy7 Gordon's equal, but not nearly as well known, I think, was Stan Rogers. He died in the '80s, saving lives when the jet he was on caught fire while still on the ground. His music is unforgettable, once you've heard it. Canada has had a large number of great musicians, whether they've been heard outside of Canada or not. Bare Naked Ladies and Moxy Früvous, as I understand it, had their demo tapes go gold. Wish I could visit again, only been once.

Don’t forget the Guess Who’s Burton Cummings!

Thanks!

Steve Mccart You're very lucky 🍀

☺👍

@Lebo leigh Leigh I just thought this song also related to profound writing by a young Waters or whoever chose those words...These words really dont mean much until you have grey hair, yes? or a gifted writer..

@@andiman45 I had the same thoughts and feelings reading those lyrics of Mr. Waters. So poignant and, so timeless a story of the human condition. Thank you for the trip down memory lane. Cheers!

Thanks!

@@blake59 Give Neil a break... Not everyone can possibly aspire to be as eloquent as you are.

@@BritIronRebel , please don't feed the troll. Perhaps then he'll run off to try and score elsewhere.

@@goodun6081 The mute button works quite well also

Waterloo Sunset is definitely in my top 10 favourite songs of all time. That melody tugs at my heart, and the vocals and lyrics and the original recording are simply perfection. Goosebumps kinda stuff.

That was during the recording of Tears are not Enough and the producer was David Foster.

He has perfect pitch so not sure where this urban myth came from

Gregor Barclay In traditional American music it’s called “playing in the cracks“ Check out the bad livers from Austin

@@heatherc772 Not really an urban myth. If you watch the doc for the making of "Tears Are Not Enough" of Neil in studio, and DF complaining after a take that Neil was flat, that WAS his reply.... Interesting comment though. I'd never considered that someone could have perfect pitch yet sing off key, as Neil does... But now that I think of it, considering his melodic skill on the guitar....could be. I've come to realize over time as I re-listen to Neil's music just how amazing it really is, and how his guitar style incredibly compliments the vocal, while setting its own emotional tone.

@@sadee1287 thanks for your lovely reply. His guitar and piano tuning are perfect. His voice might not appeal to all, and his voice may have difficulty (in some people's opinion) holding a note, but he knows pitch. Kind of like Joni Mitchell. Cheers.