Podunkian Music Club

Neil Young--Heart of Gold

With his status as Canada’s choice firmly in place, tonight on the Music club we’ll feature one of the signature songs of Neil Young.

The Canadian icon, who has been rocking the free and not so free worlds for over four decades, had his Harvest recording selected this week as Canada’s most popular album ever.

While best of lists, top hundred lists and their imitators all tend to leave a lot to be desired, the prospect of Young being Canada’s favourite seems more than possible and truly justified.

For the most part he reflects many of our traits, paints images of our lives and reflects a good number of our values. Musically born out of the turbulent sixties, he is still one of the most relevant of musicians in the business.

As though designed to bookend a long and varied career, his most recent recordings have come to mirror those that generated the most passion in the sixties. At that time, the highly charged emotional issue was the war in Vietnam and during those anxious years, Young had many compatriots in his opposition to the American involvement in Indo-China.

Forty years later it’s a different war that is being fought, and a much more docile American people, who while growing frequently more concerned about the spiral of events, have yet to take their government to account as they did in the late sixties and early seventies.

In fact, for the most part, with the exception of the Dixie Chicks, for the longest time it has been Young who has led the charge for a more involved population to question where their leaders are taking them.

His Living with War sessions have become the unofficial protest soundtrack to the movement to bring the American troops home from Iraq, each track a biting examination of where the Bush administration has taken America. From the troops in the cities, towns and villages of Iraq, to the fear in America of a lifestyle forever changed and possibly lost. It was a powerful recording, one of the few messages being delivered in a time when far too many were inclined to toe the line.

Others have slowly come around to expressing concern with the direction that American society has taken under a War presidency, only now are they following a trail blazed by Young.

While they join the chorus, Young prepares to release a new recording Chrome Dreams II, a diverse collection of tunes some new, some dating back to the mid seventies. While we await the release of that recording on October 23rd, we’ll back track thirty five years and sample some of Young at his early finest.

The selection tonight comes from Harvest, one of the recordings from the early days of his solo success, an on and off again member of Crosby, Stills Nash and Young, he recorded Harvest in 1972, three tunes stood out on that recording as the definition of what his music was to become, Old Man, the Damage and the Needle Done and tonight’s selection Heart of Gold.

A tale of a search that still continues to this day, with many coming along for the journey…

"Heart Of Gold"

I want to live,
I want to give
I've been a miner for a heart of gold.
It's these expressions I never give
That keep me searching for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keeps me searching for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

I've been to Hollywood
I've been to Redwood
I crossed the ocean for a heart of gold
I've been in my mind, it's such a fine line
That keeps me searching for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.

Keeps me searching for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
Keep me searching for a heart of gold
You keep me searching for a heart of gold
And I'm getting old.
I've been a miner for a heart of gold.


Artist: Neil Young
Recording: Harvest