Favorite Neil Young deep cuts

A year after Neil Young’s blistering Ascend show in downtown Nashville, I can’t put him back on the shelf. He continues to issue unexpected delights from the Neil Young Archives series. But some of my favorites have always been his more esoteric tracks.

You could do worse for a playlist. I set simple criteria - nothing but deep cuts from classic albums (On the Beach and Tonight's the Night) - if anything at all (Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, After the Gold Rush, Harvest and Harvest Moon do not have any representation on this list).

See the Sky About to Rain (live)
Young has always been a master re-interpreter of his songs. Despite the desolation of the On the Beach version, driven by organ and pedal steel, I lean toward the early, piano-driven take on this ballad from his Live at Massey Hall record. Somehow this take manages to be even leaner and lonelier. Young’s lyric prowess is on fully display and the song feels intensely fragile when played on a lone piano. Of the NYA live albums, Massey Hall and Live at the Cellar Door are essential.

Albuquerque
If Tonight’s the Night represents an song cycle of an artist at the end of his rope, Albuquerque is the song where he finally gets away from it all. Driving in the dark, “starving to be alone” and eager for breakfast at diner, Albuquerque is the split. It’s the flipside of Out on the Weekend, the lonely boy who relishes being alone for a while.

The Campaigner and Winterlong
Picking one deep cut from the masterful retrospective Decade is difficult, thanks a handful of songs unreleased anywhere else. But I have to go with these two. Winterlong brims with yearning and acceptance of how easily love can slip away. Campaigner has world-weary feel - the campaigner could face the end of the campaign. It’s hard to shake the immortal line, “Where even Richard Nixon has got soul.” This infectious folk number could only have been written by Young. The longer version, recently released on "lost album" Hitchhiker, enhances the original through inclusion of excised lyrics.

I’m the Ocean
Arriving at Neil Young in the mid-1990s, Mirror Ball was impossible to avoid. Remembered fondly but far from Young’s best work, this collaboration with members of Pearl Jam is highly uneven. Still, I can listen to this seven-minute rocker on repeat.

Safeway Cart
Nancy introduced me to this number from Sleeps with Angels, with its simple baseline and catchy tagline about … a grocery cart from a Safeway. For a man for name-checks his Ford Aerostar in other songs, it fits.

Peaceful Valley Boulevard 
Of all his nameless records since the mid-1990s, Neil found a mighty groove on the rumbling Le Noize. This haunting slow-burn stomper wouldn’t seem out of place on earlier Young albums.

Long songs: Sixty to Zero (Live)  and Ordinary People (live)
In a live setting, Young can draw out certain songs to extreme length, sometimes pushing the 20-minute mark.  If you know Crime in the City from Freedom, you only know part of the story. Thanks to a bootleg from Amsterdam, I became familiar with the 20-minute, full-length epic that never loses intensity. A close second among Young’s long songs – Ordinary People, a 17-minute number from the late 80s driven by horns, resurfaced on the mostly forgettable Chrome Dreams II.

Dead Man soundtrack
Is including a whole album a cheat? Jim Jarmusch’s brilliant anti-Western would not be nearly as moody and desperate without Neil’s thundering guitar following the travails of William Blake. I put the entire album because it's hard to pick a track from this sparse, meandering instrumentals. Recorded as Young watched a cut of the film, the soundtrack runs thick with spontaneity, crackling as the story slowly unfolds. Chords ring out at glacial paces. But watch the movie first for the full effect.