Neil Young Reveals His Favorite Tracks In His Younger Years

Neil Young’s music is best at giving his listeners a feeling of longing, a sense of losing something along the way, and will even make you feel nostalgic. His versatility is also the main reason albums like After The Gold Rush, Harvest and Decade are timeless.

This distinctive style of Young was recognized by Conan O’Brien of Team Coco radio show. He asked the singer-songwriter directly to name some of his favorite tracks from his youth during one of its episodes. As per Young, one is the “Four Strong Winds” by the ’60s folk duo Ian and Sylvia. He explained:

“I loved it so much I would put nickles and dimes in the jukebox to play it over and over and over again until I didn’t have any change. I’d just stand there and listen to it. It was a beautiful song. For some reason, it really got to me, and I could feel the magic of the music.”

At that time, he was only 11 or 12 and was living in Winnipeg. He said:

“I heard the song before, but I was at Falcon lake, a place that’s near Winnipeg.

“It’s just a lake – you can pitch tents around it and stuff. So we had our tent, me and my friend Jack, who played drums in The Squiers, my first band And we were out there, and I found this thing on the jukebox.”

Second on his list was Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen,” which also interestingly appeared on his 1958 album with the Tenessee Two on backing vocals. Lastly, Young added how one’s introduction to a song affects the way you listen to it thereafter. He stated:

“When it’s way back there in your life, and you have this memory, it’s vivid. Who knows what you do with it for all those years? You may have enhanced it. It may be exactly the way it was. It may just be different in some way because when you have a thought for so long, and you remember a memory, it becomes more than just that over time. So that’s why, sometimes when you go back, it’s not like you thought it was gonna be.”