After The Gold Rush

LADIES OF THE CANYON

Released: 19th September 1970

Tell Me Why

After the Gold Rush

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Southern Man

Till the Morning Comes

Oh, Lonesome Me

Don't Let It Bring You Down

Birds

When You Dance I Can Really Love

I Believe in You

Cripple Creek Ferry

After the Gold Rush is the third studio album by the Canadian-American musician Neil Young, released in September 1970 on Reprise Records. It is one of four high-profile solo albums released by the members of folk rock group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in the wake of their chart-topping 1970 album Déjà Vu. Young's album consists mainly of country folk music along with several rock tracks, including "Southern Man".^[3] The material was inspired by the unproduced Dean Stockwell-Herb Bermann screenplay After the Gold Rush.

After the Gold Rush entered Billboard Top Pop Albums chart on September 19, and peaked at number eight in October.^[7] Two of the three singles taken from the album, "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" and "When You Dance I Can Really Love", made it to number 33 and number 93 respectively on the Billboard Hot 100. Despite a mixed initial reaction, the album has since appeared on a number of greatest albums of all time lists.

From Wikipedia

When critiquing Joni’s Ladies of the Canyon in the last post, I went off on one about the triteness of the environmental message of Big Yellow Taxi. Now Neil comes along with the title track of this album where he urges us to “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970’s'“. I’m very much better disposed toward this sentiment. It’s not very specific, so it conveys more of a general foreboding about the way things are going instead of focussing on the eco-issue-du-jour. I love the song, but it’s only through repeated listenings for this post that I really started to get my head around it. There’s three parts, the middle one bracketed by two dreams. I always really viewed the lyrics as figurative, but I think they’re actually quite literal. We start with a mediaeval scene of knights, archers and fanfares, then we move on to the present day. Neil is not dreaming this bit, so we can assume he’s really lying in a bombed-out basement and is rather bombed-out himself. Then we shift to the future dream, which has some hope for humanity I guess, as a mission to resettle new worlds commences. It’s only a chosen few though, so it’s still pretty bleak but It’s also sad and beautiful and poetic.

Some other big-hitters on this as well. ‘Southern Man’ pissed off Lynyrd Skynyrd, but who cares, Neil was right and they were wrong. Alternatively you can believe that ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ is sort of in support of Young’s sentiments. Maybe, but it doesn’t come across that way.

Apart from these two songs, much of the rest is very sweet, simple and romantic. ‘Tell Me Why’ and ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ are familiar but both lyrically sparse and the less familar (to me) tracks like ‘Birds’, ‘When You Dance I Can Really Love’ and ‘I Believe In You’ are the same, a couple of short verses that get right to the point and a chorus each time.

Closing track is ‘Cripple Creek Ferry’, which is a sort of a story song, but like so much else is minimalist. Young shows his genius in painting a picture of two passing riverboats with so few words.

This is justifiably seen as a classic album, and it’s still surprising to me how much Young achieved in the early part of his solo career. I had to look up what was going on with the cover image. Young’s face is ‘solarized’ which I think means it’s effectively been put into negative. It also looks like he is carrying a small gnomish woman in a backpack.