Weekly Neil: Cinnamon Girl, With Ducks Ltd.'s Evan Lewis

A chat about one-note guitar solos, first thought best thought, and the jangle pop band's terrific new album 'Harm's Way'

This is Weekly Neil, a newsletter about Neil Young. This week, I’m honored to share a conversation with Evan Lewis from the great Toronto jangle pop band Ducks Ltd. Along with his bandmate Tom McGreevy, Evan has created some of the most pleasant-sounding indie rock of the past few years. Their latest album, Harm’s Way, is springy and full of life with callbacks to NME’s seminal C86 comp and, to my ears, bands like Aztec Camera and The Jesus and Mary Chain. (It also features Julia and Marcus from Ratboys.) Not particularly in the Neil Young wheelhouse, I gotta say! But as Evan explains, in talking about the all-timer “Cinnamon Girl” (one of a shortlist of about 10 Neil songs you could call his most famous), there’s the music he loves and the music he ends up channeling as he makes his own. Where those diverge is where things get interesting.

“I see you in deleted scenes / Not in real life, not in dreams.”

That’s part of the chorus of “Deleted Scenes,” one of my favorite songs of 2024 so far, from Ducks Ltd. It has an unmistakable air of Neil — one of my favorite subgenres of Neil song is his escape into the cinematic — if only on the page and not necessarily in sound. In fact, Tom McGreevy sings with a bit of a long-voweled accent, like British after a game of telephone, and Evan Lewis’ guitar lines unspool like Johnny Marr’s. Again, not the kind of aesthetic one would mistake for Neil’s.

But there is a longing and a yearning in the songs of Ducks Ltd. that renders me incapable of moving sometimes. It viscerally reminds me of the airy-sounding indie bands I listened to in summer 2010 — The Drums, Girls, Real Estate, Wild Nothing — that opened up my ears to the whole gauzy jangle-pop thing that originated in the 1980s. Then I worked my way backwards to find The Feelies, Good stuff for throwing on and giving your mind a break for a bit. Maybe lying down on the carpet. See where things go.

Tom and Evan bonded over that kind of feeling in music, though not Neil’s music. In fact, I first asked Tom if he wanted to do this interview, and he politely declined but sent me Evan’s way. (I didn’t ask about The Ducks, which was a huge blown layup.) Thankfully, Evan had a lot to say anyway. With Neil, there really is always so much to say.

Photo credit: Colin Medley

Weekly Neil: Tom probably told you, but I reached out to him and he was like, “I actually don't like Neil at all. I think he's extremely overrated. But Evan loves Neil Young!”

Evan: [laughs] It’s point of contention between us. I'm always being like, you just haven't heard enough! You just gotta hear this! But Tom’s such a lyric guy and such a melody dude. Neil doesn't do too much for him, especially because so much Neil is, you know, first thought best thought. I think that kind of irks Tom, you know. A little more effort into the lyrics.

WN: For you, what is it about Neil that made you go all in and have this big fandom, which I also have?

Evan: When I was a teenager, I was just obsessed with getting an iPod, and then when I got it, I was like, oh, I need to get music on this thing. And so I went through my dad’s CD collection, picked a bunch of stuff and my dad had. He had this Neil Young best-of CD — not the Greatest Hits but some weird CD. I don't think I've ever seen it since, but it might have been only released in Australia. I became absolutely obsessed. Then I started getting into records and, again, went through my dad's record collection, and he had Rust Never Sleeps. I put that on and heard “Hey Hey, My My,” which just changed my life. Then I went out to the local library and they had a copy of Shakey. I started reading about him and read about Tonight’s The Night and became obsessed with just the concept of hearing it. It’s kind of strange to think about now with streaming services. Like, how do I hear this music? And none of the CD stores had it. I went to an antique store and they had Tonight’s The Night. I’ve been super obsessed ever since.

WN: A couple of the other songs you suggested before we settled on “Cinnamon Girl” were “Albuquerque” and “Danger Bird” and “On The Beach.” Those are all from Neil’s mid-’70s period. That seems to be a lot of people's favorite era. Is that the most resonant era of his for you?

Evan: I think for sure. I love the early stuff as well to death and some of the later stuff, but it's like, he finds his voice in that period and gets super confident. And then he just creates such a great run of classic albums. It's loose and vibey and, yeah, I just find myself endlessly listening to that stuff. I haven't gotten tired. of it over the years. It's just because it is a lot of just like, you know, they played it a few times and they captured that moment and that's the track you have forever so it's not overcooked. It's not overthought. It just is what it is. “Albuquerque” feels like a whole genre of music at this point to me. Jason Molina, it feels like his whole Magnolia Electric Co. is based on that.

WN: When you and Tom started making music together, you guys bonded over liking music that sounds a lot different than this. Like, ‘80s new wave and jangle pop — is that where you and him find the most the most common ground musically?

