Tonight's the Night is Neil Young's third washout album in a row…. (p. 62)

[Tonight's the Night was conceived] as one long dirge in memory of Bruce Berry, a member of his road crew, and Danny Whitten, a musician with Young's original backing band, Crazy Horse (both of whom apparently died of drug overdoses)….

[In] the realm of thematic coherence, consider this wail from "Borrowed Tune" …: "I'm singing this borrowed tune/I took from the Rolling Stones/Alone in this empty room/Too wasted to write my own…." Young recently told Cameron Crowe of Rolling Stone that Tonight's the Night was "the most liquid album I've ever made…. You almost need a life preserver to get through that one," which accounts for the meandering of most of his material….

Young seems to have been quite in earnest when he set out to make a miserable album about feeling miserable. And he has succeeded, beyond his wildest nightmares….

And yet [Tonight's the Night] deserves to be suffered through—just like Time Fades Away … and On The Beach … before it. For although Young has never been all that articulate, he has an impressive gift for letting his raw feelings come through; this may be an ugly album, but its emotional purity makes it as arresting as it is painful. Like Young's Journey Through the Past film, it's easy to laugh at and easy to dismiss but still possessed of some kernel of honesty…. [His] evocation of heartfelt despair this time is too effective to be easily ignored.

And its murkiness is not Tonight's the Night's real problem, anyway; instead, Young's characteristic evasiveness is what does him in…. Though this album was originally conceived as both a memorial tribute and an expression of grief, and though nodding out may indeed be Young's way of coping with this or any other crisis, the prevailing fogginess does the original intentions a disservice; if Young was at all serious about this project, he needed either to make an album about the way his own fears were aroused by the double tragedy, or to take a long, sober look into the abyss. Tonight's the Night falls short because he shies away from both of these extremes without finding any middle ground and never really explores either one. Next to that weakness, the deterrent effects of his gloom and caterwauling are almost beside the point. (p. 63)