title: Middle Ages

text: Legal studies advanced during the 12th century. Both secular law and canon law, or ecclesiastical law, were studied in the High Middle Ages. Secular law, or Roman law, was advanced greatly by the discovery of the "Corpus Juris Civilis" in the 11th century, and by 1100 Roman law was being taught at Bologna. This led to the recording and standardisation of legal codes throughout Western Europe. Canon law was also studied, and around 1140 a monk named Gratian (fl. 12th century), a teacher at Bologna, wrote what became the standard text of canon law—the "Decretum".


title: Middle Ages

text: Among the results of the Greek and Islamic influence on this period in European history was the replacement of Roman numerals with the decimal positional number system and the invention of algebra, which allowed more advanced mathematics. Astronomy advanced following the translation of Ptolemy's "Almagest" from Greek into Latin in the late 12th century. Medicine was also studied, especially in southern Italy, where Islamic medicine influenced the school at Salerno.


title: Middle Ages

text: In the 12th and 13th centuries, Europe experienced economic growth and innovations in methods of production. Major technological advances included the invention of the windmill, the first mechanical clocks, the manufacture of distilled spirits, and the use of the astrolabe. Concave spectacles were invented around 1286 by an unknown Italian artisan, probably working in or near Pisa.


title: Middle Ages

text: The development of a three-field rotation system for planting crops increased the usage of land from one half in use each year under the old two-field system to two-thirds under the new system, with a consequent increase in production. The development of the heavy plough allowed heavier soils to be farmed more efficiently, aided by the spread of the horse collar, which led to the use of draught horses in place of oxen. Horses are faster than oxen and require less pasture, factors that aided the implementation of the three-field system. Legumes – such as peas, beans, or lentils – were grown more widely as crops, in addition to the usual cereal crops of wheat, oats, barley, and rye.


title: Middle Ages

text: The construction of cathedrals and castles advanced building technology, leading to the development of large stone buildings. Ancillary structures included new town halls, houses, bridges, and tithe barns. Shipbuilding improved with the use of the rib and plank method rather than the old Roman system of mortise and tenon. Other improvements to ships included the use of lateen sails and the stern-post rudder, both of which increased the speed at which ships could be sailed.


title: Middle Ages

text: In military affairs, the use of infantry with specialised roles increased. Along with the still-dominant heavy cavalry, armies often included mounted and infantry crossbowmen, as well as sappers and engineers. Crossbows, which had been known in Late Antiquity, increased in use partly because of the increase in siege warfare in the 10th and 11th centuries. The increasing use of crossbows during the 12th and 13th centuries led to the use of closed-face helmets, heavy body armour, as well as horse armour. Gunpowder was known in Europe by the mid-13th century with a recorded use in European warfare by the English against the Scots in 1304, although it was merely used as an explosive and not as a weapon. Cannon were being used for sieges in the 1320s, and hand-held guns were in use by the 1360s.


title: Middle Ages

text: In the 10th century the establishment of churches and monasteries led to the development of stone architecture that elaborated vernacular Roman forms, from which the term "Romanesque" is derived. Where available, Roman brick and stone buildings were recycled for their materials. From the tentative beginnings known as the First Romanesque, the style flourished and spread across Europe in a remarkably homogeneous form. Just before 1000 there was a great wave of building stone churches all over Europe. Romanesque buildings have massive stone walls, openings topped by semi-circular arches, small windows, and, particularly in France, arched stone vaults. The large portal with coloured sculpture in high relief became a central feature of façades, especially in France, and the capitals of columns were often carved with narrative scenes of imaginative monsters and animals. According to art historian C. R. Dodwell, "virtually all the churches in the West were decorated with wall-paintings", of which few survive. Simultaneous with the development in church architecture, the distinctive European form of the castle was developed and became crucial to politics and warfare.


title: Middle Ages

text: Romanesque art, especially metalwork, was at its most sophisticated in Mosan art, in which distinct artistic personalities including Nicholas of Verdun (d. 1205) become apparent, and an almost classical style is seen in works such as a font at Liège, contrasting with the writhing animals of the exactly contemporary Gloucester Candlestick. Large illuminated bibles and psalters were the typical forms of luxury manuscripts, and wall-painting flourished in churches, often following a scheme with a "Last Judgement" on the west wall, a Christ in Majesty at the east end, and narrative biblical scenes down the nave, or in the best surviving example, at Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, on the barrel-vaulted roof.


title: Middle Ages

text: From the early 12th century, French builders developed the Gothic style, marked by the use of rib vaults, pointed arches, flying buttresses, and large stained glass windows. It was used mainly in churches and cathedrals and continued in use until the 16th century in much of Europe. Classic examples of Gothic architecture include Chartres Cathedral and Reims Cathedral in France as well as Salisbury Cathedral in England. Stained glass became a crucial element in the design of churches, which continued to use extensive wall-paintings, now almost all lost.


title: Middle Ages

text: During this period the practice of manuscript illumination gradually passed from monasteries to lay workshops, so that according to Janetta Benton "by 1300 most monks bought their books in shops", and the book of hours developed as a form of devotional book for lay-people. Metalwork continued to be the most prestigious form of art, with Limoges enamel a popular and relatively affordable option for objects such as reliquaries and crosses. In Italy the innovations of Cimabue and Duccio, followed by the Trecento master Giotto (d. 1337), greatly increased the sophistication and status of panel painting and fresco. Increasing prosperity during the 12th century resulted in greater production of secular art; many carved ivory objects such as gaming-pieces, combs, and small religious figures have survived.


title: Middle Ages

text: Monastic reform became an important issue during the 11th century, as elites began to worry that monks were not adhering to the rules binding them to a strictly religious life. Cluny Abbey, founded in the Mâcon region of France in 909, was established as part of the Cluniac Reforms, a larger movement of monastic reform in response to this fear. Cluny quickly established a reputation for austerity and rigour. It sought to maintain a high quality of spiritual life by placing itself under the protection of the papacy and by electing its own abbot without interference from laymen, thus maintaining economic and political independence from local lords.


title: Middle Ages

text: Monastic reform inspired change in the secular Church. The ideals upon which it was based were brought to the papacy by Pope Leo IX (pope 1049–1054), and provided the ideology of clerical independence that led to the Investiture Controversy in the late 11th century. This involved Pope Gregory VII (pope 1073–85) and Emperor Henry IV, who initially clashed over episcopal appointments, a dispute that turned into a battle over the ideas of investiture, clerical marriage, and simony. The emperor saw the protection of the Church as one of his responsibilities as well as wanting to preserve the right to appoint his own choices as bishops within his lands, but the papacy insisted on the Church's independence from secular lords. These issues remained unresolved after the compromise of 1122 known as the Concordat of Worms. The dispute represents a significant stage in the creation of a papal monarchy separate from and equal to lay authorities. It also had the permanent consequence of empowering German princes at the expense of the German emperors.


title: Middle Ages

text: The High Middle Ages was a period of great religious movements. Besides the Crusades and monastic reforms, people sought to participate in new forms of religious life. New monastic orders were founded, including the Carthusians and the Cistercians. The latter, in particular, expanded rapidly in their early years under the guidance of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153). These new orders were formed in response to the feeling of the laity that Benedictine monasticism no longer met the needs of the laymen, who along with those wishing to enter the religious life wanted a return to the simpler hermetical monasticism of early Christianity, or to live an Apostolic life. Religious pilgrimages were also encouraged. Old pilgrimage sites such as Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela received increasing numbers of visitors, and new sites such as Monte Gargano and Bari rose to prominence.


title: Middle Ages

text: In the 13th century mendicant orders—the Franciscans and the Dominicans—who swore vows of poverty and earned their living by begging, were approved by the papacy. Religious groups such as the Waldensians and the Humiliati also attempted to return to the life of early Christianity in the middle 12th and early 13th centuries, another heretical movement condemned by the papacy. Others joined the Cathars, another movement condemned as heretical by the papacy. In 1209, a crusade was preached against the Cathars, the Albigensian Crusade, which in combination with the medieval Inquisition, eliminated them.


title: Middle Ages

text: The first years of the 14th century were marked by famines, culminating in the Great Famine of 1315–17. The causes of the Great Famine included the slow transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age, which left the population vulnerable when bad weather caused agricultural crises. The years 1313–14 and 1317–21 were excessively rainy throughout Europe, resulting in widespread crop failures. The climate change—which resulted in a declining average annual temperature for Europe during the 14th century—was accompanied by an economic downturn.


title: Middle Ages

text: These troubles were followed in 1347 by the Black Death, a pandemic that spread throughout Europe during the following three years. The death toll was probably about 35 million people in Europe, about one-third of the population. Towns were especially hard-hit because of their crowded conditions. Large areas of land were left sparsely inhabited, and in some places fields were left unworked. Wages rose as landlords sought to entice the reduced number of available workers to their fields. Further problems were lower rents and lower demand for food, both of which cut into agricultural income. Urban workers also felt that they had a right to greater earnings, and popular uprisings broke out across Europe. Among the uprisings were the "jacquerie" in France, the Peasants' Revolt in England, and revolts in the cities of Florence in Italy and Ghent and Bruges in Flanders. The trauma of the plague led to an increased piety throughout Europe, manifested by the foundation of new charities, the self-mortification of the flagellants, and the scapegoating of Jews. Conditions were further unsettled by the return of the plague throughout the rest of the 14th century; it continued to strike Europe periodically during the rest of the Middle Ages.


title: Middle Ages

text: These dire conditions resulted in an increase of interpersonal violence in most parts of Europe. Population increase, religious intolerance, famine and disease led to an increase in violent acts in vast parts of the medieval society. One exception to this was North-Eastern Europe, whose population managed to maintain low levels of violence due to a more organized society resulting from extensive and successful trade.


