![]() ![]() ![]() On a 1971 solo tour that previewed some of the Harvest material, Young presented as callow, lovelorn, fragile and poignantly underfed. “My life is changing in so many ways,” he confessed on A Man Needs a Maid, “I don’t know who to trust anymore.” If Young needed a maid, he also needed a nurse, a lover, maybe even his mother – this was an isolated young man wrestling with a new level of fame. Criticized for the apparent male chauvinism of the cinematic album centrepiece A Man Needs a Maid, Young later explained that he literally needed someone to pick up after him: “I found myself not being able to move around too much, in bed a lot, and my mind started wondering.” He was recently divorced and suffering from a debilitating back condition, which hospitalized him and required a restrictive brace. Some of Harvest was written when Young was in emotional and physical discomfort. ![]() James Taylor and Janis Ian had no monopoly on mellow, heart-felt introspection. Though Young is not often lumped into the sensitive-singer/songwriter movement of the 1970s, parts of Harvest represent the greatest moments of the genre at the time. Harvest should be seen as a portrait of young artist who was willing to express fear and vulnerability with distinctively flat vocals and in accessible song forms. But if rhyming “lonely boy” with “can’t relate to joy” is silliness, sign me up for the malarkey. Lyrics, wrote the magazine’s John Mendelsohn, were marked by an “extremely low incidence of inspiration and high incidence of rhyme-scheme-forced silliness.” Rolling Stone in particular was unimpressed with Young’s move from rock ‘n’ roll troubadour to Harvest’s twangy SoCal stoner. Conversely, the radio-friendly Harvest was poorly received in some quarters initially. Young’s off-road music, specifically the post- Harvest “ditch trilogy” of Time Fades Away, On the Beach and Tonight’s the Night, gets universal kudos from the critics. “A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there.” “Travelling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch,” he would later explain. Heart of Gold in particular put him uncomfortably in the middle of the road musically. Harvest is both beloved and beleaguered – even Young’s own relationship with the album is complicated. ![]()
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