Neil Young - Neil Young - Released 1968 - 4.5

Young kicked off his solo career with a very low key affair. The whole pace of the album is dictated to by the opening jaunty instrumental The Emperor of Wyoming which has a definite country feel to it. The key to the success of a first album is a positive answer to the question "will this artist improve?" With Young it was definitely a yes as you could hear the beginnings of the golden career that was to follow. So this is a decent stab at things, but there was much better to follow. It includes some pseudo classical twiddly bits and, like on so many Young albums, the sum of the whole is slightly fractured, varying from the prettiness of "Here We Are in the Years," which for me is the outstanding track, to the rambling "The Last Trip to Tulsa" which at nine minutes is hugely too long. Over indulgence was something Young would be accused of many times in his career, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that he was and still is a major major talent.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere - Released 1969 - 3.5

Shortly after his first album Young released a rather patchy album that's real claim to fame was the first appearance of Crazy Horse. The voice is more assured than on the opener but that takes away some of the quirkiness that made the opener sound fresher than a rather stodgy offering in which Young seems to be desperately trying to make a niche for himself. There's definitely a cowboy feel to this one but many of the songs fail to work despite this albums popularity. It was for me an artist in search of a style and ...

After the Goldrush - Released 1970 - 9

Boy did he find the style with one of the greatest albums of all time. Gone is the waffle. Everything on Goldrush is stripped down to its bare essentials This album regularly appears in top 100 lists and it is easy to see why. I defy anybody to listen to Goldrush and not end up singing along. Every single song is a gem in its own right. Here Young had created a style and feeling all of his own. This was near genius at work as the list of songs shows: Tell Me Why, After the Gold Rush, Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Southern Man, Till teh Morning Comes, Oh Lonesome Me, Don't Let It Bring You Down, Birds, When You Dance I Can Really Love, I Believe in You and Cripple Creek Ferry - virtually unsurpassed songs. The brilliance is that so many people have heard these songs but probably don't realise that every one of them was penned by young apart from Don Gibson's Oh Lonesome Me which Young still manages to twist into his own. Young's voice was never better, his songwriting superlative and arguably the height of his career.

Harvest - Released 1972 - 8

I'm sure many people waited eagerly for this release and I was certainly one of them. The fear was that it would be a huge disappointment after Goldrush - well it wasn't. Harvest has taken on almost a mythical feel over the years. Many consider it his best work and certainly it met with critical acclaim and is still talked of today. When Young releases a low key, tuneful album it is always described as "The New Harvest" and the composer also references the album many times in his subsequent offerings. It was more progressive than Goldrush. To me the songs aren't quite so effective but there is no denying the power and beauty of an album that once again contained some outstanding music with the likes of "Harvest", "A Man Needs a Maid" "Heart of Gold" (I can hear you singing it now and two songs with much stronger messages "Old Man" and a foray into drug culture "The Needle and the Damage Done." The only question on the lips of Young fans were "where does he go from here and can he produce a trio of essential albums?"