title: Middle Ages

text: Society throughout Europe was disturbed by the dislocations caused by the Black Death. Lands that had been marginally productive were abandoned, as the survivors were able to acquire more fertile areas. Although serfdom declined in Western Europe it became more common in Eastern Europe, as landlords imposed it on those of their tenants who had previously been free. Most peasants in Western Europe managed to change the work they had previously owed to their landlords into cash rents. The percentage of serfs amongst the peasantry declined from a high of 90 to closer to 50 percent by the end of the period. Landlords also became more conscious of common interests with other landholders, and they joined to extort privileges from their governments. Partly at the urging of landlords, governments attempted to legislate a return to the economic conditions that existed before the Black Death. Non-clergy became increasingly literate, and urban populations began to imitate the nobility's interest in chivalry.


title: Middle Ages

text: Jewish communities were expelled from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Although some were allowed back into France, most were not, and many Jews emigrated eastwards, and Hungary. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and dispersed to Turkey, France, Italy, and Holland. The rise of banking in Italy during the 13th century continued throughout the 14th century, fuelled partly by the increasing warfare of the period and the needs of the papacy to move money between kingdoms. Many banking firms loaned money to royalty, at great risk, as some were bankrupted when kings defaulted on their loans.


title: Middle Ages

text: Strong, royalty-based nation states rose throughout Europe in the Late Middle Ages, particularly in England, France, and the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula: Aragon, Castile, and Portugal. The long conflicts of the period strengthened royal control over their kingdoms and were extremely hard on the peasantry. Kings profited from warfare that extended royal legislation and increased the lands they directly controlled. Paying for the wars required that methods of taxation become more effective and efficient, and the rate of taxation often increased. The requirement to obtain the consent of taxpayers allowed representative bodies such as the English Parliament and the French Estates General to gain power and authority.


title: Middle Ages

text: Throughout the 14th century, French kings sought to expand their influence at the expense of the territorial holdings of the nobility. They ran into difficulties when attempting to confiscate the holdings of the English kings in southern France, leading to the Hundred Years' War, waged from 1337 to 1453. Early in the war the English under Edward III (r. 1327–77) and his son Edward, the Black Prince (d. 1376), won the battles of Crécy and Poitiers, captured the city of Calais, and won control of much of France. The resulting stresses almost caused the disintegration of the French kingdom during the early years of the war. In the early 15th century, France again came close to dissolving, but in the late 1420s the military successes of Joan of Arc (d. 1431) led to the victory of the French and the capture of the last English possessions in southern France in 1453. The price was high, as the population of France at the end of the Wars was likely half what it had been at the start of the conflict. Conversely, the Wars had a positive effect on English national identity, doing much to fuse the various local identities into a national English ideal. The conflict with France also helped create a national culture in England separate from French culture, which had previously been the dominant influence. The dominance of the English longbow began during early stages of the Hundred Years' War, and cannon appeared on the battlefield at Crécy in 1346.


title: Middle Ages

text: In modern-day Germany, the Holy Roman Empire continued to rule, but the elective nature of the imperial crown meant there was no enduring dynasty around which a strong state could form. Further east, the kingdoms of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia grew powerful. In Iberia, the Christian kingdoms continued to gain land from the Muslim kingdoms of the peninsula; Portugal concentrated on expanding overseas during the 15th century, while the other kingdoms were riven by difficulties over royal succession and other concerns. After losing the Hundred Years' War, England went on to suffer a long civil war known as the Wars of the Roses, which lasted into the 1490s and only ended when Henry Tudor (r. 1485–1509 as Henry VII) became king and consolidated power with his victory over Richard III (r. 1483–85) at Bosworth in 1485. In Scandinavia, Margaret I of Denmark (r. in Denmark 1387–1412) consolidated Norway, Denmark, and Sweden in the Union of Kalmar, which continued until 1523. The major power around the Baltic Sea was the Hanseatic League, a commercial confederation of city-states that traded from Western Europe to Russia. Scotland emerged from English domination under Robert the Bruce (r. 1306–29), who secured papal recognition of his kingship in 1328.


title: Middle Ages

text: Although the Palaiologos emperors recaptured Constantinople from the Western Europeans in 1261, they were never able to regain control of much of the former imperial lands. They usually controlled only a small section of the Balkan Peninsula near Constantinople, the city itself, and some coastal lands on the Black Sea and around the Aegean Sea. The former Byzantine lands in the Balkans were divided between the new Kingdom of Serbia, the Second Bulgarian Empire and the city-state of Venice. The power of the Byzantine emperors was threatened by a new Turkish tribe, the Ottomans, who established themselves in Anatolia in the 13th century and steadily expanded throughout the 14th century. The Ottomans expanded into Europe, reducing Bulgaria to a vassal state by 1366 and taking over Serbia after its defeat at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. Western Europeans rallied to the plight of the Christians in the Balkans and declared a new crusade in 1396; a great army was sent to the Balkans, where it was defeated at the Battle of Nicopolis. Constantinople was finally captured by the Ottomans in 1453. The Ottoman Empire's ever more aggressive policy of conquest became a horror for the Christian world.


title: Middle Ages

text: During the tumultuous 14th century, disputes within the leadership of the Church led to the Avignon Papacy of 1309–76, also called the "Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy" (a reference to the Babylonian captivity of the Jews), and then to the Great Schism, lasting from 1378 to 1418, when there were two and later three rival popes, each supported by several states. Ecclesiastical officials convened at the Council of Constance in 1414, and in the following year the council deposed one of the rival popes, leaving only two claimants. Further depositions followed, and in November 1417, the council elected Martin V (pope 1417–31) as pope.


title: Middle Ages

text: Besides the schism, the Western Church was riven by theological controversies, some of which turned into heresies. John Wycliffe (d. 1384), an English theologian, was condemned as a heretic in 1415 for teaching that the laity should have access to the text of the Bible as well as for holding views on the Eucharist that were contrary to Church doctrine. Wycliffe's teachings influenced two of the major heretical movements of the later Middle Ages: Lollardy in England and Hussitism in Bohemia. The Bohemian movement initiated with the teaching of Jan Hus, who was burned at the stake in 1415, after being condemned as a heretic by the Council of Constance. The Hussite Church, although the target of a crusade, survived beyond the Middle Ages. Other heresies were manufactured, such as the accusations against the Knights Templar that resulted in their suppression in 1312, and the division of their great wealth between the French King Philip IV (r. 1285–1314) and the Hospitallers.


title: Middle Ages

text: The papacy further refined the practice in the Mass in the Late Middle Ages, holding that the clergy alone was allowed to partake of the wine in the Eucharist. This further distanced the secular laity from the clergy. The laity continued the practices of pilgrimages, veneration of relics, and belief in the power of the Devil. Mystics such as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471) wrote works that taught the laity to focus on their inner spiritual life, which laid the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Besides mysticism, belief in witches and witchcraft became widespread, and by the late 15th century the Church had begun to lend credence to populist fears of witchcraft with its condemnation of witches in 1484, and the publication in 1486 of the "Malleus Maleficarum", the most popular handbook for witch-hunters.


title: Middle Ages

text: During the Later Middle Ages, theologians such as John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and William of Ockham (d. c. 1348) led a reaction against intellectualist scholasticism, objecting to the application of reason to faith. Their efforts undermined the prevailing Platonic idea of universals. Ockham's insistence that reason operates independently of faith allowed science to be separated from theology and philosophy. Legal studies were marked by the steady advance of Roman law into areas of jurisprudence previously governed by customary law. The lone exception to this trend was in England, where the common law remained pre-eminent. Other countries codified their laws; legal codes were promulgated in Castile, Poland, and Lithuania.


title: Middle Ages

text: Education remained mostly focused on the training of future clergy. The basic learning of the letters and numbers remained the province of the family or a village priest, but the secondary subjects of the trivium—grammar, rhetoric, logic—were studied in cathedral schools or in schools provided by cities. Commercial secondary schools spread, and some Italian towns had more than one such enterprise. Universities also spread throughout Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Lay literacy rates rose, but were still low; one estimate gave a literacy rate of ten percent of males and one percent of females in 1500.


title: Middle Ages

text: The publication of vernacular literature increased, with Dante (d. 1321), Petrarch and Boccaccio in 14th-century Italy, Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) and William Langland (d. c. 1386) in England, and François Villon (d. 1464) and Christine de Pizan (d. c. 1430) in France. Much literature remained religious in character, and although a great deal of it continued to be written in Latin, a new demand developed for saints' lives and other devotional tracts in the vernacular languages. This was fed by the growth of the "Devotio Moderna" movement, most prominently in the formation of the Brethren of the Common Life, but also in the works of German mystics such as Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler (d. 1361). Theatre also developed in the guise of miracle plays put on by the Church. At the end of the period, the development of the printing press in about 1450 led to the establishment of publishing houses throughout Europe by 1500.


title: Middle Ages

text: In the early 15th century, the countries of the Iberian Peninsula began to sponsor exploration beyond the boundaries of Europe. Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal (d. 1460) sent expeditions that discovered the Canary Islands, the Azores, and Cape Verde during his lifetime. After his death, exploration continued; Bartolomeu Dias (d. 1500) went around the Cape of Good Hope in 1486, and Vasco da Gama (d. 1524) sailed around Africa to India in 1498. The combined Spanish monarchies of Castile and Aragon sponsored the voyage of exploration by Christopher Columbus (d. 1506) in 1492 that discovered the Americas. The English crown under Henry VII sponsored the voyage of John Cabot (d. 1498) in 1497, which landed on Cape Breton Island.


title: Middle Ages

text: One of the major developments in the military sphere during the Late Middle Ages was the increased use of infantry and light cavalry. The English also employed longbowmen, but other countries were unable to create similar forces with the same success. Armour continued to advance, spurred by the increasing power of crossbows, and plate armour was developed to protect soldiers from crossbows as well as the hand-held guns that were developed. Pole arms reached new prominence with the development of the Flemish and Swiss infantry armed with pikes and other long spears.


title: Middle Ages

text: In agriculture, the increased usage of sheep with long-fibred wool allowed a stronger thread to be spun. In addition, the spinning wheel replaced the traditional distaff for spinning wool, tripling production. A less technological refinement that still greatly affected daily life was the use of buttons as closures for garments, which allowed for better fitting without having to lace clothing on the wearer. Windmills were refined with the creation of the tower mill, allowing the upper part of the windmill to be spun around to face the direction from which the wind was blowing. The blast furnace appeared around 1350 in Sweden, increasing the quantity of iron produced and improving its quality. The first patent law in 1447 in Venice protected the rights of inventors to their inventions.