Evan: Yeah, we both definitely agreed on. And we both, I don't think at the time when we met, knew too many people that were super into that stuff. But Tom was born in England and I was born in Australia. So I feel like we have like a connection to that kind of music because we're also kind of raised on it a little bit. So that was definitely a middle ground. He had a bunch of songs and I could see them flavored in that style. And then yeah, we started doing this band and thinking of it influenced by those things, even though we're both into a ton of other kinds of music. It just seemed like the best hat for us to wear for this project.

WN: When you started playing guitar, did you play a lot of Neil songs? Because I did. By the time I was 16, I was learning to play “Cinnamon Girl,” for example.

Evan: Yes, absolutely. That was like the first thing that I learned, and still to this day, I still do always enjoy playing Neil Young things. Every year for Halloween here, there's this big event called Death To T.O. where a bunch of local bands get to dress up and play a 20-minute set as another band. It's at this big venue called Lee's Palace here, and it's two floors, so one band plays for 20 minutes as one band downstairs, and immediately another one plays upstairs. A previous band I was in, we did Neil Young and Crazy Horse. So it was really fun to just like, really dig in and learn all the songs and try and deal with all that stuff. I'm always obsessing over guitar pedals and equipment I thinks that sounds like Neil, even though whenever I tried to bring them into Ducks songs it doesn’t, uh— [laughs]

WN: Yeah, it is a little fuzzy for for Ducks songs. But it sounds good. So, okay, why did you want to talk about “Cinnamon Girl”? What is it about that one that kind of stands out for you?

Evan: It's a really interesting song to talk about, because it feels like a transitional song for him in a lot of ways. You have the Buffalo Springfield, and then he's starting to find his voice in that, and then he kind of starts to do these Pet Sounds-influenced Wrecking Crew orchestral songs with loads of different time-signature changes and things with Jack Nitzsche. He does the first album which I always forget exists almost because — I like the album, but it almost doesn't sound like what I think Neil sounds like. Then obviously he comes out of that and then makes this whole other raw album with Crazy Horse. It feels like that's the beginning of him becoming Neil Young.

“Cinnamon Girl,” and I'd say “Down By The River” and “Cowgirl In The Sand” definitely feel like the beginning of a whole new thing. But “Cinnamon Girl” still has some leanings towards that previous album in that it's still kind of structured like a pop song. It's got more of a defined riff, almost like “The Loner,” the single off the previous album, just on that, it’s played on an organ. I was listening to it last night. You could totally see the concepts of that song in “Cinnamon Girl,” which I thought was super interesting. I can’t think of any other song by anyone that really sounds like it. A heavy metal riff in this pop song, a ragged and raw in a unique way. I don't even think he's really done something too much like it since.

WN: There's the famous fact that he wrote “Down By The River,” this song and “Cowgirl In The Sand” all on the same day when he had a really high fever and he was ill.

Evan: It's super crazy. The other thing I was reading was that he had been with Crazy Horse for only two weeks, and then they went and recorded the songs. And they had played them a few times. Those are the initial versions of them, you know? It's such a reaction to what he was doing before where he was laboring over everything and over-producing. Obviously he finished that first album, put so much work into it, released it, didn't do super well, and then was just like, “Fuck it. I want to play with these weirdos. You don't really know how to play that well, but, just like, it sounds good. We recorded the second take of the song and it sounds great. Let's just release that.”

WN: There's a wisdom in that, which comes through in the song. “Okay, the guitar solo is just one note? Great. Perfect. Let's do it.”

Evan: Digging into it, I didn’t realize but the song “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere” was tracked for the self-titled album, and there's a whole version of that that's very produced in that style. That's like a flute solo or something on it. It's very interesting to hear him take that song, which I've always just thought is kind of a loose country tune. But at some point, he had it more structured and studio produced.

WN: Ducks Ltd. has covered a lot of bands that feel closer to your wheelhouse: The Feelies, The Cure, The Jesus And Mary Chain. Is there a Neil melody you think might work, if you could get Tom to agree to sing it?

Evan: Interesting. I feel like the only album I could convince him to do a cover off would be like something like Trans. “Computer Age” or “Transformer Man,” something like that. I feel like it would be so odd that I could convince Tom that it was an interesting cover. I never thought of it because I just know there’s absolutely no way he’d ever want to do it. We had a song on our last album called “Old Times.” And I remember when he brought that to me. I was like, “This is the most Neil Young-named song you've ever written.”

Ducks Ltd.’s new album, Harm’s Way, is out now. It’s $10 on Bandcamp. They’ll join Ratboys at Rochester’s Bug Jar on Monday, April 8. You already know I’ll be there.

“Cinnamon Girl,” written by Neil Young, from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (1969)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar
Danny Whitten: guitar, vocals
Billy Talbot: bass
Ralph Molina: drums