Best Neil Young Songs of All Time, Ranked

Neil Young is one of just a few 1960s rockers who is just as relevant today as he was at the very beginning of his career.

He's been a member of seminal bands Buffalo Springfield and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. In late 2021, he released his 41st studio album "Barn," and his 14th with the band Crazy Horse.

These are the best Neil Young songs of all time.

20. This Note's for You

Album: This Note's for You

Year of release: 1988

Bottom Line: This Note's for You

Young has never been one to rest on his laurels. He's been outspoken throughout his career and critiqued artists who sold out to advertisers in the late 1980s with "This Note's For You." Young has never allowed his music to be used for commercials and pokes fun at his contemporaries who do. 

The song's title is a play on the Budweiser campaign, "This Bud's For You," and the song mentions other corporations, like Coke and Pepsi, who paid handsomely to feature the artists in their commercials. 

The video, which was banned from MTV until it proved to be a hit, featured a Michael Jackson look-alike with his hair on fire and also a Spuds MacKenzie lookalike.

19. Mr. Soul

Album: Buffalo Springfield Again

Year of release: 1967

Bottom Line: Mr. Soul

Young wrote "Mr. Soul" when he was with Buffalo Springfield and was beginning to feel disillusioned with fame. He was experiencing epileptic attacks onstage, and the audience didn't know that it wasn't part of the act. 

According to Young: "It’s basically a guy talkin’ to himself—talking to his conscience. He wants to be heard. ... You take things very heavily when you’re that age. You don’t realize you’re gonna live through it. Of course, sometimes you don’t live through it."

18. Powderfinger

Album: Rust Never Sleeps 

Year of release: 1979 

Bottom Line: Powderfinger

Originally written for Lynyrd Skynyrd, "Powderfinger" is said to be written about a man who died while protecting his family from a gunboat attack. He had just turned 22, and as he dies, remains full of longing.

While Young has never offered any confirmation of the theme or story, he said of "Powderfinger," "Those songs are like a landscape. I don't think with those songs. I get myself to a certain place, open up and they just come to me."

17. Harvest Moon

Album: Harvest Moon

Year of release: 1992

Bottom Line: Harvest Moon

One of Neil Young's biggest hits came later in his career, and it's also one of his least controversial. 

For its recording, he reformed the same studio band he had from the "Harvest" LP two decades earlier, which included James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt. 

The song was a tribute to his wife, Pegi, who dances with him in the music video. 

16. After The Gold Rush

Album: After The Gold Rush

Year of release: 1970

Bottom Line: After The Gold Rush

Titular track "After the Gold Rush" moves across history from medieval times to humanity's final move from Earth to another home somewhere in the universe.

In the past, Young claimed he never knew what the song was about but relented in his 2012 biography, saying it stemmed from a screenplay of the same name written by actor Dean Stockwell ("Quantum Leap") in which California was destroyed in a flood. The film was never made, but the song and album rank among Young's best.

Stockwell shared the backstory: "Dennis [Hopper] very strongly urged me to write a screenplay and he would get it produced. I came back home to Topanga Canyon and wrote 'After The Gold Rush.' Neil was living in Topanga then too, and a copy of it somehow got to him. He had had writer’s block for months, and his record company was after him. And after he read this screenplay, he wrote the 'After The Gold Rush' album in three weeks."

Young calls this song an "environmental song" and said, "I recognize in it now this thread that goes through a lotta my songs that’s this time-travel thing. ... When I look out the window, the first thing that comes to my mind is the way this place looked a hundred years ago."

15. Cowgirl in the Sand

Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Year of release: 1969

Bottom Line: Cowgirl in the Sand

Fans and critics alike have tried to attribute meaning to "Cowgirl in the Sand." It is said to tell the tale of one promiscuous woman in different guises or three women, but Young has never said that was the case either way.

He leaves its interpretation up to the listener. "The words to 'Cowgirl In The Sand' are very important because you can free-associate with them. Some words won't let you do that, so you're locked into the specific thing the guy's singin' about. This way it could be anything."

14. Rockin' in the Free World

Album: Freedom 

Year of release: 1989

Bottom Line: Rockin' in the Free World

"Rockin' in the Free World" was Young's take on the political landscape of 1989. He was highly critical of then president George H.W. Bush and used his campaign slogan in the lyrics: "We got 1,000 points of light, for the homeless man/We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand."

