Track Listing

1. Emperor Of Wyoming
2. Loner
3. If I Could Have Her Tonight
4. I've Been Waiting For You
5. Old Laughing Lady
6. String Quartet From Whiskey Boot Hill
7. Here We Are In The Years
8. What Did You Do To My Life
9. I've Loved Her So Long
10. Last Trip To Tulsa

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36702 in Music
• Released on: 1989-06-01
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
Released in early 1969, Neil Young's first solo album is essentially an extension of "Broken Arrow" and "Expecting to Fly", his two most inventive contributions to Buffalo Springfield. Jack Nitzsche arranged and produced several of the tracks, fusing haunting strings and even funky female backing vocals to acoustic-oriented songs like "Here We Are in the Years" and "The Old Laughing Lady". "The Loner" is the one song from Neil Young to achieve classic-rock immortality, but "I've Been Waiting for You" is almost as good, and the rambling "Last Trip to Tulsa" presages the dark acoustic epics of On the Beach. Though it's not an essential album, Neil Young--like the man himself--is rarely less than interesting. --Dan Epstein

CD Description
Neil Young's first solo record is quite a bit different from the sound he would later develop--not that anyone could ever know what to expect from this mercurial visionary. This album, though, is a bit artier and less spontaneous-sounding than most of Young's catalogue. That's not to say that he hadn't already developed a gift for writing unique, captivating material. He'd already shown that ability with Buffalo Springfield, and NEIL YOUNG is full of great, idiosyncratic tunes.
The most well-known cut here is the most traditional rock-sounding tune, "The Loner", but even here Young sings of disaffection and isolation, over an arrangement that shifts between distorted guitar and elegant string section. "The Old Laughing Lady" is probably the most Springfieldish song here, and along with the country flavour of some of the other tunes, provides a link to Young's past. The piece de resistance is the closing acoustic epic, "The Last Trip To Tulsa", a surreal, Dylanesque number that showed Young already blazing his own trail in the world of rock poets.

Customer Reviews

Great album in dire need of remastering
This has always been one of my favourite albums. But, the sound quality is simply appalling. The whole thing needs remastering to show the sheer brillance of the material and the performance. Young, by his own admittance once said that he was trying to get this re-done an dre-released but nothing ever came of it. Shame.

Magnificent
Tracks 6,8 = Outstanding
Tracks 1,2,4,9 = Excellent
Tracks 5,7 = Very Good
Tracks 3,10 = Good
Neil Young's debut solo album is a remarkable record, which must have been cruelly over looked when it was released in 1969. This album sounds most like 'Harvest' and 'Comes A Time', but these are only close comparison's - this album sounds like no other Young album. Similarly to 'Harvest' and 'Harvest Moon', it is a fusion of Jack Nitzsche's string arrangements with Young's acoustic and electric guitar playing also present but it still doesn't sound like any other Young album. The female backing singers also add an extra element to this record. I discovered Neil Young's music when one of my friends bought me 'Rust Never Sleeps' for my birthday. I liked it so much I wanted to buy other Neil Young albums and got the impression his best ones were 'Harvest', 'After the gold rush', 'Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere' etc. The point is this was never mentioned, yet it is easily a 5 - star album and is easily as good as 'Harvest' and Neil Young's other most famed albums.
At worst this album is good and at its best it is outstanding. There are no poor or even average tracks on this album; each song has its own moments. 'The Last Trip To Tulsa', for example, is an experiment I don't fully appreciate; yet there are parts of this epic that are excellent. The album opens with an instrumental, which is a weird curtain raiser for a singer-songwriter's debut album. This song is a top class track, very similar to the sound of 'Harvest'. 'The Loner' and 'I've Loved Her For So Long' are quality fusion's of rock with classical music and 'I've Been Waiting For You' is an excellent sixties rocker which is one of the most commercial sings on the album. The aforementioned tracks are all excellent, but 'String Quartet From Whiskey Boot Hill' (a Jack Nitzsche composition) and 'What Did You To My Life' are two of the best songs on any Neil Young album, and are a class above the others. The former is a string instrumental, which sounds as if it's from the soundtrack of any of the 'Godfather' movies. The latter is one of the best Neil Young songs there is with a fantastic melody sung over a wheezing sound that leads to the chorus that has some phenomenal backing vocals. These backing vocals make this song something really special and are some of the best I've heard along with the backing vocals on Lindsey Buckingham's 'Trouble' and Peter Gabreil's 'Don't Give Up'.
This is a must have album for any Neil Young fan (if you didn't have it already) and a must have for anyone who loves decent music.

What a false start!
This, Young's début solo release, is nothing like anything which came after it. Very "produced" (Young described the album as "Overdub City"), the multi-layered tracks on this record are of uniformly high quality. Superb tracks such as "Here We Are in the Years" are cruelly neglected gems, although Young is not averse to trotting out numbers such as "The Old Laughing Lady" and "I've Been Waiting for You," in revised form, in his current concerts. Generally seen as "the one with "The Loner" on it," this album, featuring stellar compositions like "The Last Trip to Tulsa" and "If I Could Have Her Tonight," is another triumph for Young. This is a remarkably coherent piece of work, at odds with the ramshackle approach Young later took to his music, and a fascinating glimpse of what could have been, had Young chosen to explore this aspect of his art further.