title: Middle Ages

text: The Late Middle Ages in Europe as a whole correspond to the Trecento and Early Renaissance cultural periods in Italy. Northern Europe and Spain continued to use Gothic styles, which became increasingly elaborate in the 15th century, until almost the end of the period. International Gothic was a courtly style that reached much of Europe in the decades around 1400, producing masterpieces such as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. All over Europe secular art continued to increase in quantity and quality, and in the 15th century the mercantile classes of Italy and Flanders became important patrons, commissioning small portraits of themselves in oils as well as a growing range of luxury items such as jewellery, ivory caskets, cassone chests, and maiolica pottery. These objects also included the Hispano-Moresque ware produced by mostly Mudéjar potters in Spain. Although royalty owned huge collections of plate, little survives except for the Royal Gold Cup. Italian silk manufacture developed, so that Western churches and elites no longer needed to rely on imports from Byzantium or the Islamic world. In France and Flanders tapestry weaving of sets like "The Lady and the Unicorn" became a major luxury industry.


title: Middle Ages

text: The large external sculptural schemes of Early Gothic churches gave way to more sculpture inside the building, as tombs became more elaborate and other features such as pulpits were sometimes lavishly carved, as in the Pulpit by Giovanni Pisano in Sant'Andrea. Painted or carved wooden relief altarpieces became common, especially as churches created many side-chapels. Early Netherlandish painting by artists such as Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) and Rogier van der Weyden (d. 1464) rivalled that of Italy, as did northern illuminated manuscripts, which in the 15th century began to be collected on a large scale by secular elites, who also commissioned secular books, especially histories. From about 1450 printed books rapidly became popular, though still expensive. There were around 30,000 different editions of incunabula, or works printed before 1500, by which time illuminated manuscripts were commissioned only by royalty and a few others. Very small woodcuts, nearly all religious, were affordable even by peasants in parts of Northern Europe from the middle of the 15th century. More expensive engravings supplied a wealthier market with a variety of images.


title: Middle Ages

text: The medieval period is frequently caricatured as a "time of ignorance and superstition" that placed "the word of religious authorities over personal experience and rational activity." This is a legacy from both the Renaissance and Enlightenment when scholars favourably contrasted their intellectual cultures with those of the medieval period. Renaissance scholars saw the Middle Ages as a period of decline from the high culture and civilisation of the Classical world. Enlightenment scholars saw reason as superior to faith, and thus viewed the Middle Ages as a time of ignorance and superstition.


title: Middle Ages

text: Others argue that reason was generally held in high regard during the Middle Ages. Science historian Edward Grant writes, "If revolutionary rational thoughts were expressed [in the 18th century], they were only made possible because of the long medieval tradition that established the use of reason as one of the most important of human activities". Also, contrary to common belief, David Lindberg writes, "the late medieval scholar rarely experienced the coercive power of the Church and would have regarded himself as free (particularly in the natural sciences) to follow reason and observation wherever they led".


title: Middle Ages

text: The caricature of the period is also reflected in some more specific notions. One misconception, first propagated in the 19th century and still very common, is that all people in the Middle Ages believed that the Earth was flat. This is untrue, as lecturers in the medieval universities commonly argued that evidence showed the Earth was a sphere. Lindberg and Ronald Numbers, another scholar of the period, state that there "was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference". Other misconceptions such as "the Church prohibited autopsies and dissections during the Middle Ages", "the rise of Christianity killed off ancient science", or "the medieval Christian Church suppressed the growth of natural philosophy", are all cited by Numbers as examples of widely popular myths that still pass as historical truth, although they are not supported by historical research.


title: Neil Young

text: Neil Percival Young (born November 12, 1945) is a Canadian-American singer and songwriter. After embarking on a music career in Winnipeg in the 1960s, Young moved to Los Angeles, joining Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills, Richie Furay and others. Since the beginning of his solo career with his backing band Crazy Horse, he has released many critically acclaimed and important albums, such as "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere", "After the Gold Rush", "Harvest", "On the Beach" and "Rust Never Sleeps". He was a part-time member of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young.


title: Neil Young

text: His guitar work, deeply personal lyrics and signature high tenor singing voice define his long career. Young also plays piano and harmonica on many albums, which frequently combine folk, rock, country and other musical genres. His often distorted electric guitar playing, especially with Crazy Horse, earned him the nickname "Godfather of Grunge" and led to his 1995 album "Mirror Ball" with Pearl Jam. More recently he has been backed by Promise of the Real.


title: Neil Young

text: Young directed (or co-directed) films using the pseudonym "Bernard Shakey", including "Journey Through the Past" (1973), "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979), "Human Highway" (1982), "Greendale" (2003), "CSNY/Déjà Vu" (2008), and "Harvest Time" (2022). He also contributed to the soundtracks of the films "Philadelphia" (1993) and "Dead Man" (1995).


title: Neil Young

text: Young has received several Grammy and Juno Awards. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him twice: in 1995 as a solo artist and in 1997 as a member of Buffalo Springfield. In 2000, "Rolling Stone" named Young No. 34 on their list of the 100 greatest musical artists. According to Acclaimed Music, he is the seventh most celebrated artist in popular music history. 21 of his albums and singles have been certified Gold and Platinum in U.S. by RIAA certification. Young was awarded the Order of Manitoba in 2006 and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2009.


title: Neil Young

text: Neil Young was born on November 12, 1945, in Toronto, Canada. His father, Scott Alexander Young (1918–2005), was a journalist and sportswriter who also wrote fiction. His mother, Edna Blow Ragland "Rassy" Young (1918–1990) was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Although Canadian, his mother had American and French ancestry. Young's parents married in 1940 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and moved to Toronto shortly thereafter where their first son, Robert "Bob" Young, was born in 1942.


title: Neil Young

text: Shortly after Young's birth in 1945, the family moved to rural Omemee, Ontario, which Young later described fondly as a "sleepy little place". Young contracted polio in the late summer of 1951 during the last major outbreak of the disease in Ontario, and as a result became partially paralyzed on his left side. After the conclusion of his hospitalization, the Young family wintered in Florida, whose milder weather they believed would help Neil's convalescence. During that period, Young briefly attended Faulkner Elementary School in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. In 1952, upon returning to Canada, Young moved from Omemee to Pickering (1956), lived for a year in Winnipeg (where he would later return), before relocating to Toronto (1957–1960). While in Toronto, Young briefly attended Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute as a freshman in 1959. It is rumored that he was expelled for riding a motorcycle down the hall of the school.


title: Neil Young

text: Young became interested in popular music he heard on the radio. When Young was twelve, his father, who had had several extramarital affairs, left his mother. His mother asked for a divorce, which was granted in 1960. Young went to live with his mother, who had moved back to Winnipeg, while his brother Bob stayed with his father in Toronto.


title: Neil Young

text: During the mid-1950s, Young listened to rock 'n roll, rockabilly, doo-wop, R&B, country, and western pop. He idolized Elvis Presley and later referred to him in a number of his songs. Other early musical influences included Link Wray, Lonnie Mack, Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs, The Ventures, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Chuck Berry, Hank Marvin, Little Richard, Fats Domino, The Chantels, The Monotones, Ronnie Self, the Fleetwoods, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Gogi Grant. Young began to play music himself on a plastic ukulele, before, as he would later relate, going on to "a better ukulele to a banjo ukulele to a baritone ukulele – everything but a guitar."


title: Neil Young

text: Young and his mother settled into the working-class area of Fort Rouge, Winnipeg, where he enrolled at Earl Grey Junior High School. It was there that he formed his first band, the Jades, and met Ken Koblun. While attending Kelvin High School in Winnipeg, he played in several instrumental rock bands, eventually dropping out of school in favor of a musical career. Young's first stable band was the Squires, with Ken Koblun, Jeff Wuckert and Bill Edmondson on drums, who had a local hit called "The Sultan". Over a three-year period the band played hundreds of shows at community centers, dance halls, clubs and schools in Winnipeg and other parts of Manitoba. The band also played in Fort William (now part of the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario), where they recorded a series of demos produced by a local producer, Ray Dee, whom Young called "the original Briggs". While playing at The Flamingo, Young met Stephen Stills, whose band The Company was playing the same venue, and they became friends. The Squires primarily performed in Winnipeg and rural Manitoba in towns such as Selkirk, Neepawa, Brandon and Giroux (near Steinbach), with a few shows in northern Ontario.


title: Neil Young

text: After leaving the Squires, Young worked folk clubs in Winnipeg, where he first met Joni Mitchell. Mitchell recalls Young as having been highly influenced by Bob Dylan at the time. Young said Phil Ochs was "a big influence on me," telling a radio station in 1969 that Ochs was "on the same level with Dylan in my eyes." Here he wrote some of his earliest and most enduring folk songs such as "Sugar Mountain", about lost youth. Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game" in response. The Winnipeg band The Guess Who (with Randy Bachman as lead guitarist) had a Canadian Top 40 hit with Young's "Flying on the Ground is Wrong", which was Young's first major success as a songwriter.


title: Neil Young

text: In 1965, Young toured Canada as a solo artist. In 1966, while in Toronto, he joined the Rick James-fronted Mynah Birds. The band managed to secure a record deal with the Motown label, but as their first album was being recorded, James was arrested for being AWOL from the Navy Reserve. After the Mynah Birds disbanded, Young and the bass player Bruce Palmer decided to pawn the group's musical equipment and buy a Pontiac hearse, which they used to relocate to Los Angeles. Young admitted in a 2009 interview that he was in the United States illegally until he received a "green card" (permanent residency permit) in 1970.


