After The Gold Rush - Neil Young
Song of the Day #31
Sorry for disappearing for so long. Finals season was crazy this year and then I had to write a HUGE article on Neil Young, so I was a bit burnt out. Fortunately, I started to miss doing this, so we'll hopefully get things back on track!
Apple Music link: https://music.apple.com/us/album/after-the-gold-rush/1015783330
No matter how much hardcore fans like myself claim that the ditch trilogy is where Neil truly found himself, this masterpiece of a title track may be the quintessential Neil Young composition after all (as far as his softer side goes). Really, it's songs like this that make the Dylan comparisons feel utterly ridiculous because of how different their songwriting approaches are. For all the surrealism within Dylan's complex lyricisms, you still feel he was firmly grounded in reality, taking observations from the world around him and extracting the united spiritual thread between them. On the other hand, Neil would often get so deeply lost within himself that he would lose touch with the real world entirely. The depressing disappointments of human existence were too difficult for him to endure day after day, so he retreated to these glimmering, impressionistic worlds of his own creation. He never claimed to fully grasp his microcosmic personal universes, but you can tell he felt much more at home in their refuge than in the decaying world around him.
This song almost chronicles this starry-eyed self-exploration of his. Each stanza of the song talks not about some real-life memory but a dream, describing otherworldly places with knights in armor speaking to kings and queens, spaceships flying into the haze of the sun, and Mother Nature herself spreading her silver seed. Yet, these perplexing descriptions have a delicate beauty and intimacy, where you feel how these dreams made an incredibly powerful impact on him. That surrealistically confessional spirit is embodied in the stumbling, grandiose piano chords. inducing that sense of wonder and awe as he tries to sort out those transcendent experiences and understand himself in the process. To solidify the perfection of this song, he throws in the flugelhorn solo as a masterful finishing touch: recalling similarly stylized horn interludes in psych-pop songs like "Penny Lane," that dreamy idealism in 60s psychedelia fits wonderfully with the mood expressed here. It's all of these things that separate Neil Young from almost all of his soft-rock contemporaries: there was barely anyone who could express themselves in such abstract terms back then and still make them so amazingly personal.
Above all, "After the Gold Rush" just feels so genuinely magical. From the very first notes, you feel just as hopelessly lost in these entrancing worlds as he does, and its atmosphere becomes so breathtaking you might want to stay there for a little longer. At least, it's a testament to how awesome the song is that it didn't lose any of its mystical sheen when performed live with the harmonica solo replacing the flugelhorn. Though, we should expect no less than genius from dear old Neil, right? Go ahead and give the song one more listen to pay tribute to this songwriting brilliance.
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