Neil Young [is] the thirty-one-year-old loner who for more than 10 years has danced unflinchingly along the edge of that greatest of all precipices, Romance. Young is a romantic whose narcissistic mortification cuts so deep that his music—as evidenced by his latest release, the triple-disc retrospective, Decade—is among the most passionate in rock….

He's a committed malcontent approaching middle age, as indeed the whole rock form is, pressured to abandon the obsessions he has struggled with for so long.

Clearly, Young is a haunted dreamer who finds the world disappointing. In the early Seventies, he was given to overtly political statements …, but his most consuming grievance has been with women, the source of his most powerful illusions and frustrations. Young's creative history is a study in stubborn temperament at war with reality….

He also displayed a knack for reflective lyrics that stand up better than most of the stoned wisdom of the era.

While other countercultural rockers protested their social and political disorientation, Young protested loneliness at the peak of the "free love" eruption, expressing feelings of displacement with dreamy, abstract images….

They were consciousness-stretching lyrics that fit the adventurousness of the times, balancing his emotional commitments between this world and the next. (p. 40)

After Buffalo Springfield disbanded, Young continued to indulge in the bliss of bereavement as a solo artist on the melancholy Neil Young (1968)…. Although he didn't totally neglect the weepy tunes [on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere], numbers like "Down by the River," the title track, and "Cowgirl in the Sand" bristled with impatient, even vengeful, lyrics…. (pp. 40, 48)

Following this staunch effort, though, his third [After the Goldrush] and fourth [Harvest] albums seemed depressingly woebegone….

Zuma (1975) is a tough-minded, occasionally misogynic collection powered by brawling love/hate numbers like "Barstool Blues" and "Stupid Girl." American Stars 'n Bars (1977) is less pugnacious but equally indomitable. Two tracks especially … express his frustration with such clarity that they rank among the most extraordinary pieces in rock.

"Like a Hurricane" is a ferocious maelstrom that reeks of voltage….

A throbbing, spiraling dream song, ["Cortez the Killer"] achieves an excruciatingly poignant trance effect as Young sings of the distant golden age of the Aztecs under the benevolent Montezuma. Then in a startling fusion of personal tragedy and social history, Young suddenly injects himself into the mythic fabric he's woven…. [He] goes on to indict modern civilization (in the figure of the trusted but ultimately treacherous Cortez) for displacing the more perfect world of his imagination. It's an outrageously bold metaphor, a finely balanced, mind-altering stretch through time, and the epiphany of his career.

Since that catharsis a couple of years ago, Young seems to have exercised an honest objectivity vis-à-vis his illusions, making them work for, rather than against, him. In the peaceful "Will to Love," his best recent song, he identifies with the salmon that instinctively searches out its spawning grounds and death. But if Young realizes he's fated to pursue the ephemeral ceaselessly, at least his decade of wrestling for perspective appears to have won him a grudging acceptance of the world he's stuck with. (p. 48)