#91, "Hell Yeah," Neil Diamond (2005)

150 Favorite Songs: #91, "Hell Yeah," Neil Diamond (2005)

I like an underdog, and so this is my favorite Neil Diamond song. The man wrote "Daydream Believer" and "Sweet Caroline" and "Solitary Man" and "Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show" and a ton of other great examples of what a rock and roll song is meant to be, but I think this one is nearly as good as those, and it's such an expression of what it's like to be—or what we'd like to think it's like to be—Neil Diamond, that I respond to it much more emotionally than I do the others.

Because he's obviously very well aware that he's been blessed his entire life, and he acknowledges that artfully and gracefully. There's no bragging, no ignorance of the fact that other people's lives aren't always as easy, but he also acknowledges that, after six and a half decades of living life, he's entitled to reflect on it. It's a little bit defiant, but he knows he doesn't have a lot to defy. But any good celebration of life is a celebration of rebellion, because everyone has to overcome things, has to carve their own path, and so he's emphatic that he's done what he wants to have done with his life—Hell yeah, he has.

When he wrote this song, Neil Diamond hadn’t really put much effort into his music in a long time. He mostly recorded covers (he put out two Christmas albums in the ‘90s) and hadn’t actually played the guitar on one of his albums himself since 1991. The originals he did write, while listenable little pop songs, weren’t particularly memorable work. Then he met Rick Rubin sometime around 2003, who had spent the previous decade giving Johnny Cash’s career an unexpected third act, and Rubin asked Neil why he didn’t play guitar anymore. He didn’t have a good answer, so they went into the studio with some of Rubin’s regular session guys (including two of the Heartbreakers, whom Rubin had borrowed from Tom Petty for the Johnny Cash records he produced), and the songs they came up with were something new—they were unmistakably Neil Diamond songs, but not a pastiche of early Neil or groovy seventies Neil, a little more honest and personal. That’s the genius of someone like Rick Rubin—he pulled the best parts of Neil Diamond out of the man, but didn’t try to turn him into Johnny Cash, anymore than he turned Johnny Cash into Slayer, or Slayer into Run DMC. He just gave him permission to be more Neil Diamond.

And “Hell Yeah” is that. It’s a little corny, but deliciously so, and when he gets to the final verse, I get chills every fucking time. “He walked the line, never had to crawl / he cried a bit, but not for long / hell yeah, he found the life that he was after / filled it up with love and laughter / finally got it right and made it fit / hell yeah, he did.” My goodness. We should all be so lucky.

There’s a warmth to it that defies the convention of the “grizzled veteran songwriter looking back at life, reflecting on mortality” song, which is a kind of song I love a lot. I’m drawn to those songs, but almost none of them are as joyful as "Hell Yeah." But then, what else would you expect from Neil Diamond?