(Credit: Alamy)
Mon 19 May 2025 19:15, UK
For those of us not blessed with musical ability, watching a musician compose, finesse, or simply rehearse a song is like watching a magic trick from the magician’s sleeve. Seeing where the signatures or stamps are put into place can feel like being given access to the very creation of light and dark itself, sitting next to a cosmic deity as the world unfurls around you. What makes it more impressive is when artists like Neil Young do it so flippantly.
Most songwriters will speak to some kind of higher power taking over their songwriting skills when they sit down to get a few tunes laid down on tape. They are simply the conduits to the creation, allowing the words and notes to flow through them as they become a canal receiving the barge of hopeful pop music. Even people in the studio, like engineers and producers, who have watched countless artists perform the same miracle, can be left astounded.
When Young sat down for the ‘Indigo Sessions’ in 1976, he completed this very trick, leaving his dutiful producer David Briggs agog as Young delivered a ream of incredible tracks with no warm-up or practice, and seemingly without having ever written the tunes down. “He’d turn to me and go, ‘Guess I’ll turn on the tap,’” Briggs said of the Indigo sessions.
For most people, this might be a few lines or the odd track, but for Young it was a procession of some of his most beloved songs, as Briggs continues: “And then out came ‘Powderfinger’, ‘Pocahontas’, ‘Out Of The Blue’, ‘Ride My Llama’. I’m not talking about sitting down with a pen and paper. I’m talking about picking up a guitar, sitting there and looking me in the face and in 20 minutes: ‘Pocahontas’.”
There is good cause for Briggs’ statement’s truly astounded tone. Not to mention the other songs, for which we can’t be exactly sure how long their composition took, but ‘Pocahontas’ is one of Young’s most mercurial efforts.
It delicately deals with the hundreds of massacres Native Americans endured during the European colonisation of America, touches on Marlon Brando’s Oscar defiance, and pulls these themes all into the scope of modernity through a surrealist twist. It’s more than impressive that such a track might be conceived and constructed within the timeframe.
Using the near-mythical figure of Pocahontas as his central character, Young challenges his American audiences to deal with the brutal way in which their ancestors took over the plains. It also dashes back and forth between timelines, paying homage to Brando, who had recently rejected his Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ because of Hollywood’s treatment of Native Americans and sent Sacheen Littlefeather in his place to decline it. With all this in mind, it is difficult not to see this track as a distillation of everything magical about making music.
It is one thing to take on such subjects with fragrant, poetic delicacy, sung with a lullaby tone, and delivered with a gentle reverence, but to complete the task in 20 minutes without so much as stretching is truly savant-like genius, which is why Neil Young is still so beloved to this day.
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