Released a few months before the Berlin Wall fell, it became an unofficial anthem for the event and has been performed with Pearl Jam over the years.

13. Hey Hey, My My

Album: Rust Never Sleeps

Year of release: 1979

Bottom Line: Hey Hey, My My

Many of Young's songs reflect the times, and "Hey, Hey, My My" is no different. In the late 1970s, more established rockers were worried about the popularity of punk and reflected this in their songs.

Young, however, also embraced the changing times. "Hey Hey, My My" sprang from his collaboration with Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh, who also introduced him to the line "rust never sleeps," which came from a Rust-Oleum ad campaign.

The line "It's better to burn out than to fade away" has been endlessly quoted since in songs from Panic! At The Disco, Def Leppard, Hole and Machine Gun Kelly. Tragically, it was also quoted in Kurt Cobain's suicide note in 1994. 

12. Only Love Can Break Your Heart

Album: After the Gold Rush

Year of release: 1970 

Bottom Line: Only Love Can Break Your Heart

While Young frequently courts controversy in his music, he still manages to write some of the most poignant love songs in rock. 

 "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" was long-rumored to be about his fraught relationship with former bandmate Steven Stills, but he finally set the record straight saying that it was about another bandmate, Graham Nash, who was suffering from his breakup with Joni Mitchell.

11. Cortez the Killer

Album: Zuma

Year of release: 1975

Bottom Line: Cortez the Killer

Young addresses 16th-century colonization in "Cortez the Killer," which references Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortez's arrival in Mexico. 

The Aztecs thought he was a god, but he made them slaves as well as brought European diseases to their shores. While the song is not a full history of the event, its theme of peace and Young's view of colonization are on full display.

He said, "What Cortez represented to me is the explorer with two sides, one benevolent, the other utterly ruthless. I mean, look at Columbus. Everyone now knows he was less than great and he wasn't even there first. It always makes me question all these other so-called 'icons.'"

10. Like a Hurricane

Album: Decade

Year of release: 1977

Bottom Line: Like a Hurricane

The song of longing isn't about someone who was in Young's life. He was simply attracted to a girl he met in a bar one night.

According to his friend and neighbor, Taylor Phelps: "Neil, Jim Russell, David Cline and I went to Venturi's in La Honda [near his home]. ... Neil had this amazing intense attraction to this particular woman named Gail. It didn't happen, he didn't go home with her. We go back to the ranch, and Neil started playing. He was completely possessed, pacing around the room, hunched over a Stringman keyboard pounding out the song."

9. Helpless

Album: Déjà Vu

Year of release: 1970

Bottom Line: Helpless

Young wrote this song about his early childhood in Canada. He spent some time in the small town of Omemee in northern Ontario.

"[It's a] sleepy little place. ... Life was real basic and simple in that town," he once said. "Walk to school, walk back. Everybody knew who you were. Everybody knew everybody."

Young's family didn't stay in town for long. He came down with polio, and the family moved to Florida to allow him to recuperate in warmer weather. Shortly following that, his parents divorced, and he never returned to town.

8. Southern Man

Album: After the Goldrush

Year of release: 1970 

Bottom Line: Southern Man

"Southern Man" is Young's reflection on racism in the American South and is replete with imagery of the KKK and slavery. While it has become an iconic classic rock staple, Southern listeners, among them the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, let him know the generalization wasn't appreciated.

Skynyrd wrote "Sweet Home Alabama" as an answer record to "Southern Man," lyrically stating, "I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern man don't need him around anyhow."

Despite this, Skynyrd members remained big fans of Young, who later said of the song: "I don't like my words when I listen to it. They are accusatory and condescending, not fully thought out, and too easy to misconstrue."

Young also said of "Sweet Home Alabama": "I'm proud to have my name in a song like theirs" and wrote songs for the band as a peace offering. However, Skynyrd never got the chance to perform them, as some of the members died in a 1977 plane crash.

7. Cinnamon Girl

Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Year of release: 1969

Bottom Line: Cinnamon Girl

Newly married in the late 1960s, Young was reluctant to say who the "Cinnamon Girl" was and said she was just "a city girl on peeling pavement coming at me through Phil Ochs [a '60s protest singer] eyes playing finger cymbals. It was hard to explain to my wife."