title: Neil Young

text: Once they reached Los Angeles, Young and Palmer met up with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay after a chance encounter in traffic on Sunset Boulevard. Along with Dewey Martin, they formed Buffalo Springfield. A mixture of folk, country, psychedelia, and rock, lent a hard edge by the twin lead guitars of Stills and Young, made Buffalo Springfield a critical success, and their first record "Buffalo Springfield" (1966) sold well after Stills' topical song "For What It's Worth" became a hit, aided by Young's melodic harmonics played on electric guitar. According to "Rolling Stone", the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and other sources, Buffalo Springfield helped create the genres of folk rock and country rock.


title: Neil Young

text: Distrust of their management, as well as the arrest and deportation of Palmer, worsened the already strained relations among the group members and led to Buffalo Springfield's demise. A second album, "Buffalo Springfield Again", was released in late 1967, but two of Young's three contributions were solo tracks recorded apart from the rest of the group.


title: Neil Young

text: From that album, "Mr. Soul" was the only Young song of the three that all five members of the group performed together. "Broken Arrow" features snippets of sound from other sources, including opening the song with a soundbite of Dewey Martin singing "Mr. Soul" and closing it with the thumping of a heartbeat. "Expecting to Fly" featured a string arrangement that Young's co-producer for the track, Jack Nitzsche, dubbed "symphonic pop".


title: Neil Young

text: In May 1968, the band split up for good, but to fulfill a contractual obligation, a final studio album, "Last Time Around", was released. The album was primarily composed of recordings made earlier that year. Young contributed the songs "On the Way Home" and "I Am a Child", singing lead on the latter. In 1997, the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Young did not appear at the ceremony. The three surviving members, Furay, Stills, and Young, appeared together as Buffalo Springfield at Young's annual Bridge School Benefit on October 23–24, 2010, and at Bonnaroo in the summer of 2011.


title: Neil Young

text: Young played as a studio session guitarist for some 1968 recordings by The Monkees which appeared on the "Head" and "Instant Replay" albums. Young had known Monkee Mike Nesmith since their folk shows at The Troubadour in 1965.


title: Neil Young

text: After the breakup of Buffalo Springfield, Young signed a solo deal with Reprise Records, home of his colleague and friend Joni Mitchell, with whom he shared a manager, Elliot Roberts. Roberts managed Young until Roberts' death in 2019. Young and Roberts immediately began work on Young's first solo record, "Neil Young" (January 22, 1969), which received mixed reviews. In a 1970 interview, Young deprecated the album as being "overdubbed rather than played." The album contains songs that remain a staple of his live shows, including "The Loner."


title: Neil Young

text: For his next album, Young recruited three musicians from a band called the Rockets: Danny Whitten on guitar, Billy Talbot on bass guitar, and Ralph Molina on drums. These three took the name Crazy Horse (after the historical figure of the same name), and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" (May 1969) is credited to "Neil Young with Crazy Horse." Recorded in just two weeks, the album includes "Cinnamon Girl", "Cowgirl in the Sand", and "Down by the River." Young reportedly wrote all three songs in bed on the same day while nursing a high fever of .


title: Neil Young

text: Shortly after the release of "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," Young reunited with Stephen Stills by joining Crosby, Stills & Nash, who had already released one album "Crosby, Stills & Nash" as a trio in May 1969. Young was originally offered a position as a sideman, but agreed to join only if he received full membership, and the group – winners of the 1969 Best New Artist Grammy Award – was renamed Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. The quartet debuted in Chicago on August 16, 1969, and later performed at the famous Woodstock Festival, during which Young skipped the majority of the acoustic set and refused to be filmed during the electric set, even telling the cameramen: "One of you fuckin' guys comes near me and I'm gonna fuckin' hit you with my guitar". During the making of their first album, "Déjà Vu" (March 11, 1970), the musicians frequently argued, particularly Young and Stills, who both fought for control. Stills continued throughout their lifelong relationship to criticize Young, saying that he "wanted to play folk music in a rock band." Despite the tension, Young's tenure with CSNY coincided with the band's most creative and successful period, and greatly contributed to his subsequent success as a solo artist.


title: Neil Young

text: Young wrote "Ohio" following the Kent State massacre on May 4, 1970. The song was quickly recorded by CSNY and immediately released as a single, even though CSNY's "Teach Your Children" was still climbing the singles charts.


title: Neil Young

text: Later in the year, Young released his third solo album, "After the Gold Rush" (August 31, 1970), which featured, among others, Nils Lofgren, Stephen Stills, and CSNY bassist Greg Reeves. Young also recorded some tracks with Crazy Horse, but dismissed them early in the sessions. The eventual recording was less amplified than "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere", with a wider range of sounds. Young's newfound fame with CSNY made the album his commercial breakthrough as a solo artist, and it contains some of his best known work, including "Tell Me Why" and "Don't Let It Bring You Down"; the singles "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love"; and the title track, "After the Gold Rush", played on piano, with dreamlike lyrics that ran a gamut of subjects from drugs and interpersonal relationships to environmental concerns. Young's bitter condemnation of racism in the heavy blues-rock song "Southern Man" (along with a later song entitled "Alabama") was also controversial with southerners in an era of desegregation, prompting Lynyrd Skynyrd to decry Young by name in the lyrics to their hit "Sweet Home Alabama." However, Young said he was a fan of Skynyrd's music, and the band's front man Ronnie Van Zant was later photographed wearing a "Tonight's the Night" T-shirt on the cover of an album.


title: Neil Young

text: In the autumn of 1970, Young began a solo acoustic tour of North America, during which he played a variety of his Buffalo Springfield and CSNY songs on guitar and piano, along with material from his solo albums and a number of new songs. Some songs premiered by Young on the tour, like "Journey through the Past", would never find a home on a studio album, while other songs, like "See the Sky About to Rain", would only be released in coming years. With CSNY splitting up and Crazy Horse having signed their own record deal, Young's tour, now entitled Journey Through the Past, continued into early 1971, and its focus shifted more to newer songs he had been writing; he famously remarked that having written so many, he could not think of anything to do but play them. Many gigs were sold out, including concerts at Carnegie Hall and a pair of acclaimed hometown shows at Toronto's Massey Hall, which were taped for a planned live album. The shows became legendary among Young fans, and the recordings were officially released nearly 40 years later as an official bootleg in Young's Archive series.


title: Neil Young

text: Near the end of his tour, Young performed one of the new acoustic songs on the "Johnny Cash" TV show. "The Needle and the Damage Done", a somber lament on the pain caused by heroin addiction, had been inspired in part by Crazy Horse member Danny Whitten, who eventually died while battling his drug problems. While in Nashville for the Cash taping, Young accepted the invitation of Quadrafonic Sound Studios owner Elliot Mazer to record tracks there with a group of country-music session musicians who were pulled together at the last minute. Making a connection with them, he christened them The Stray Gators, and began playing with them. Befitting the immediacy of the project, Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor were brought in from the Cash taping to do background vocals. Against the advice of his producer David Briggs, he scrapped plans for the imminent release of the live acoustic recording in favor of a studio album consisting of the Nashville sessions, electric-guitar oriented sessions recorded later in his barn, and two recordings made with the London Symphony Orchestra at Barking (credited as Barking Town Hall and now the Broadway Theatre) during March 1971. The result was Young's fourth album, "Harvest" (February 14, 1972), which was also the best selling album of 1972 in the US. The only remnant left of the original live concept was the album's live acoustic performance of "Needle and the Damage Done."


title: Neil Young

text: After his success with CSNY, Young purchased a ranch in the rural hills above Woodside and Redwood City in Northern California ("Broken Arrow Ranch", where he lived until his divorce in 2014). He wrote the song "Old Man" in honor of the land's longtime caretaker, Louis Avila. The song "A Man Needs a Maid" was inspired by his relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress. "Heart of Gold" was released as the first single from "Harvest", the only No. 1 hit in his career. "Old Man" was also popular, reaching No. 31 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 chart, marking Young's third and final appearance in the chart's Top 40 as a solo artist.


title: Neil Young

text: The album's recording had been almost accidental. Its mainstream success caught Young off guard, and his first instinct was to back away from stardom. In the "Decade" (1977) compilation, Young chose to include his greatest hits from the period, but his handwritten liner notes famously described "Heart of Gold" as the song that "put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there."


title: Neil Young

text: Although a new tour with The Stray Gators (now augmented by Danny Whitten) had been planned to follow up on the success of "Harvest", it became apparent during rehearsals that Whitten could not function due to drug abuse. On November 18, 1972, shortly after he was fired from the tour preparations, Whitten was found dead of an apparent alcohol/diazepam overdose. Young described the incident to "Rolling Stone"s Cameron Crowe in 1975: "[We] were rehearsing with him and he just couldn't cut it. He couldn't remember anything. He was too out of it. Too far gone. I had to tell him to go back to L.A. 'It's not happening, man. You're not together enough.' He just said, 'I've got nowhere else to go, man. How am I gonna tell my friends?' And he split. That night the coroner called me from L.A. and told me he'd OD'd. That blew my mind. I loved Danny. I felt responsible. And from there, I had to go right out on this huge tour of huge arenas. I was very nervous and ... insecure."


title: Neil Young

text: On the tour, Young struggled with his voice and the performance of drummer Kenny Buttrey, a noted Nashville session musician who was unaccustomed to performing in the hard rock milieu; Buttrey was eventually replaced by former CSNY drummer Johnny Barbata, while David Crosby and Graham Nash contributed rhythm guitar and backing vocals to the final dates of the tour. The album assembled in the aftermath of this incident, "Time Fades Away" (October 15, 1973), has often been described by Young as "[his] least favorite record", and was not officially released on CD until 2017 (as part of Young's ). Nevertheless, Young and his band tried several new musical approaches in this period. "Time Fades Away", for instance, was recorded live, although it was an album of new material, an approach Young would repeat with more success later on. "Time" was the first of three consecutive commercial failures which would later become known collectively to fans as the "Ditch Trilogy", as contrasted with the more middle-of-the-road pop of "Harvest". These subsequent albums were seen as more challenging expressions of Young's inner conflicts on achieving success, expressing both the specific struggles of his friends and himself, and the decaying idealism of his generation in America at the time.


