![\"Neil](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Neil-Young-2015-Musician-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy<\/p>\n
The policy Neil Young<\/a> usually had surrounding his music usually involved staying the hell out of his way at every opportunity. <\/p>\n He didn\u2019t want the chance of anyone screwing up his music at any point, and some of the biggest songs that he ever made were usually centred around him getting the right set of hands playing the right instrument for the right song. He didn\u2019t care what the label had to say about it most of the time, but that\u2019s only because he knew what good music was supposed to sound like whenever he sang. <\/p>\n He had grown up listening to some of the best bands of all time, and he figured that Crazy Horse was another extension of what their heroes were doing. Those songs were meant to excite people, but with a little bit more grit and grime in them, and there was also a healthy respect for soul music when Young was making his folk tunes \u2013 he was no Sam Cooke<\/a> or anything, but he could still find the time to make music that resonated just as well as his favourite artists did.<\/p>\n And while the idea of a Neil Young Motown album is still very funny<\/a>, the fact is that he knew that genre backwards and forwards. You have to remember that rock and soul have never been all that far apart, and when looking at the way that those tunes were constructed, Young was knocked out when he heard about what the Memphis Horns could do on all of those early soul recordings.<\/p>\n Hitsville in Detroit had their own way of making classics, but the Memphis Horns were as integral to soul music as just about any singer. It was all about finding the right moment to get that one musical hook, and even though the guitar was the more dominant midrange instrument, there\u2019s a reason why so many people freaked out when they heard the horns come in on those Al Green records.<\/p>\n Those horns tied every song together, and Young felt it was a travesty that those two horn players were forgotten by everyone, saying<\/a>, \u201c[People] just don\u2019t know what\u2019s happening. They don\u2019t know that the Memphis Horns are responsible for so many great gold records. Wayne Jackson makes up this stuff off the top of his head. Maybe if you\u2019re a musician, you know \u2018Oh that\u2019s the Memphis Horns\u2019. They are integral to the whole thing. [They are] arrangers, [and] they are master musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n And what\u2019s even more insane is that Jackson never lost his touch once horns fell by the wayside. The language of the 1970s and 1980s may have still been centred around the guitar, but the entire reason why a song like \u2018Sledgehammer\u2019 by Peter Gabriel sounds so good<\/a> is that he heard Otis Redding back in the day and wanted to capture the same feeling that he felt listening to those old recordings.<\/p>\n Further reading: From The Vault<\/strong><\/p>\n Young certainly didn\u2019t forget that kind of power, either, especially when looking at the kind of people that worked with him over the years. Everyone from Jack Nitzsche to Paul Buckmaster did fantastic work up and down the charts every single time a hit came on the radio, and it was always they who added the heightened sense of drama whenever they made some of those classics.\u00a0<\/p>\n So while Young could claim to make the most authentic music that he could, he understood that some of the greatest artists of all time had the right people behind them to flesh everything out. He was still going to give the \u2018OK\u2019 before it went to print, but there was no one who could ever replace a band that could improvise as they could.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/faroutmagazine.co.uk\/wp-content\/themes\/far-out-magazine\/img\/google-discover.svg\")
<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credit: Far Out \/ Alamy The policy Neil Young usually had surrounding his music usually involved staying the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":753585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[77,269,20920,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-946815","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-neil-young","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116540827808068056","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=946815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/946815\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/753585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=946815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=946815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=946815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}