Weekly Neil: Borrowed Tunes

Too wasted to write my own

We begin with a correspondence dated July 26, 2020:

Neil, did you really take “Borrowed Tune” from the Rolling Stones, and were you really too wasted to write your own?
[Peace],
David

D
yes. in madison wisconsin / the edgewater HOTEL. time fades away tour.
love neil
be well

During the worst of the COVID times, David wrote into the Archives to ask Neil if “Borrowed Tune,” the wounded piano song that arrived fourth on Tonight’s The Night, really was a Rolling Stones lift. He asked this presumably because Neil sings, “I’m singing this borrowed tune / I took from The Rolling Stones,” in the final verse. He then gives context as to why he might have done something like steal a melody from one of the most famous bands on the planet: “Alone in this empty room / Too wasted to write my own.”

In another song, this might be funny. In the hands of a Neil acolyte like Josh Tillman (better known as Father John Misty), these words might be both wounded and funny and would likely reveal a greater truth about the nature of art as it relates to capitalism and maybe even addiction. And Neil’s delivery, while far from funny, does paint a scene where laughter perhaps feels appropriate to offset the darkness. He’s fucked up and alone, writing a song in a hotel in frozen-ass Madison, Wisconsin during a big arena tour and feeling bummed. His former trusted collaborator is dead. His album Harvest is huge and he’s kinda freaked out about it.

He sits down at the piano and starts to play a song he knows, “Lady Day” by The Stones. It’s a baroque little folk tune, pastel and British as hell. But he forgets the chords so he makes up his own. Soon he’s got his own song. But it’s at least 30% someone else’s song, so he nods to that in the lyrics. He wraps the tour, gets boozed out of his mind making Tonight’s The Night in August, then records “Borrowed Tune” in December.

A few years after Tonight’s The Night, he reflected on “Borrowed Tune,” calling it “a song I had written at the beginning of the Time Fades Away tour reflecting on whether a big stadium tour was right for me.”

On the Archives, accompanying the song is a stark monochrome photograph of a frozen Lake Mendota, near where Neil wrote the song at the Edgewater Hotel. It was taken over a decade before by Paul Vanderbilt, and it’s quite simple in composition. A structure with a dusting of white on the roof’s margins, a few skinny piers, two lone gasoline pumps and textured snow. The desolate photo looks exactly the way “Borrowed Tune” sounds.

Funnily enough, Neil had lifted from The Stones before. You ever throw on “Mr. Soul” from Buffalo Springfield’s 1967 second album and marvel at that bouncy riff? You’ve definitely heard it before. Neil had, too. It’s nearly note-for-note the iconic guitar part Keith Richards’ penned for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The Stones put that song out two years earlier.

“Satisfaction” is decidedly not a psychedelic song, though it does get at something elemental to the emerging boomer-rock culture of the time: being fed up. (Paul Westerberg later made a generation-defining indie-rock anthem out of the same sentiment.) “Mr. Soul,” meanwhile, is trippy as hell. There’s that rubbery riff repeating as a bedrock, but Neil’s lead guitar sounds like a minor acid trip. (The mono mix available on the Archives sounds revelatory.)

One of my favorite rock myths is that the “Satisfaction” riff came to Keith Richards in a dream and he woke up and immediately started writing the song because he knew it was good. Whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. It creates a legend. Subconscious may have played a role in Neil writing “Mr. Soul, ” too. It probably went something like this: He was playing guitar, started jamming on the riff and wrote a whole other song around it. (Sound familiar?)

A few years after Tonight’s The Night came out, Neil released Comes A Time, a collection of simpler folk and country tunes that harkened back to his big Harvest breakout. (The best song on that album is “Human Highway,” which is a top-10 Neil all-timer.) Track 4 opens with yet another familiar piano melody and Neil singing some “la la la” sounds. You’ve heard that before, too. It’s “Let’s Spend The Night Together,” The Stones’ ‘67 b-side to “Ruby Tuesday.” But here, Neil winds the melody so it ends up at a melting repeated “ooh” and a genteel take: “It’s gonna take a lotta love / To change the way things are.” Nicolette Larson, a prodigious singer whose voice perfectly suited her moment, transformed “Lotta Love” into a breezy, slightly disco-fied country tune the same year. “I got that song off a tape I found lying on the floor of Neil's car,” she reportedly said. “I popped it in the tape player and commented on what a great song it was. Neil said: 'You want it? It's yours.'”

None of this means that Neil was not also a massive talent. Inspiration can strike anywhere. Creativity is fluid, music especially. Rock ripped off the blues and country, etc. Our current climate of lawsuit-heavy song crediting has certainly helped some folks get their proper due, but it’s also led to a culture of fear. Never the ideal conditions for creativity to flourish.

Back in 2021, Nick Thorburn, the vocalist and songwriter for the band Islands, heard a tune he liked by airy folk artist Julie Byrne called “Prism Song.” He learned how to play it and recorded a voice memo of himself strumming it out. Some time later, he found the recording with no memory that he was playing someone else’s song. He brought it to his band, and they recorded and released a slick song called “Carpenter,” which is, word-for-word, the same as “Prism Song,” and shares much of the same musicality (though with a much different arrangement).

When he got called out for stealing the song, Thorburn shared his side of the story to Stereogum, along with the right amount of penitence and humor that the situation deserves:

In those years between, I had completely forgotten the provenance of the song, and attributed it to one of the many “works in progress” I had been maintaining in the growing folder of song ideas. When I started putting this album together, I took my “Carpenter” demo into the studio, thinking it was an original song. It was brought to my attention only this morning on Twitter that it was a Julie Byrne song, which I was extremely dismayed to discover! Holy fuck!

It was never my intention or desire to copy another artist, and certainly not to profit off of their work in any way. Thankfully, it is all being sorted out! I’ll be going to songwriter jail for a bit and when I get out, I will make sure to learn from the failings of my Swiss-cheese brain.

I love this story because this is exactly how creativity works. Thorburn should be sorry, and he is, but he also realizes that this is the way things happen sometimes. We can’t rely on the structurally solid framework of our brains when it comes to the more elusive aspects of pulling music out of thin air. In fact, as this anecdote shows, ideas rarely come from thin air at all. Everything exists in a continuum.

I was poking around on a forum dedicated to Neil ripping off other artists and came across one I’d never heard before: The “Pocahontas” (1976) melody originating in the early Carole King tune “He’s a Bad Boy” (1963). That’s a fascinating bit of musical hopscotch. It’s very easy to think Neil knew the song and the melody and it just came out one day when he was putting some chords together — admittedly while high as hell pulling an all-nighter recording session.

Lest we forget, Neil’s been ripped off plenty. The worst (or most blatant) offender is still a tune I actually like. That feels like a topic for another entry, all the detritus of what makes a song someone’s own versus a carbon copy. The subconscious is a powerful thing. Not everyone’s is capable of pure poetry. Sometime you end up with plants and birds and rocks and things.

“Borrowed Tune,” written by Neil Young, from Tonight’s The Night (1975)

Neil Young: vocals, piano, harmonica