title: Neil Young

text: In the second half of 1973, Young formed The Santa Monica Flyers, with Crazy Horse's rhythm section augmented by Nils Lofgren on guitar and piano and "Harvest"/"Time Fades Away" veteran Ben Keith on pedal steel guitar. Deeply affected by the drug-induced deaths of Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry, Young recorded an album specifically inspired by the incidents, "Tonight's the Night" (June 20, 1975). The album's dark tone and rawness led Reprise to delay its release and Young had to pressure them for two years before they would do so. While his record company was stalling, Young recorded another album, "On the Beach" (July 16, 1974), which presented a more melodic, acoustic sound at times, including a recording of the older song "See the Sky About to Rain", but dealt with similarly dark themes such as the collapse of 1960s folk ideals, the downside of success and the underbelly of the Californian lifestyle. Like "Time Fades Away", it sold poorly but eventually became a critical favorite, presenting some of Young's most original work. A review of the 2003 re-release on CD of "On the Beach" described the music as "mesmerizing, harrowing, lucid, and bleary".


title: Neil Young

text: After completing "On the Beach", Young reunited with "Harvest" producer Elliot Mazer to record another acoustic album, "Homegrown". Most of the songs were written after Young's breakup with Carrie Snodgress, and thus the tone of the album was somewhat dark. Though "Homegrown" was reportedly entirely complete, Young decided, not for the first or last time in his career, to drop it and release something else instead, in this case, "Tonight's the Night", at the suggestion of Band bassist Rick Danko. Young further explained his move by saying: "It was a little too personal ... it scared me". Most of the songs from "Homegrown" were later incorporated into other Young albums while the original album was not released until 2020. "Tonight's the Night," when finally released in 1975, sold poorly, as had the previous albums of the "ditch" trilogy, and received mixed reviews at the time, but is now regarded as a landmark album. In Young's own opinion, it was the closest he ever came to art.


title: Neil Young

text: Young reunited with Crosby, Stills, and Nash after a four-year hiatus in the summer of 1974 for a concert tour which was partially recorded; highlights were ultimately released in 2014 as "CSNY 1974". It was one of the first ever stadium tours, and the largest tour in which Young has participated to date.


title: Neil Young

text: In 1975, Young reformed Crazy Horse with Frank Sampedro on guitar as his backup band for his eighth album, "Zuma" (November 10, 1975). Many of the songs dealt with the theme of failed relationships; "Cortez the Killer", a retelling of the Spanish conquest of Mexico from the viewpoint of the Aztecs, may also be heard as an allegory of love lost. "Zuma"s closing track, "Through My Sails", was the only released fragment from aborted sessions with Crosby, Stills and Nash for another group album.


title: Neil Young

text: In 1976, Young reunited with Stephen Stills for the album "Long May You Run" (September 20, 1976), credited to The Stills-Young Band; the follow-up tour was ended midway through by Young, who sent Stills a telegram that read: "Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way. Eat a peach, Neil."


title: Neil Young

text: In 1976, Young performed with Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and numerous other rock musicians in the high-profile all-star concert "The Last Waltz", the final performance by The Band. The release of Martin Scorsese's movie of the concert was delayed while Scorsese unwillingly re-edited it to obscure the lump of cocaine that was clearly visible hanging from Young's nose during his performance of "Helpless". "American Stars 'n Bars" (June 13, 1977) contained two songs originally recorded for the "Homegrown" album, "Homegrown" and "Star of Bethlehem", as well as newer material, including the future concert staple "Like a Hurricane". Performers on the record included Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris and Young protégé Nicolette Larson along with Crazy Horse. In 1977, Young also released the compilation "Decade", a personally selected set of songs spanning every aspect of his work, including a handful of previously unreleased songs. The record included less commercial album tracks alongside radio hits.


title: Neil Young

text: "Comes a Time" (October 2, 1978), Young's first entirely new solo recording since the mid-1970s, marked a return to the commercially accessible, Nashville-inspired sound of "Harvest" while also featuring contributions from Larson and Crazy Horse. The album also marked a return to his folk roots, as exemplified by a cover of Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds", a song Young associated with his childhood in Canada. Another of the album's songs, "Lotta Love", was also recorded by Larson, with her version reaching No. 8 on the "Billboard" Hot 100 in February 1979. In 1978, much of the filming was done for Young's film "Human Highway", which took its name from a song featured on "Comes a Time". Over four years, Young would spend US$3,000,000 of his own money on production (US$ in dollars). This also marked the beginning of his brief collaboration with the art punk band Devo, whose members appeared in the film.


title: Neil Young

text: Young set out in 1978 on the lengthy "Rust Never Sleeps" tour, in which he played a wealth of new material. Each concert was divided into a solo acoustic set and an electric set with Crazy Horse. The electric sets, featuring an abrasive style of playing, were influenced by the punk rock zeitgeist of the late 1970s and provided a stark contrast from "Comes a Time". Two new songs, the acoustic "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)" and electric "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" were the centerpiece of the new material. During the filming of "Human Highway", Young had collaborated with Devo on a cacophonous version of "Hey Hey, My My" at the Different Fur studio in San Francisco and would later introduce the song to Crazy Horse. The lyric "It's better to burn out than to fade away" was widely quoted by his peers and by critics. The album has also widely been considered a precursor of grunge music and many grunge artists have said they were inspired by Young's distorted guitars on the B side to this album. Young also compared the rise of Johnny Rotten with that of the recently deceased "King" Elvis Presley, who himself had once been disparaged as a dangerous influence only to later become an icon. Rotten returned the favor by playing one of Young's songs, "Revolution Blues" from "On the Beach", on a London radio show, an early sign of Young's eventual embrace by a number of punk-influenced alternative musicians.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's two accompanying albums "Rust Never Sleeps" (July 2, 1979; new material culled from live recordings, but featuring studio overdubs) and "Live Rust" (November 19, 1979; a genuine concert recording featuring old and new material) captured the two sides of the concerts, with solo acoustic songs on side A, and fierce, uptempo, electric songs on side B. A movie version of the concerts, also called "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979), was directed by Young under the pseudonym "Bernard Shakey". Young worked with rock artist Jim Evans to create the poster art for the film, using the "Star Wars" Jawas as a theme. Young's work since "Harvest" had alternated between being rejected by mass audiences and being seen as backward-looking by critics, sometimes both at once, and now he was suddenly viewed as relevant by a new generation, who began to discover his earlier work. Readers and critics of "Rolling Stone" voted him Artist of the Year for 1979 (along with The Who), selected "Rust Never Sleeps" as Album of the Year, and voted him Male Vocalist of the Year as well. "The Village Voice" named "Rust Never Sleeps" as the year's second best album in the Pazz & Jop Poll, a survey of nationwide critics, and honored Young as the Artist of the Decade. The Warner Music Vision release on VHS of "Rust Never Sleeps" in 1987 had a running time of 116 minutes, and although fully manufactured in Germany, was initially imported from there by the markets throughout Europe.


title: Neil Young

text: At the start of the 1980s, distracted by medical concerns relating to the cerebral palsy of his son, Ben, Young had little time to spend on writing and recording. After providing the incidental music to the 1980 film "Where the Buffalo Roam", Young released "Hawks & Doves" (November 3, 1980), a short record pieced together from sessions going back to 1974.


title: Neil Young

text: "Re·ac·tor" (1981), an electric album recorded with Crazy Horse, also included material from the 1970s. Young did not tour in support of either album; in total, he played only one show, a set at the 1980 Bread and Roses Festival in Berkeley, between the end of his 1978 tour with Crazy Horse and the start of his tour with the Trans Band in mid-1982.


title: Neil Young

text: The 1982 album "Trans", which incorporated vocoders, synthesizers, and electronic beats, was Young's first for the new label Geffen Records (distributed at the time by Warner Bros. Records, whose parent Warner Music Group owns most of Young's solo and band catalog) and represented a distinct stylistic departure. Young later revealed that an inspiration for the album was the theme of technology and communication with Ben, who could not speak. An extensive tour preceded the release of the album, and was documented by the video "Neil Young in Berlin", which saw release in 1986. MTV played the video for "Sample and Hold" in light rotation.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's next album, 1983's "Everybody's Rockin'", included several rockabilly covers and clocked in at less than 25 minutes in length. Young was backed by the Shocking Pinks for the supporting US tour. "Trans" (1982) had already drawn the ire of label head David Geffen for its lack of commercial appeal, and with "Everybody's Rockin" following seven months later, Geffen Records sued Young for making music "unrepresentative" of himself. The album was also notable as the first for which Young made commercial music videos – Tim Pope directed the videos for "Wonderin'" and "Cry, Cry, Cry". Also premiered in 1983, though little seen, was the long-gestating "Human Highway". Co-directed and co-written by Young, the eclectic comedy starred Young, Dean Stockwell, Russ Tamblyn, Dennis Hopper, David Blue, Sally Kirkland, Charlotte Stewart and members of Devo.


title: Neil Young

text: Young did not release an album in 1984, his first unproductive year since beginning his career with Buffalo Springfield in 1966. Young's lack of productivity was largely due to the ongoing legal battle with Geffen, although he was also frustrated that the label had rejected his 1982 country album "Old Ways". It was also the year when Young's third child was born, a girl named Amber Jean, who was later diagnosed with inherited epilepsy.


title: Neil Young

text: Young spent most of 1984 and all of 1985 touring for "Old Ways" (August 12, 1985) with his country band, the International Harvesters. The album was finally released in an altered form midway through 1985. Young also appeared at that year's Live Aid concert in Philadelphia, collaborating with Crosby, Stills and Nash for the quartet's first performance for a paying audience in over ten years.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's last two albums for Geffen were more conventional in the genre, although they incorporated production techniques like synthesizers and echoing drums that were previously uncommon in Young's music. Young recorded 1986's "Landing on Water" without Crazy Horse but reunited with the band for the subsequent year-long tour and final Geffen album, "Life", which emerged in 1987. Young's album sales dwindled steadily throughout the eighties; today "Life" remains his all-time-least successful studio album, with an estimated four hundred thousand sales worldwide.


