#30, “After the Gold Rush,” Neil Young (1970)

150 Favorite Songs: #30, “After the Gold Rush,” Neil Young (1970)

My dad was not always an easy person to talk with. He didn’t really like getting into feelings, which, as a Wells For Boys type of kid, sometimes left me yearning for advice in affairs of the heart that I would not be able to get from him. His advice, when I did seek it, tended toward the practical: Do you want this, or not? Does she want it? Which is fair and good, it creates a decision-tree that it is useful to be able to follow, but commiseration was not a strong point of his.

He did, however, give me one piece of advice that has served me very well, in romantic situations and many others besides, since it was bestowed upon me in my teen years: When you’re really down, he told me sometime when I was probably sixteen or so and sad because one girl named Dana or another didn’t like me back (there was a whole thing with Danas that year), Listen to Neil Young. Because no matter how bad you feel, you’ll know that there’s always someone who feels worse.

Neil Young has written more expressly sad songs than “After the Gold Rush,” songs with names like “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” or “Helpless” or “Don’t Cry No Tears” or “Tell Me Why” or “The Needle and the Damage Done” or “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere,” and those songs are all songs that I have listened to many many times in my life, too. But “After the Gold Rush,” which is lyrically far more abstract and surreal than any of those (it starts maybe at a renaissance faire? Then it cements that it is a song set in the 1970’s, before it goes out into outer space), is the one I have listened to the most. It is the one that, when I was twenty-two and had my heart broken in an absolutely devastating and humiliating fashion (we’ve talked about it here before, go read about “The Calendar Hung Itself” or wait around for a bit and we’ll get back to it before too long), I spent an evening lying face down on the living room floor in my apartment listening to when my roommates walked in like, “uhhhh, Dan, you okay?” and I managed to choke out a “yeah, for sure” in response to before going into my bedroom and resuming the wallowing process.

“After the Gold Rush” is the Neil Young song I have taken the most comfort in during the hardest times, I think, because it’s just so incredibly beautiful. Neil Young has one of the most unusual voices among legendary rock singers, not a falsetto but certainly in a higher register than most men sing in, and he also writes some of the best songs, and “After the Gold Rush” is, I think, the song of his that is best written for his voice, the one that turns that nasal whine into an incredible asset. It’s such a lovely melody and the piano chords are all in the same register as his voice, and the words all flow effortlessly out of him in a way that does not require one to be a singer of considerable skill to deliver. (Indeed, it’s not really an asset at all on this song, as this version by Emmylou Harris, Dolly Parton, and Linda Ronstadt, who are all much more accomplished vocalists than Neil Young, proves—the song starts to lose something with a better singer, I think.) (Thom Yorke and Billy Corgan, who also sing through their noses, fare better, in my opinion.)

I tried to get my dad to be the person who could match the way I felt things, and respond to me the way I wanted to be responded, and that wasn’t something he could do. Our parents are only ever people, after all, and a person is going to interact with the world the way that suits them; he couldn’t do what I wanted him to do anymore than I could simply choose not to feel things as deeply. Instead, he gave me Neil Young, and I’ve had him with me ever since. In his own way, he sings with my dad’s voice, and I like to imagine that the way my Uncle Neil feels things and relates them is how my dad might have liked to, if only to know me better.