Neil Young is an artist that I confess I wasn't much of a fan of growing up....I just didn't get him.  But with some maturity, I started to give his work a second listen and I've become a great appreciator of his writing, his voice, and most of all his free spirited style.  This is one of my favorite tracks from his catalog.

"Old Man" was a single from an album that dropped in early 1972 called "Harvest".  It wasn't a huge chart success in the US, but it did crack the top 40, peaking at #31 on the Billboard Hot 100, while penetrating the top 5 in his native Canada.  But that's one of the things I love most about Neil Young....he hasn't enjoyed that much massive chart success in his solo career, but he's such an original voice and character, and so true to himself, that he's built a huge army of fans that adore him and have fueled an iconic career with large sold out concert audiences for decades.

This song was inspired when he bought a ranch as a young man after coming into some real money for the first time.  There was an old couple who lived in a smaller structure on the property that were the caretakers of the ranch, even as ownership changed hands from time to time.  The old man had a blue Jeep and gave Neil a ride to the highest point on the property to take in the view and asked him, "How does a young fella your age come into owning a ranch?"  Neil replied with, "Just lucky sir....just real lucky."  The old man responded with, "That's the darndest thing I ever heard of."

Neil was inspired to write a song reminding the old man that their needs were more or less the same.  They both needed love and companionship, a roof over their heads, nourishment, friendship, etc.

I love songs that remind us that we have more in common than we often remember.  The internet is a marvelous and miraculous feat of modern science.  It has created an abundance of information to the masses for the first time in all of verifiable history.  But what we didn't realize it would bring is a feeling of isolation.  

The thing is, when you have access to ALL the information, the only way to not go crazy is to focus yourself on the information most appealing or most important to you....it's our natural filtering process.  And it's profound and powerful to be able to do that...the degree of specialty people are honing in millions of various disciplines is truly incredible, and adds SO much value to the world.  But, when everyone spends all their time only focused on "their things"....they can easily, without even realizing it, completely lose touch with other people and their needs, motivators, etc.  

I suppose that isn't always a problem...it doesn't need to be everyone's job to tend to everyone else's needs all the time....but we have paid a real price in person-to-person empathy because of great differences in what we are exposed to that have come with this ever more intense specialized focus.  We get too far apart from one another in the specifics to remember how much we share in the general.  And we can even start to feel like enemies over differences of opinion and values shaped by personal life experience.

I don't think the internet is going anywhere, and I certainly don't want to lose all the wonderful things it has given us...but I do hope that as we get further into this information age, we mature a little bit collectively and learn to find our common humanity with one another a little bit better in the backdrop of the new normal.  We all need a lot of the same things....air, food, water, shelter, sleep, love, and purpose all come to mind without much deep contemplation....I think that's enough overlap in our collective Venn Diagram to offer a little more kindness and acceptance to one another in spite of our interesting and important differences. 

Enjoy my cover of this song from March 12, 2024, and then check out my favorite performance of it by Neil himself as a very young man in 1971 alone with his guitar on the BBC. 

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