Neil Young "The Loner"

Especially if you are not familiar with it but even if you are, it would be good to listen to this song before reading the post about it.


Hear the song on Youtube.


I've heard this song for years on mvyradio.  Played it as a DJ, heard it when I was just listening.

I don't think I really knew it, before coming to work at mvyradio.  The song came out when I was still in diapers.  But I always like the simple crunchiness of a good Neil Young tune.  But didn't have any particular feeling beyond that.

Last week a I walked into the studio at 1pm, as I do every day.  Barbara Dacey was finishing up her shift and clearing out to turn things over to me.  She had "The Loner" cranked on the studio speakers, and was really into it.

She started talking about what it felt like to her, when the song came out.  That she remembers it so clearly.  That it seemed a step beyond anything that had come before it.

She marveled at the amazing diversity within the songs structure.  The acoustic guitar that starts the track that sounds like a typical acoustic tune, followed immediately by the clear-but-fuzzy lead guitar riff.  At :40 seconds strings suddenly appear, and come and go throughout the song.  At :55 seconds everything stops as Neil sings "The Loner . . ." and everything halts for a moment, followed by a short bridge, then back into the main riff.  At 1:50 it goes into a piece of music entirely different from the rest of the song, before the lead coaxes the tune back.  The long outro is a dance between the delicate acoustic and strings, coupled with the pointed, noisy-but-direct electric guitar.

Barbara talked at length about the complexity of the tune, of how it was such a composition on a level about what the others in Neil Young's cohort group were doing a the time.

I have to admit, I had never heard the tune like that before.

While I am familiar enough with the song that I guess I could have identified the various parts, if you had just asked me about the tune without me hearing it, I probably would have only heard the crunchy riff in my head, not recognizing the complexity.

The other thing that is evident about Barbara's reaction versus mine, is context.

At the time this song came out, Barbara was already an avid music listener and consumer.  She was also a musician.  She heard the song in the context of the time it came out, and could compare it to other things she'd been listening to.  And compared to other songs out at the time, Barbara felt it was a big innovation, and her reaction to the song, even today, is colored by that excitement.

At the time this song came out, I was working on chewing solid foods.  So I never heard the song in the context of its day.

For me, this song is neither before nor after "Times They Are A' Changing" or "London Calling" or "Born To Run" or "Let It Be."  They ALL fall under the category of "before I started listening to music."  So the song could never really hit me in the same way as it hits Barbara.

You listen to the radio day after day, and it's simply not possible to dive into every single song and react to every single song and pick apart every single song.

But it really lifts the listening experience when you can grab ahold of just one tune, and shake it for all it's worth.