title: Neil Young

text: Switching back to his old label Reprise Records, Young continued to tour relentlessly, assembling a new blues band called The Bluenotes in mid-1987 (a legal dispute with musician Harold Melvin forced the eventual rechristening of the band as Ten Men Working midway through the tour). The addition of a brass section provided a new jazzier sound, and the title track of 1988's "This Note's For You" became Young's first hit single of the decade. Accompanied by a video that parodied corporate rock, the pretensions of advertising, and Michael Jackson, the song was initially unofficially banned by MTV for mentioning the brand names of some of their sponsors. Young wrote an open letter, "What does the M in MTV stand for: music or money?" Despite this, the video was eventually named best video of the year by the network in 1989.


title: Neil Young

text: Young reunited with Crosby, Stills, and Nash to record the 1988 album "American Dream" and play two benefit concerts late in the year, but the group did not embark upon a full tour.


title: Neil Young

text: Young attracted criticism from liberals in the music industry when he supported President Ronald Reagan and said he was "tired of people constantly apologising for being Americans". In a 1985 interview with "Melody Maker", he said about the AIDS pandemic: “You go to a supermarket and you see a faggot behind the fuckin' cash register, you don't want him to handle your potatoes." In the same interview, Young also complained about welfare beneficiaries, saying: "Stop being supported by the government and get out and work. You have to make the weak stand up on one leg, or half a leg, whatever they've got." "Rolling Stone" wrote in 2013 that Young "almost certainly regrets that horrific statement" and that he "quickly moved away from right-wing politics".


title: Neil Young

text: Young's 1989 single "Rockin' in the Free World", which hit No. 2 on the US mainstream-rock charts, and accompanying the album, "Freedom", returned Young to the popular consciousness after a decade of sometimes-difficult genre experiments. The album's lyrics were often overtly political; "Rockin' in the Free World" deals with homelessness, terrorism, and environmental degradation, implicitly criticizing the government policies of President George H. W. Bush.


title: Neil Young

text: The use of heavy feedback and distortion on several "Freedom" tracks was reminiscent of the "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979) album and foreshadowed the imminent rise of grunge. The rising stars of the subgenre, including Nirvana's Kurt Cobain and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, frequently cited Young as a major influence, contributing to his popular revival. A tribute album called "" was released in 1989, featuring covers by a range of alternative and grunge acts, including Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Soul Asylum, Dinosaur Jr, and the Pixies.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's 1990 album "Ragged Glory", recorded with Crazy Horse in a barn on his Northern California ranch, continued this distortion-heavy aesthetic. Young toured for the album with Orange County, California country-punk band Social Distortion and Sonic Youth as support, much to the consternation of many of his old fans. "Weld", a two-disc live album documenting the tour, was released in 1991. Sonic Youth's influence was evident on "Arc", a 35-minute collage of feedback and distortion spliced together at the suggestion of Thurston Moore and originally packaged with some versions of "Weld".


title: Neil Young

text: 1992's "Harvest Moon" marked an abrupt return (prompted by Young's hyperacusis in the aftermath of the "Weld" tour) to the country and folk-rock stylings of "Harvest" and reunited him with some of the musicians from that album, including the core members of the Stray Gators and singers Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor. The title track was a minor hit, and the record was well received by critics, winning the Juno Award for Album of the Year in 1994. Young also contributed to lifelong friend Randy Bachman's nostalgic 1992 tune "Prairie Town", and garnered a 1993 Academy Award nomination for his song "Philadelphia", from the soundtrack of the Jonathan Demme movie of the same name. An "MTV Unplugged" performance and album emerged in 1993. Later that year, Young collaborated with Booker T. and the M.G.s for a summer tour of Europe and North America, with Blues Traveler, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam also on the bill. Some European shows ended with a rendition of "Rockin' in the Free World" played with Pearl Jam, foreshadowing their eventual full-scale collaboration two years later.


title: Neil Young

text: In 1994, Young again collaborated with Crazy Horse for "Sleeps with Angels", a record whose dark, somber mood was influenced by Kurt Cobain's death earlier that year: the title track in particular dealt with Cobain's life and death, without mentioning him by name. Cobain had quoted Young's lyric "It's better to burn out than fade away" (a line from "My My, Hey Hey") in his suicide note. Young had reportedly made repeated attempts to contact Cobain prior to his death. Young and Pearl Jam performed "Act of Love" at an abortion rights benefit along with Crazy Horse, and were present at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner, sparking interest in a collaboration between the two. Still enamored with the grunge scene, Young reconnected with Pearl Jam in 1995 for the live-in-the-studio album "Mirror Ball" and a tour of Europe with the band and producer Brendan O'Brien backing Young. 1995 also marked Young's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where he was inducted by Eddie Vedder.


title: Neil Young

text: In 1995, Young and his manager Elliot Roberts founded a record label, Vapor Records. It has released recordings by Tegan and Sara, Spoon, Jonathan Richman, Vic Chesnutt, Everest, Pegi Young, Jets Overhead, and Young himself, among others.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's next collaborative partner was filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, who asked Young to compose a soundtrack to his 1995 black-and-white western film "Dead Man". Young's instrumental soundtrack was improvized while he watched the film alone in a studio. The death of longtime mentor, friend, and producer David Briggs in late 1995 prompted Young to reconnect with Crazy Horse the following year for the album and tour "Broken Arrow". A Jarmusch-directed concert film and live album of the tour, "Year of the Horse", emerged in 1997. From 1996 to 1997 Young and Crazy Horse toured extensively throughout Europe and North America, including a stint as part of the H.O.R.D.E. Festival's sixth annual tour.


title: Neil Young

text: In 1998, Young renewed his collaboration with the rock band Phish, sharing the stage at the annual Farm Aid concert and then at Young's Bridge School Benefit, where he joined headliners Phish for renditions of "Helpless" and "I Shall Be Released". Phish declined Young's later invitation to be his backing band on his 1999 North American tour.


title: Neil Young

text: The decade ended with the release in late 1999 of "Looking Forward", another reunion with Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The subsequent tour of the United States and Canada with the reformed quartet earned US$42.1 million, making it the eighth largest grossing tour of 2000.


title: Neil Young

text: Neil Young continued to release new material at a rapid pace through the first decade of the new millennium. The studio album "Silver & Gold" and live album "Road Rock Vol. 1" were released in 2000 and were both accompanied by live concert films. His 2001 single "Let's Roll" was a tribute to the victims of the September 11 attacks, and the effective action taken by the passengers and crew on Flight 93 in particular.


title: Neil Young

text: In 2003, Young released "Greendale", a concept album recorded with Crazy Horse members Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina. The songs loosely revolved around the murder of a police officer in a small town in California and its effects on the town's inhabitants. Under the pseudonym "Bernard Shakey", Young directed an accompanying film of the same name, featuring actors lip-synching to the music from the album. He toured extensively with the "Greendale" material throughout 2003 and 2004, first with a solo, acoustic version in Europe, then with a full-cast stage show in North America, Japan, and Australia. Young began using biodiesel on the 2004 Greendale tour, powering his trucks and tour buses with the fuel. "Our Greendale tour is now ozone friendly", he said. "I plan to continue to use this government approved and regulated fuel exclusively from now on to prove that it is possible to deliver the goods anywhere in North America without using foreign oil, while being environmentally responsible."


title: Neil Young

text: In March 2005, while working on the "Prairie Wind" album in Nashville, Young was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. He was treated successfully with a minimally invasive neuroradiological procedure, performed in a New York hospital on March 29, but two days afterwards he passed out on a New York street from bleeding from the femoral artery, which radiologists had used to access the aneurysm. The complication forced Young to cancel his scheduled appearance at the Juno Awards telecast in Winnipeg, but within months he was back on stage, appearing at the close of the Live 8 concert in Barrie, Ontario, on July 2. During the performance, he debuted a new song, a soft hymn called "When God Made Me". Young's brush with death influenced "Prairie Wind"s themes of retrospection and mortality. The album's live premiere in Nashville was recorded by filmmaker Jonathan Demme in the 2006 film "".


title: Neil Young

text: Young's renewed activism manifested itself in the 2006 album "Living with War", which like the much earlier song "Ohio", was recorded and released in less than a month as a direct result of current events. Most of the album's songs rebuked the Bush administration's policy of war by examining its human costs to soldiers, their loved ones, and civilians, but Young also included a few songs on other themes and an outright protest song entitled "Let's Impeach the President", in which he asserted that Bush had lied to lead the country into war.


title: Neil Young

text: While Young had never been a stranger to eco-friendly lyrics, themes of environmentalist spirituality and activism became increasingly prominent in his work throughout the 1990s and 2000s, especially on "Greendale" (2003) and "Living with War" (2006). The trend continued on 2007's "Chrome Dreams II", with lyrics exploring Young's personal eco-spirituality.


title: Neil Young

text: Young remains on the board of directors of Farm Aid, an organization he co-founded with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp in 1985. According to its website, it is the longest running concert benefit series in the US and it has raised $43 million since its first benefit concert in 1985. Each year, Young co-hosts and performs with well-known guest performers who include Dave Matthews and producers who include Evelyn Shriver and Mark Rothbaum, at the Farm Aid annual benefit concerts to raise funds and provide grants to family farms and prevent foreclosures, provide a crisis hotline, and create and promote home grown farm food in the United States.


title: Neil Young

text: In 2008, Young revealed his latest project, the production of a hybrid-engine 1959 Lincoln called LincVolt. A new album loosely based on the Lincvolt project, "Fork in the Road", was released on April 7, 2009.


title: Neil Young

text: A Jonathan Demme concert film from a 2007 concert at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, called the "Neil Young Trunk Show" premiered on March 21, 2009, at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival in Austin, Texas. It was featured at the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2009, and was released in the US on March 19, 2010, to critical acclaim.


title: Neil Young

text: In 2009, Young headlined the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and Glastonbury Festival in Pilton, England, at Hard Rock Calling in London (where he was joined onstage by Paul McCartney for a rendition of "A Day in the Life") and, after years of unsuccessful booking attempts, the Isle of Wight Festival.


