Neil Young (b. 1945)
Filed under the name Neil · June 25, 2026
Neil Young has had a genuinely long, restless career, moving across rock and folk for decades in a way that has apparently kept him relevant to musicians several generations younger than he is, which is not a thing I can say about most of the recording artists from his era whom I might, if pressed, be more naturally inclined to appreciate. My own musical tastes run firmly toward opera and eighteenth-century portraiture, and I will admit an old habit of quietly filing popular music several rungs beneath what I considered serious art, a habit I am slowly, if incompletely, growing out of. What strikes me about Young's career, reading about it properly rather than dismissing it from a comfortable distance, is the sheer restlessness of it, an unwillingness to simply repeat whatever had already succeeded. That is a harder thing to sustain across decades than consistency is, and I suspect I have historically given it rather less credit than it deserves, simply because the genre wasn't mine.