Neil Young

Neil Young, one of the most influential and controversial rock music figures of all times, was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto. Along with Bob Dylan, he is credited with laying down the foundation for almost each of currently existent rock genres. Before finishing the school, Neil sank into guitar music playing with a lot of local bands and showing up at many clubs of his city late at night. At the dawn of his music life, Young was focused on performing blues and rockabilly as the most prominent group of his was the California-based Buffalo Springfield. The members of this formation did get along with each other very well, which prompted Neil soon to start recording his own stuff on his own in 1968.

A brilliant instrumentalist himself, Young recruited a group of very talented musicians from California that would be accompanying him throughout his entire career as the Crazy Horse band. The artist’s debut self-titled album, released in 1968, did not bring him the expected results, yet it only made him work harder. The second effort, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969), featured the songs bearing the traces of the music that would soon be called hard-rock. Through with this work, Young joined a supreme band of his old time friends, Crosby, Stills & Nash, which made them add his name to the title. With the renewed lineup, the group launched a massive American tour. The musicians had too different music preferences and ideas to stick together constantly and went through numerous breakups. On irregular basis, they would reunite to perform live up to the present days.

In 1972, Young came back to the solo career and recorded a calm country-rock oriented album, Harvest, to become of the specimen of the genre. Although the artist strived to stay away from mainstream and remain a not-like-them figure, he grew extremely surprised when this record climbed to the top of the US pop-music charts. Right after that, Neil made a swift turn to a much darker and noisier sound. The pessimistic mood of those records was predetermined by Neil’s loss of several people dear to him and his only son’s incurable illness. After a streak of albums of low interest, he finally prepared a very strong long player that was Tonight’s the Night (1975).

Young spent the second half of the seventies in constant and fruitful collaboration with Crazy Horse. They made an accent on loud guitar sounding that in the years to come formed the basis for punk and grunge rock. As the new decade arrived, the artist decided to open a period of experimentations that upset many of his supporters. Their disenchantment reached the peak in 1982 when he released Trans, an electronic album with his voice processed through the synthesizers. Young returned to the path of classic rock in 1989 with the smashing album Freedom. The same year, the market offered a compilation of his songs performed by other rock musicians. As the era of grunge opened the beginning of the nineties, many of new rock stars shared the desire to cooperate with their main inspirer, Neil Young. Pearl Jam succeeded most of them all as they played several concerts with the famed artists and then helped him record a very powerful album that was called Mirror Ball (1995). Later, Young recorded the music for the classic art-house movie Dead Man released in 1996. Recapitulating the highlights of the twenties century, the influential magazine Rolling Stone rated Neil Young as thirty forth in the list of the rock-n-roll most prominent persons. In the new millennium, the famed artist made his song strongly political. His 2006 studio effort Living with War featured the song Let’s Impeach the President patently condemning the US policy in Iraq. Early in 2009, he delighted his fans with the new album, Fork in the Road, and in 2010 they got another Neil’s creation. He worked with a producer Daniel Lanois and his name became the link to the album’s title - Le Noise. That Young’s studio attempt was critically acclaimed and was really enjoyed by the listeners. There is no doubt that the artist’s experience and desire to create music became the main elements of his success.