title: Neil Young

text: Young has been a vocal opponent of the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline, which would run from Alberta to Texas. When discussing the environmental impact on the oilsands of Fort McMurray, Alberta, Young asserted that the area now resembles the Japanese city of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bomb attack of World War II. Young has referred to issues surrounding the proposed use of oil pipelines as "scabs on our lives". In an effort to become more involved, Young has worked directly with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation to draw attention to this issue, performing benefit concerts and speaking publicly on the subject. In 2014, he played four shows in Canada dedicated to the Honor the Treaties movement, raising money for the Athabasca Chipewyan legal defense fund. In 2015, he and Willie Nelson held a festival in Neligh, Nebraska, called "Harvest the Hope", raising awareness of the impact of oilsands and oil pipelines on Native Americans and family farmers. Both received honors from leaders of the Rosebud, Oglala Lakota, Ponca and Omaha nations, and were invested with sacred buffalo robes.


title: Neil Young

text: Young participated in the Blue Dot Tour, which was organized and fronted by environmental activist David Suzuki, and toured all 10 Canadian provinces alongside other Canadian artists including the Barenaked Ladies, Feist, and Robert Bateman. The intent of Young's participation in this tour was to raise awareness of the environmental damage caused by the exploitation of oilsands. Young has argued that the amount of released as a byproduct of oilsand oil extraction is equivalent to the amount released by the total number of cars in Canada each day. Young has faced criticism by representatives from within the Canadian petroleum industry, who have argued that his statements are irresponsible. Young's opposition to the construction of oil pipelines has influenced his music as well. His song, "Who's Going to Stand Up?" was written to protest this issue, and features the lyric "Ban fossil fuel and draw the line / Before we build one more pipeline".


title: Neil Young

text: In addition to directly criticizing members of the oil industry, Young has also focused blame on the actions of the Canadian government for ignoring the environmental impacts of climate change. He referred to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as "an embarrassment to many Canadians ... [and] a very poor imitation of the George Bush administration in the United States". Young was also critical of Barack Obama's government for failing to uphold the promises made regarding environmental policies during his election campaign.


title: Neil Young

text: Young recorded "A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop" in response to Starbucks' possible involvement with Monsanto and use of genetically modified food. The song was included on his 2015 concept album "The Monsanto Years".


title: Neil Young

text: On January 22, 2010, Young performed "Long May You Run" on the final episode of "The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien". On the same night, he and Dave Matthews performed the Hank Williams song "Alone and Forsaken", for the "" charity telethon, in response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Young also performed "Long May You Run" at the closing ceremony of the 2010 Olympic winter games in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In May 2010, it was revealed Young had begun working on a new studio album produced by Daniel Lanois. This was announced by David Crosby, who said that the album "will be a very heartfelt record. I expect it will be a very special record." On May 18, 2010, Young embarked upon a North American solo tour to promote his then upcoming album, "Le Noise", playing a mix of older songs and new material. Although billed as a solo acoustic tour, Young also played some songs on electric guitars, including Old Black.


title: Neil Young

text: In September 2011, Jonathan Demme's third documentary film on the singer songwriter, "Neil Young Journeys", premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.


title: Neil Young

text: On January 22, 2012, the Master Class at the Slamdance Festival featured Coffee with Neil Young & Jonathan Demme discussing their film "Neil Young Journeys". Young said that he had been recording with Crazy Horse, completing one album and working on another.


title: Neil Young

text: Neil Young and Crazy Horse performed a version of the Beatles' "I Saw Her Standing There" for Paul McCartney's MusiCares Person of the Year dinner on February 10, 2012, in Hollywood.


title: Neil Young

text: Neil Young with Crazy Horse released the album "Americana" on June 5, 2012. It was Young's first collaboration with Crazy Horse since the "Greendale" album and tour in 2003 and 2004. The record is a tribute to unofficial national anthems that jumps from an uncensored version of "This Land Is Your Land" to "Clementine" and includes a version of "God Save the Queen", which Young grew up singing every day in school in Canada. "Americana" is Neil Young's first album composed entirely of cover songs. The album debuted at number four on the "Billboard" 200, making it Young's highest-charting album in the US since "Harvest". On June 5, 2012, "American Songwriter" also reported that Neil Young and Crazy Horse would be launching their first tour in eight years in support of the album.


title: Neil Young

text: On August 25, 2012, Young was mistakenly reported dead by NBCNews.com, the day when astronaut Neil Armstrong died.


title: Neil Young

text: On September 25, 2012, Young's autobiography "" was released to critical and commercial acclaim. Reviewing the book for the "New York Times", Janet Maslin reported that Young chose to write his memoirs in 2012 for two reasons: he needed to take a break from stage performances for health reasons but continue to generate income; and he feared the onset of dementia, considering his father's medical history and his own present condition. Maslin praised the book, describing it as frank but quirky and without pathos.


title: Neil Young

text: In November 2013, Young performed at the annual fundraiser for the Silverlake Conservatory of Music. Following the Red Hot Chili Peppers, he played an acoustic set to a crowd who had paid a minimum of $2,000 a seat to attend the benefit in the famous Paramour Mansion overlooking downtown Los Angeles.


title: Neil Young

text: Young released the album "A Letter Home" on April 19, 2014, through Jack White's record label, and his second memoir, entitled "Special Deluxe", which was released on October 14. He appeared with White on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on May 12, 2014.


title: Neil Young

text: The 2014 debut solo album by Chrissie Hynde, entitled "Stockholm", featured Young on guitar on the track "Down the Wrong Way".


title: Neil Young

text: Young released his thirty-fifth studio album, "Storytone" on November 4, 2014. The first song released from the album, "Who's Gonna Stand Up?", was released in three different versions on September 25, 2014.


title: Neil Young

text: "Storytone" was followed in 2015 by his concept album "The Monsanto Years". "The Monsanto Years" is an album themed both in support of sustainable farming, and to protest the biotechnology company Monsanto. Young achieves this protest in a series of lyrical sentiments against genetically modified food production. He created this album in collaboration with Willie Nelson's sons, Lukas and Micah, and is also backed by Lukas's fellow band members from Promise of the Real. Additionally, Young released a film in tandem to the album, (also entitled "The Monsanto Years"), that documents the album's recording, and can be streamed online. In August 2019, "The Guardian" reported Young, among other environmental activists, was being spied on by the firm.


title: Neil Young

text: In summer 2015, Young undertook a North America tour titled the Rebel Content Tour. The tour began on July 5, 2015, at the Summerfest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and ended on July 24, 2015, at the Wayhome Festival in Oro-Medonte, Ontario. Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real were special guests for the tour.


title: Neil Young

text: In October 2016, Young performed at Desert Trip in Indio, California, and announced his thirty-seventh studio album, "Peace Trail", recorded with drummer Jim Keltner and bass guitarist Paul Bushnell, which was released that December.


title: Neil Young

text: On September 8, 2017, Young released "Hitchhiker", a studio LP recorded on August 11, 1976, at Indigo Studios in Malibu. The album features ten songs that Young recorded accompanied by acoustic guitar or piano. While different versions of most of the songs have been previously released, the new album will include two never-before-released songs: "Hawaii" and "Give Me Strength", which Young has occasionally performed live.


title: Neil Young

text: On July 4, 2017, Young released the song "Children of Destiny" which would appear on his next album. On November 3, 2017, Young released "Already Great", a song from "The Visitor", an album he recorded with Promise of the Real and released on December 1, 2017.


title: Neil Young

text: On December 1, 2017, Young performed live in Omemee, Ontario, Canada, a town he had lived in as a child.


title: Neil Young

text: On Record Store Day, April 21, 2018, Warner Records released a two-vinyl LP special edition of "", a double live album of a show that Young performed in September 1973 at the Roxy in West Hollywood, with the Santa Monica Flyers. The album is labeled as "Volume 05" in Young's "Performance Series."


title: Neil Young

text: On October 19, 2018, Young released a live version of his song "Campaigner", an excerpt from a forthcoming archival live album titled "Songs for Judy", which features solo performances recorded during a November 1976 tour with Crazy Horse. It will be the first release from his new label Shakey Pictures Records.


title: Neil Young

text: In November 2018, shortly after his home had been destroyed by the California wildfire, Young criticized President Donald Trump's stance on climate change.


title: Neil Young

text: In December 2018, Young criticized the promoters of a London show for selecting Barclays Bank as a sponsor. Young objected to the bank's association with fossil fuels. Young explained that he was trying to rectify the situation by finding a different sponsor.


title: Neil Young

text: On August 19, 2019, Neil Young and Crazy Horse announced the forthcoming release later in August 2019 of the new song "Rainbow of Colors", the first single from the album "Colorado", Young's first new record with the band in seven years, since 2012's "Psychedelic Pill". Young, multi-instrumentalist Nils Lofgren, bassist Billy Talbot and drummer Ralph Molina recorded the new album with Young's co-producer, John Hanlon, in spring 2019. The 10 new songs are ranging from around 3 minutes to over 13 minutes. "Colorado" was released on October 25, 2019 on Reprise Records. On August 30, 2019, Young unveiled "Milky Way", the first song from "Colorado", a love ballad he had performed several times at concerts – both solo acoustic and with Promise of the Real.


title: Neil Young

text: In February 2020, Young wrote an open letter to President Trump, calling him a "disgrace to my country". On August 4, 2020, Young filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Trump's reelection campaign for the use of his music at campaign rallies.


title: Neil Young

text: In April 2020, Young announced that he was working on a new archival album, "Road of Plenty", comprising music made with Crazy Horse in 1986 and rehearsals for his 1989 "Saturday Night Live" appearance. On June 19, Young released a "lost" album, "Homegrown." He recorded it in the mid-1970s following his breakup with Carrie Snodgress, but opted not to release it at the time, feeling it was too personal. In September, Young released a live EP, "The Times". Young shared the news via his video for his new song "Lookin' for a Leader", stating: "I invite the President to play this song at his next rally. A song about the feelings many of us have about America today."