His reference to finger cymbals led fans to believe it was folk singer Jean Ray, who played finger cymbals and was a close friend of Ochs. Her brother Brian Ray later confirmed this. 

In later years, Young also admitted having a crush on her saying, "There's images in there that have to do with Jean, and there's images that have to do with other people."

6. Sugar Mountain

Album: Decade

Year of release: 1977

Bottom Line: Sugar Mountain

Young wrote "Sugar Mountain" about his lost youth when he was 19, hence the line, "You can't be 20 on Sugar Mountain."

According to friend, singer, and fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell, "Sugar Mountain" was the inspiration for her song, "Circle Game": "Neil Young wrote this song that was called 'Oh to live on sugar mountain,' which was a lament for his lost youth. And I thought, God, you know, if we get to 21 and there's nothing after that, that's a pretty bleak future, so I wrote a song for him, and for myself just to give me some hope. It's called 'The Circle Game.'"

5. Down by the River

Album: Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Year of release: 1969

Bottom Line: Down by the River

Young offered various explanations to "Down By The River"over its history. It appears to tell the story of a man who kills the woman he's involved with because he can't meet her emotional needs.

In a 1970 interview, Young inferred that the killing was metaphorical, stating: "There's no real murder in it. It's about blowing your thing with a chick. It's a plea, a desperate cry." However, Young said that it was, in fact, a murder story when he played it for a New Orleans audience in 1984. 

Also interesting to note: Young wrote "Down By The River," "Cinnamon Girl" and "Cowgirl In The Sand" on the same day while he was sick with a fever. 

4. Needle and the Damage Done

Album: Tonight's the Night

Year of release: 1972

Bottom Line: Needle and the Damage Done

Young wrote "The Needle and the Damage Done" about heroin addiction and its affect on bandmate Danny Whitten. When Young was rehearsing for a tour with Crazy Horse in 1971, Witten would show up so strung out and could barely play. After trying for months to help him get sober, Young fired him, gave him money for rehab, and sent him back to Los Angeles where he overdosed. 

Young said: "I felt responsible. But really there was nothing I could do. I mean, he was responsible. But I thought I was for a long time. Danny just wasn't happy. It just all came down on him. He was engulfed by this drug. That was too bad. Because Danny had a lot to give. Boy. He was really good."

3. Ohio

Album: NA (Recorded by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young)

Year of release: 1970

Bottom Line: Ohio

Images from a May 1970 student protest at Ohio's Kent State rocked the world. Four students died during this demonstration against the Vietnam War when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on protestors.

After seeing the photos in Life magazine, Young was moved to write "Ohio," and he finished the song in just a few hours. 

2. Heart of Gold

Album: Harvest

Year of release: 1972

Bottom Line: Heart of Gold

This song was Young's only single to reach the top of the charts in the U.S. and Canada.

He wrote "Heart of Gold" after suffering a debilitating back injury that made it difficult for him to play electric guitar. For its recording, he played acoustic and harmonica. James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt are also featured on the track. 

The song about a man who was unlucky in love and continues to search for it has been covered over 30 times by everyone from Johnny Cash to Tori Amos and Willie Nelson.

1. Old Man

Album: Harvest

Year of release: 1972

Bottom Line: Old Man

"Old Man" compares a young man's life to that of the older gentleman and is a commentary on how they both have the same basic needs.

Young wrote "Old Man" with a man named Louis Avila in mind. He was a caretaker on a Northern California ranch that Young purchased in 1970 for $350,000.

Young said: "About that time when I wrote ["Heart of Gold"], and I was touring, I had also—just, you know, being a rich hippie for the first time—I had purchased a ranch, and I still live there today. And there was a couple living on it that were the caretakers, an old gentleman named Louis Avila and his wife Clara. And there was this old blue Jeep there, and Louis took me for a ride in this blue Jeep.

He gets me up there on the top side of the place, and there's this lake up there that fed all the pastures, and he says, 'Well, tell me, how does a young man like yourself have enough money to buy a place like this?' And I said, 'Well, just lucky, Louis, just real lucky.' And he said, 'Well, that's the darnedest thing I ever heard.' And I wrote this song for him."