Weekly Neil: On The Way Home

Can you feel it now?

Last week, Dominic Angelella talked about why “Human Highway,” in its various permutations, remains such a potent Neil song. Part of it stems from Dom’s own understanding and reading of Neil’s early career, writing songs about leaving childhood as he was actually leaving childhood, as opposed to reflecting back upon it later. “Someone said about Lorde’s Melodrama, you know, people don’t normally write about that era when they are that age,” he told me. “Listening to Neil Young write about becoming a young man as he is a teenager becoming young man. Most of the time when you’re that young, your thoughts are just like a confusing mess of gibberish.”

The best example of this is “Sugar Mountain,” a song that even Neil admitted to being slightly embarrassed of when he was playing it in the late ‘60s around the Toronto folk scene in Yorkville. “I wrote it when I’d just turned 20, which seems an enormous length of time ago,” he says ahead of a performance in February 1969. He was 23. (He then says he wrote it while staying at Joni Mitchell’s home in Michigan, and that Joni wrote “The Circle Game” about “Sugar Mountain.”)

There’s so much to write about “Sugar Mountain” — the nostalgia, the dreamy reverie, the simple lyrics that were perhaps the most direct he ever was — and perhaps we’ll get there another day. But there’s another song written around the same time that’s another side of the same coin, recorded while in Buffalo Springfield and given to Richie Furay to sing with a boyish charm. It’s “On The Way Home,” and it’s a stunner. I am primarily concerned with the earliest versions available, the ones that capture Neil singing in a low, less assured tremble — not the declarative trademark voice he’d soon adopt.

My favorite version may be from Live At The Riverboat 1969, where he introduces it with a quick stumble: “This is a song that I, uh… this is a song that I wrote about leaving friends.”

I am nowhere near the age of 20 or 23. But I can remember what it’s like to leave home, and a comfort zone of good pals, behind in order to go find out what else there might be. I did that a few times. There’s excitement, and there’s even a sense that they may all join you spiritually if not physically. There’s also a naive delusion that you can always pick back up where you left off and things will be the same. Of course that’s not true, and you have to learn that, too. Neil’s ability to write about that feeling and distill it into a bit of folk-pop is mesmerizing. “Now I won’t be back ‘til later on if I do come back at all,” he sings. “But you know me, and I miss you now.”

On the Buffalo Springfield version, trumpets and a bit of adventurous pep soundtrack the journey. Furay’s voice is bright and shining, with sunny California backing harmonies making Neil’s trek feel promising. Neil even brought that sound back 20 years later with an ample band, performing with boisterous energy at the Blue Note in 1988. When it’s just Neil onstage at The Riverboat in Yorkville in ‘69, he’s fragile and whispery. He doesn’t have the benefit of friends, other musicians, or even any auxiliary sounds to make his message seem grander.

“Though we rush ahead to save our time, we are only what we feel,” he muses quietly. “But I love you. Can you feel it now?” A few songs later, at the start of “Whiskey Boot Hill,” Neil asks the venue worker to take the lights down. He’s feeling too exposed.

After living in New York City for a year at age 22, I moved back home to retreat and regroup. I eventually ended up in grad school, but in that nebulous fog between sending an application and receiving an offer letter, I got an easy desk job and decided to resume hanging with the group of friends I’d had since high school. Except it was all different because how could it not be. An open grass lot near my folks’ house because a mega Jesus church. Our favorite haunts no longer seemed super entertaining. Within a year, we’d all go our separate (geographical) ways again. I didn’t know “On The Way Home” then. I wish I had.

“In a strange game I saw myself as you knew me,” Neil sings. “When the change came and you had a chance to see through me.”

They had to. But also, I saw through me. Meanwhile Neil kept right on rolling, a saga he recounts with loads of melancholy in “Hitchhiker.” And to a lesser extent, so did I, though I ended up back in the city we all grew up in anyway. I’m 33 on Sugar Mountain. And I’m still on the way home.

“On The Way Home,” written by Neil Young, originally recorded for Buffalo Springfield’s Last Time Around (1968), also featured on Live At Massey Hall (recorded 1971, released 2007)

Neil Young: vocals, guitar, piano
Richie Furay: vocals, guitar
Stephen Stills: guitar, vibes, vocals
Bruce Palmer: bass
Dewey Martin: drums