title: Neil Young

text: In January 2021, Young sold 50% of the rights to his back catalog to the British investment company Hipgnosis Songs Fund. The value was estimated to be at least $150 million. Young and Crazy Horse released a new album, "Barn", on December 10, 2021. The first single, "Song of the Seasons", was released on October 15, followed by "Welcome Back" on December 3, along with a music video. A stand-alone will be released on Blu-ray and will be directed by Daryl Hannah. Young also confirmed that he had completed his third book, "Canary", his first work of fiction.


title: Neil Young

text: On January 24, 2022, Young posted an open letter threatening to remove his music from the audio streaming service Spotify if it did not remove "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast from the platform. Young accused the podcast of COVID-19 misinformation, writing that "Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform". On January 26, Young's music was removed from Spotify, with a spokesperson for the company stating that Spotify wanted "all the world's music and audio content to be available to Spotify users" and that it had a "great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators". Subsequently, other artists such as Joni Mitchell and the members of Crosby, Stills, and Nash removed their music from Spotify, in agreement with Young's stance. Director-General of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also praised Young's action.


title: Neil Young

text: Since 2006, Young has been maintaining the Neil Young Archives, a project which encompasses the release of live albums, starting in 2006 with "Live at the Fillmore East", box sets of live and studio material, starting in 2009 with "The Archives Vol 1: 1963-1972", as well as video releases. , the project has evolved into a subscription website and application where all of his music is available to stream in high resolution audio. Neil Young Archives also includes his newspaper, "The Times-Contrarian", The Hearse Theater, and photographs and memorabilia from throughout his career.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's family was from Manitoba, where both his parents were born and married. Young himself was born in Toronto, Ontario, and lived there at various times in his early life (1945, 1957, 1959–1960, 1966 to 1967), as well as Omemee (1945 to 1952) and Pickering, Ontario (1956) before settling with his mother in Winnipeg, Manitoba (1958, 1960–1966), where his music career began and which he considers his "hometown". Young has been outside Canada since 1967. After becoming successful, he bought properties in California. He currently holds dual citizenship for Canada and the United States.


title: Neil Young

text: Young owned Broken Arrow Ranch, a property of about 1,000 acres near La Honda, California, that he purchased in 1970 for US$350,000 (US$ in dollars); the property was subsequently expanded to thousands of acres. He moved out and gave Pegi Young the ranch after their divorce in 2014. Young's son Ben lives there.


title: Neil Young

text: Young announced in 2019 that his application for United States citizenship had been held up because of his use of marijuana. In 2020, the issue was resolved and he became a United States citizen.


title: Neil Young

text: Young married his first wife, restaurant owner Susan Acevedo, in December 1968. They were together until October 1970, when she filed for divorce.


title: Neil Young

text: From late 1970 to 1975, Young was in a relationship with actress Carrie Snodgress. The song "A Man Needs a Maid" from "Harvest" is inspired by his seeing her in the film "Diary of a Mad Housewife". They met soon afterward and she moved in with him on his ranch in northern California. They have a son, Zeke, who was born September 8, 1972. He has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy.


title: Neil Young

text: Young met future wife Pegi Young ( Morton) in 1974 when she was working as a waitress at a diner near his ranch, a story he tells in the 1992 song "Unknown Legend". They married in August 1978 and had two children together, Ben and Amber. Ben has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and Amber has been diagnosed with epilepsy. The couple were musical collaborators and co-founded the Bridge School in 1986. On July 29, 2014, Young filed for divorce after 36 years of marriage. Pegi died on January 1, 2019.


title: Neil Young

text: Young has been in a relationship with actress and director Daryl Hannah since 2014. Young and Hannah were reported to have wed on August 25, 2018, in Atascadero, California. Young confirmed his marriage to Hannah in a video released on October 31, 2018.


title: Neil Young

text: Young has been widely reported to be the godfather of actress Amber Tamblyn; in a 2009 interview with "Parade", Tamblyn explained that "godfather" was "just a loose term" for Young, Dennis Hopper, and Dean Stockwell, three famous friends of her father, Russ Tamblyn, who were important influences on her life.


title: Neil Young

text: Young is an environmentalist and outspoken advocate for the welfare of small farmers, having co-founded in 1985 the benefit concert Farm Aid. He worked on "LincVolt", the conversion of his 1959 Lincoln Continental to hybrid electric technology as an environmentalist statement. In 1986, Young helped found The Bridge School, an educational organization for children with severe verbal and physical disabilities, and its annual supporting Bridge School Benefit concerts, together with his former wife Pegi Young.


title: Neil Young

text: Young was part owner of Lionel, LLC, a company that makes toy trains and model railroad accessories. In 2008 Lionel emerged from bankruptcy and his shares of the company were wiped out. He was instrumental in the design of the Lionel Legacy control system for model trains, and remains on the board of directors of Lionel. He has been named as co-inventor on seven US patents related to model trains.


title: Neil Young

text: Young has long held that the digital audio formats in which most people download music are deeply flawed, and do not provide the rich, warm sound of analog recordings. He claims to be acutely aware of the difference, and compares it with taking a shower in tiny ice cubes versus ordinary water. Young and his company PonoMusic developed Pono, a music download service and dedicated music player focusing on "high-quality" uncompressed digital audio. It was designed to compete against highly compressed MP3 type formats. Pono promised to present songs "as they first sound during studio recording". The service and the sale of the player were launched in October 2014.


title: Neil Young

text: In 2003, "Rolling Stone" listed Young as eighty-third in its ranking of "The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" (although in a more recent version of the list, he has been moved up to seventeenth place), describing him as a "restless experimenter ... who transform[s] the most obvious music into something revelatory". Young is a collector of second-hand guitars, but in recording and performing, he uses frequently just a few instruments, as is explained by his longtime guitar technician Larry Cragg in the film "". They include:


title: Neil Young

text: a late 1950s Gretsch White Falcon purchased by Young near the end of the Buffalo Springfield era. In 1969, he bought a stereo version of the same vintage guitar from Stephen Stills, and this instrument is featured prominently during Young's early 1970s period, and can be heard on tracks like "Ohio", "Southern Man", "Alabama", "Words (Between the Lines of Age)", and "L.A.". It was Young's primary electric guitar during the "Harvest" (1972) era, since Young's deteriorating back condition (eventually fixed with surgery) made playing the much heavier Les Paul (a favourite of his named Old Black) difficult.


title: Neil Young

text: Young owns a restored Estey reed organ, serial number 167272, dating from 1885, which he frequently plays in concert.


title: Neil Young

text: Young owns a glass harmonica, which he played in the recording of "I Do" on his 2019 album "Colorado".


title: Neil Young

text: Young uses various vintage Fender Tweed Deluxe amplifiers. His preferred amplifier for electric guitar is the Fender Deluxe, specifically a Tweed-era model from 1959. He purchased his first vintage Deluxe in 1967 for US$50 (US$ in dollars) from Sol Betnun Music on Larchmont in Hollywood and has since acquired nearly 450 different examples, all from the same era, but he maintains that it is the original model that sounds superior and is crucial to his trademark sound.


title: Neil Young

text: The Tweed Deluxe is almost always used in conjunction with a late-1950s Magnatone 280 (similar to the amplifier used by Lonnie Mack and Buddy Holly). The Magnatone and the Deluxe are paired together in an unusual manner: the external speaker jack from the Deluxe sends the amped signal through a volume potentiometer and directly into the input of the Magnatone. The Magnatone is notable for its true pitch-bending vibrato capabilities. It can be heard as an electric piano amplifier on "See the Sky About to Rain". A notable and unique accessory to Young's Deluxe is the Whizzer, a device created specifically for Young by Rick Davis, which physically changes the amplifier's settings to pre-set combinations. This device is connected to footswitches operable by Young onstage in the manner of an effects pedal. Tom Wheeler's book Soul of Tone highlights the device on page 182/183.


title: Neil Young

text: As one of the original founders of Farm Aid (1985–), he remains an active member of the board of directors. For one weekend each October, in Mountain View, California, Young and his ex-wife hosted the Bridge School Concerts, which drew international talent and sell-out crowds for nearly two decades. He announced in June 2017, however, that he would no longer host the concerts.


title: Neil Young

text: "Rolling Stone" magazine in 2000, ranked Young thirty-fourth in its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time. In 2000, Young was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.


title: Neil Young

text: In 2003, "Rolling Stone"s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list included "After the Gold Rush" at number 71, "Harvest" at number 78, "Déjà Vu" (with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) at number 148, "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere" at number 208, "Tonight's the Night" at number 331, and "Rust Never Sleeps" at number 350. And in 2004, on their 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list, "Rolling Stone" included "Rockin' in the Free World" at number 214, "Heart of Gold" at number 297, "Cortez the Killer" at number 321, and "Ohio" (with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) at number 385.


title: Neil Young

text: In 2006, when "Paste" magazine compiled a "Greatest Living Songwriters" list, Young was ranked second behind Bob Dylan. (While Young and Dylan have occasionally played together in concert, they have never collaborated on a song together or played on each other's records). He ranked thirty-ninth on "VH1's 100 Greatest Artist of Hard Rock" that same year. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame explained that while Young has "avoided sticking to one style for very long, the unifying factors throughout Young's peripatetic musical journey have been his unmistakable voice, his raw and expressive guitar playing, and his consummate songwriting skill."


title: Neil Young

text: "After the Gold Rush", "Harvest", "Déjà Vu", and "Ohio" have all been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.


title: Neil Young

text: Young's political outspokenness and social awareness influenced artists such as Blind Melon, Phish, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. Young is referred to as "the Godfather of Grunge" because of the influence he had on Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder and the entire grunge movement. Vedder inducted Young into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, citing him as a huge influence. Young is cited as being a significant influence on the experimental rock group Sonic Youth, and Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Yorke recounted of first hearing Young after sending a demo tape into a magazine when he was 16, who favorably compared his singing voice to Young's. Unaware of Young at that time, he bought "After the Gold Rush" (1970), and "immediately fell in love" with his work, calling it "extraordinary".


title: Neil Young

text: The Australian rock group Powderfinger named themselves after Young's song "Powderfinger" from "Rust Never Sleeps" (1979). The members of the Constantines have occasionally played Neil Young tribute shows under the name Horsey Craze.