He is famously among the most ornery, uncompromising and capricious of blue-chip legends
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Neil Young’s battle is principled – and comfortable
In pulling his music from Spotify in protest over Covid misinformation, the singer continues a life of political action – but unlike others, he doesn’t need to please the streaming giant
He is famously among the most ornery, uncompromising and capricious of said blue-chip legends. The years that produced his most famous work also played host to Young wilfully sabotaging his own commercial prospects in order to follow his muse (or, as he memorably put it, “heading for the ditch”); suddenly abandoning tours midway by directing his tour bus to pull off the motorway en route to the next show; whimsically declining to release a succession of completed albums; and incurring the wrath of his partners in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) by removing their contributions from the master tapes of his songs before releasing them. He spent a substantial chunk of the 1980s making wildly uncommercial albums, apparently with the specific intention of annoying his record label, which ended up suing him for being unpredictable – it lost, perhaps because, as his labelmate Elton John put it, its lawsuit “felt a bit like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young”.
He has failed to mellow with age: not for nothing is the news section of his website called the Times-Contrarian; according to Young’s recent post on it, when his lawyers advised him “that contractually I didn’t have the control of my music to [leave Spotify], I announced I was leaving anyway, because I knew I was”, which is pretty much the most Neil Youngian response imaginable.
via The Guardian.com
When Worlds Collide / Neil Young
From The Album FORK IN THE ROAD
cover photo on post: screen grab rollingstone.com
