Neil Young’s Harvest Turns 50

With all of the Neil Young bruhaha over Spotify in the past two weeks, we missed an important milestone. Neil’s classic ‘Harvest’ turned 50 on 1 February.

‘Harvest’ is a masterpiece. The album was Young’s fourth solo album but he had already clocked up a catalogue of three albums with Buffalo Springfield and the Crosby Stills Nash & Young classic ‘Déjà vu’. By the time ‘Harvest’ had arrived, Young was 26 years old.

‘Harvest’ was a number one album in Australia, the USA, the UK and Canada for Young and also gave Neil his first number one single ‘Heart of Gold’. To date, ‘Heart of Gold’ is also Young’s most performed song.

‘Harvest’ featured guests James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt and David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash on various songs. ‘Are You Ready for the Country’ was Crosby, Nash & Young. ‘Alabama’ was Crosby, Stills & Young. Linda and James both provided backing vocals on ‘Heart of Gold’ and ‘Old Man’.

‘Old Man’ was written about the caretaken at Young’s Broken Arrow Ranch in California.

‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ was recorded was about heroin addiction and Crazy Horse member Danny Witten. Witten died of an overdose later that year. Young also lost roadie Bruce Berry to heroin in 1973. Witten and Berry became the subjects of a later Young song ‘Tonight’s The Night’ (released in 1975).

The two tracks ‘There’s A World’ and ‘A Man Needs A Maid’ were recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra.

The Harvest tracklisting is:

1 Out on the Weekend 4:35
2 Harvest 3:03
3 A Man Needs a Maid 4:00
4 Heart of Gold 3:05
5 Are You Ready for the Country? 3:21
6 Old Man 3:22
7 There’s a World 3:00
8 Alabama 4:02
9 The Needle and the Damage Done 2:00
10 Words (Between the Lines of Age) 6:42

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